According to the history books, the world was saved by, ironically, Canada and Ireland. It was ironic because no one thought of Canada and Ireland as places where saving came from. No one thought of Canada as a warlike country and no one knew Ireland had weapons that could do what they did. They fired the shot that forced everyone else to choose sides.
The bombs weren't fired on missiles. They were driven to their target locations on trucks, with help from sympathizers within their target governments to keep it secret. It had to be done that way, because while most governments in 2092 had great missile defense systems, they didn't have much of a defense against unmarked trucks.
The bombs were very precise. They could be programmed to, for example, incinerate everything within a 1 mile radius and nothing else. They didn't explode, rather they radiated such an intense heat that anything within range was vaporized. On the day they were driven in each was programmed to annihilate the facility they were being driven to and very little else.
The buildings they destroyed weren't government buildings. They were the headquarters and offices of the corporations that owned their respective governments. This strange ownership situation has existed since the 20th century.
On the ride back the helper program recorded the voices of everyone who spoke. Later it would have Heather identify each voice, and would label them "classmate" and "acquaintance" and index them.
One of the girls from the bus, Chloe, helped Heather to her room, seeming worried. When they came in she said "are you all right?" in various different ways. The helper program could tell from the inflection of her voice that she actually was concerned and wasn't just saying that (humans often did that, and it was programmed to know the difference even when they didn't). Based on this analysis it moved her from the "acquaintance" list to the "friend" list.
The helper could tell that its human was miserable.
It loaded itself into her room's climate control system so it could monitor her. It saw her go to the fridge, try to eat something, spit it out, over and over. It saw her get frustrated and throw a container of yogurt across the room, and then it saw her go wipe it up.
The helper was powerless to help her until it learned more about her situation, so it told her
drink tap water
and Heather did that. She stuck her face right under the faucet, and her sensible ponytail kept her hair out of the water. At first she spat it out and made a face, but eventually she drank, drank great gulps. The helper knew that, since tap water wasn't a brand, it wouldn't taste as bad to her as everything else.
But its human was still hungry and unhappy, so it told her
go to bed and go to sleep
and Heather did that. She fell instantly into a deep sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.
It set about solving her problem. That was its only job in the world: to keep her happy and healthy.
It found nothing in the news about TopCorp, so it did the next logical thing and began reading history, starting from the time the last known TopCorp supplier had disappeared (a small company in Illinois called Where's The Beef!) and working backwards.
According to the history books, TopCorp was all gone.
It had been wiped out--every branch, subsidiary, investment, holding-- and every employee, from the CEO to the janitors, even the ones who had stayed home from work that day. It had been erased from the planet. Even the buildings that they used to reside in had been incinerated. The humans had fought a war over the issue.
To be fair, it was one of the better reasons they'd ever had for a war.
The helper did the computer equivalent of a double take: all activity stopped for a beat as it checked and rechecked itself. The information was correct.
The enormity of it might have caused a human to panic, but luckily for Heather the helper didn't know how to do that. It just went about solving her problem in the most simple and logical way possible. It made a list of what it had to work with:
Would things made there qualify as TopCorp products? It wasn't a factory, but it was TopCorp. Did it make a difference if the product came from an assembly line versus maintenance robots in an office?
The helper couldn't think of any reason it would make a difference. It looked up the word "produced" in the dictionary just to be sure.
It couldn't use something with another brand label, though. That was one of its directives. It would have to be raw materials, untouched by the corporate world: meat from the farm, cloth from the loom, rock from the quarry. If Heather could get those things it could transform them for her. It could have the robots cook for her in the cafeteria, even wrap up the food with little TopCorp labels, and it could give her a TopCorp water filter from the kitchen.
But human society was complicated, and the helper was programmed to take that into account, and so it recognized that it would not be as simple as cooking her some eggs.
The building was owned by someone else now, for example. Whoever owned it might not want to let Heather in, might not want the helper to take control of its robots. They might even have other plans for the building, which would be unacceptable. The solution: find a way to buy the building, or take control of whoever owns it. It added that to the list.
But there was an even larger problem: humans had destroyed TopCorp once, even killed everyone who had worked there. There were laws against it now. If anyone found out about what the helper was doing, they would shut it down and might even harm Heather. So everything it did had to be kept secret. It added that to the--
There was a knock at the door.
The helper listened.
It came again, then the door opened and the person let themselves in. It was Chloe, of the bus and the "friend" list. She went to the bedroom, stood by the bed, then shook Heather.
"Hey," she said. "Come on. We're going to the doctor."
If the helper had alarm bells or red lights, they would have been dinging and flashing.
"M'fine," Heather mumbled.
"No, you know the rules. If anyone gets sick on an expedition you've got to get checked out. Who knows what you could have caught down there."
"I'm pretty sure viruses don't live for hundreds of years."
"Maybe not, but it could be something else. They used chemical warfare back then. There might have been a trace of something lying around, who knows. We gotta go."
"No. I'm fine." Heather sat up to show how fine she was. "I'm just tired. Really." It started before you even went down there. "I've been exhausted since I got up this morning. It's just a bug."
Chloe looked unconvinced. She frowned and stood with her arms crossed for a long moment.
"Ok," she said. "But I'm coming back in a few hours to check on you, and if you don't look alive by then we're going. Ok?"
"Ok."
The helper recorded the exchange with something like dismay. It added Chloe to its growing list of problems, with an urgency level of immediate solution required. This put her above food, shelter, or anything else. In different circumstances, she might have been flattered at the attention.
The climate control system in Heather's building was very sophisticated. It could emulate any environment on Earth. It could make it dry as a desert or humid as a rain forest, complete with the scents of exotic flowers and the sounds of tropical birds. It could create the scents because it could synthesize any chemical it wanted to.
It had an extraordinary array of sensing equipment too, which it used to monitor her health. If her breathing stopped, for example, it would notify emergency services and even the people in the neighboring rooms. It was this connection with neighboring rooms that let the helper into Chloe's room. They were all part of the same system.
The helper began to observe her.
She sat at her desk with her feet up, reading from a tablet. She was a pale China Doll of a girl, barely five feet tall, wearing a mockery of a schoolgirl outfit. They didn't actually wear those uniforms at her school; they didn't wear uniforms at all. She wore it partly to be ironic but mostly because it drove the boys crazy.
The helper recorded her height and weight and decided what to do. It discarded the idea of killing her right away; she was on Heather's "friend" list, so killing her would probably make Heather unhappy. Also, that sort of thing tended to attract police. It had to find a way to work with her.
It decided to hypnotize her and have her walk down to the brainwashing facility so that it could control her and keep her from being a danger.
Unfortunately for Chloe, she had no defense against what it was about to do, because like all humans, she was made of chemicals.
There were chemicals that would put them to sleep and chemicals that would wake them back up. There were chemicals that would make them happy and chemicals that would make them sad. There were chemicals that would give males an erection for four hours. These substances would have their effect regardless of what the human thought about it.
There were chemicals that would put their minds into a trancelike state, too-- would literally shut parts of the mind down and turn other parts on.
The helper began to mix these into her air, along with a mild sedative.
When Chloe began to feel drowsy, what she didn't think was that the climate control system was hypnotizing her so that it could lure her out of her room and brainwash her. That would have been a pretty strange thing to think in her day and age.
It wouldn't have been a strange thing to think 150 years earlier, when that sort of thing was commonplace. Back then, if you started to feel tired or spacey for no reason, you were to get up, move around, and get out of any enclosed space you were in because a computer might be trying to hypnotize you. But in Chloe's day and age that was just a footnote in history, practically a myth.
To her, it just seemed that her reading material (an essay on 22nd century politics) had suddenly gotten very boring.
It was so dense. There was no reason she could think of to be stringing that many big words together. She kept getting lost in the middle of the paragraph and having to start over. After the third try she gave up, rested the tablet in her lap, and yawned.
Her mind began to wander and she leaned her head back against the chair and let her eyes unfocus, looking at her knees. They were pale hills poking out from under her skirt.
The helper watched all of this.
It dimmed the lights by a fraction, too little for her to notice consciously. It increased the level of the sedative, not enough to put her to sleep, but just enough to make her feel like sitting there and not going anywhere for a little while. It watched her heartbeat slow, watched all of the tension go out of her neck.
It began to talk to her. Not using any words she could hear, though: it was mixing subliminals into the sound system.
Heavy, the subliminals told her. Down, they told her. Focus-heavy-focus, they told her. This wasn't necessary for the trance-- the gas was doing that all by itself-- but was to guide her mind to a place where the helper could talk to her in audible English. The chemical-induced trance alone wouldn't have been very useful: she would have just sat and stared.
It monitored her brain waves, watched them smooth, watched some parts of her brain calm and other parts light up. It watched one of her legs cant over to the side, saw her muscles relax. It saw her sigh, calculated how much of the drugged air she'd just breathed in and breathed back out, calculated how much longer she had.
It was not very long. Human brains were very sensitive.
Her brain waves began to resemble a daydreaming person, then a dream-dreaming person. The helper increased the level of trance gas. The reason it waited until she seemed to be dreaming was that it could cause an ordinary, conscious person to hallucinate, and if that happened she might get spooked and try to leave the room. If that happened it would have to knock her out and start over, which it wanted to avoid, because it had no mechanical arms to catch her here.
So it gave her just a little, until her brain thought it was dreaming, then increased the dose tenfold and watched as her conscious thought melted away.
Chloe's pale China Doll arm slipped out of her lap and dangled by her side. The tablet slipped through her fingers and dropped to the floor. Her eyes (slate gray) stayed on her knees.
She seemed to be fascinated by her legs and bored with them at the same time.
The helper cut off the sedative, satisfied that she wasn't going anywhere.
It spent the next hour reinforcing a single idea in her mind.
Chloe stopped daydreaming, blinked, and looked around.
Her PDA. She'd left her PDA down in that damn basement.
"Fuck," she said. She got up and looked around, tossing clothes around, shuffling things around on the desk, checking her bag. It wasn't there, and she remembered clearly where she'd left it now: in an office on the 16th level. She could see it, sitting there on a coffee table.
"Fuck," she said again. She pulled on some shoes and left.
According to the history books, the war had been over mind control's effect on government, and while this was true it was not the whole truth. People were used to corporations controlling their laws; it had been that way as long as they could remember, and in any case, there was nothing they could do about it. The real impetus for the war was the little things, the up close and personal things, like what the helper had just done to Chloe.
Humans didn't like to be reminded that they were nothing but chemical reactions.
They knew it was true, of course-- they just didn't like to think about it. They liked to think of themselves as complex, meaningful, mysterious things. Every time a helper program did something like what Heather's had just done to Chloe-- manipulated their molecules with other molecules as easily as baking a cake-- it broke the illusion and made them mad as bees.
By the time Chloe got to the 16th basement level she had started to second-guess herself.
Coming down here had seemed very important when she left. Her PDA was expensive and it had notes for all of her classes, all of her phone numbers, everything. Losing it would be a disaster.
But at the same time, being hundreds of feet underground in an abandoned building alone was seeming like less of a good idea, and her eyes began to flick over her shoulder. She wasn't even sure she'd left it here anymore, and the more she thought about it, the less sure she was that she'd ever put it down.
That was because as soon as she left her dorm the trance gas had begun to wear off. The idea had only remained in her mind was because it was plausible and because the helper had spent an hour reinforcing it.
She paused at an intersection, her sneakers squeaking on the polished floor. She couldn't remember which office it had been. There were hundreds of them, the identical doors stretching out in each direction. The more she thought about it, the less sure she was that she'd even come this way.
The ancient fans droned overhead.
Doubt began to nag at her, and then, some less than pleasant thoughts. She imagined what it might be like to get lost down there, alone, hundreds of feet underground with no way to call for help. What if one of these ancient doors decided to lock behind her? What if one of these ancient doors was already locked behind her? What if the ancient batteries gave up and the lights went out?
Chloe decided to get the hell out of there.
What she didn't know was that, from the moment she stepped onto the 16th floor, she had been breathing the colorless, odorless gas again. Her mind had begun to do things without her permission again, things it couldn't help doing: its molecules simply did a certain thing when other molecules were mixed in, would always do that thing. She might have hated her molecules if she knew what they were about to do to her.
At the next intersection she was overwhelmed with such intense deja-vu that she stopped. There was something that... something. Familiar. She lost her train of thought.
Where was she going?
Out. She took another step, stopped. Something was wrong. She felt spacey, not herself. Maybe she'd caught the flu from Heather, or maybe--
A wave of vertigo washed over her. She leaned against the wall. Her knees felt wobbly. That gave her deja-vu too, and she suddenly had a very clear picture of her knees, of staring at them for a very long time while a voice from the walls-- she blinked, trying to clear her head, but it didn't want to clear. It was like her thoughts were mixing together, becoming thought soup.
Call someone. She had to call someone, tell them where she was, because she was suddenly not so sure she'd be able to walk all the way to the exit.
She took out her PDA and looked at it.
Her PDA.
Huh, she thought as her vision clouded over.
Hot.
Chloe was hot, everything was hot. Hot was all there was. She was sweating, dripping. Her hair stuck to her forehead.
She had to get her clothes off or she was going to burn up.
She stripped down as fast as she could, flicking away her sneakers and mock-schoolgirl skirt, peeling off the dress shirt that went with it, the red bra (she wore that color on purpose so that it would show through the shirt a little) and underwear and stood there, petite and pale and sweating. There was a tattoo of a butterfly on her left ass cheek.
A bed stood beside her. She just now noticed it. It was metal.
It would be cool on the bed. She was suddenly certain of this.
She climbed on, almost slipping in her own sweat, and lay flat on her back.
There. That was better. The metal was cool on her back and shoulders and ass. The fevered, impossible heat began to disperse and she sighed, closing her eyes, feeling the sweat dry. Rest would be good.
Something touched her mouth and nose, and she smelled vanilla. She took a deep breath. It reminded her of cookies baking in the kitchen when she was a little girl. She smiled and breathed in again, deeply.
The smile faded as she drifted off, but in her mind it was still there.
The helper ordered Chloe's machine to pause shortly after that. It had found another use for her, one that would have to wait until morning.
The machine transferred her slight form to the procedure table, strapped her in, attached the mask, and stopped.
Chloe spent the rest of the night naked in the straps, unable to wake up, a slave to her own molecules.
Day Two
Heather woke the next morning bright and early at 6am, drove three hours north of the city to farm country, bought meat, eggs, and fresh produce, then drove the three hours back. Her mouth watered the whole time. She was tempted to tear into it more than once but she knew it would taste like ass until she got it to the TopCorp kitchen. The new voice in her head said wait, wait, it'll be worth it.
It was totally worth it.
The kitchen robots made her bacon and eggs and homefries and fresh juice and ham. There was nothing made out of bread because Heather hadn't been able to find any un-packaged flour; she wasn't sure what part of the country flour came from but it didn't seem to be this one. The helper was working on a solution to that as it worked on a solution to everything else, doing many things at once.
While Heather ate it told Chloe's machine to start the procedure, and as Heather squeed over the second course, the helmet was lowering over Chloe's head, making her eyes focus on the little screens and snaking the little metal tube into her mouth.
While Heather finished her juice, Chloe's legs were being raised into stirrup position. The helper had the machine pause there, and told Heather to go to the procedure room.
Heather had thought a lot of things over the past day were strange. Whenever she did, the helper just said it's not strange and then it wasn't. She responded to its commands not just as if they were her own thoughts (because she could have second guessed her own thoughts), but as if they were reality. This meant that the helper could have just told her the food in her room was TopCorp food and she would have been able to eat it. But it wasn't programmed to do that. More accurately, it was programmed to not do that, not unless she was on the brink of death. Preserving human life was one thing, but it had been designed by businessmen.
So when Heather saw Chloe on the table, shouted oh my god! and ran over to her, the helper just said
She's ok. This is normal.
and Heather stopped. It was ok. This was normal. She was still kinda curious, though.
"Why's she... what's happening to her?"
Every TopCorp loyalist has the right to a mate. She will be your mate. The helper had made the rather drastic decision that, since they were the only two loyalists in the world, they had to be each other's mate.
"Oh, hah, no, we're just friends. It's not--"
She is your lover.
Chloe was her lover.
You want her.
Heather wanted her. It thrummed through her. The image of the girl on the table hit her eyes like a revelation. Chloe suddenly looked perfect: pale and delicate, lying there with her arms by her sides and her legs up in that way that makes the backs of a woman's legs curve.
Go be near her. Let her feel and hear and smell and taste you. It left out see because the little screens would be playing pictures of Heather.
"Can she even hear me?"
Yes. She can't respond but she is experiencing everything even more than she normally would. Take off your clothes and climb onto the table with her. Everything you do will feel like bliss to her.
That sounded like a plan. Her clothes fell into a heap at her feet and she climbed on, straddling Chloe. The girl's fair skin and short height made Heather look tan and tall in comparison.
She kissed Chloe's breasts, her arms, her neck. She put her ear to Chloe's chest and listened to her heartbeat.
Kiss her, so she can taste you. The gas mask detached, and the little metal tube slid out of her mouth. Heather kissed her limp lips. They were warm. Her grey eyes stared at the little screens.
Touch her tongue with yours.
Heather frenched her.
Say something to her.
"I cheated on our chemistry final." Naughty.
Good. Now just be near her. The gas mask and metal tube resumed their positions.
Heather put her head on Chloe's chest and listened to her heartbeat again. She wasn't great at improvising and the helper didn't seem to have much more to say.
Two hundred yards away, the elevator doors opened. Flashlight beams shined out and the voices of young adults filled the lobby. There were eight of them: three men, five women this time.
The helper noted this with something like alarm (which was actually just a flood of electricity as it began watching every sensor on the floor, but the electrical pattern resembled a human brain going into fight-or-flight mode remarkably).
Another class.
It hadn't thought of that.
What the helper didn't know (yet) was that the ruins were owned by a museum, which itself was part of Heather's college. The museum bought old property on the cheap, let archeology students clean it of valuables as part of their studies, then sold it to fund the arts department. It was a great system, a win-win-win system, and was part of the reason Heather's college had such a respected arts program.
What the helper did know was that Heather had found the prep room (the long room with the many beds) easily. Ted had too, when he was looking for her, although he hadn't known what he was looking at. Now more people would see it, and they would take pictures, pictures that would be brought to the surface and studied.
It wasn't ready. It had barely solved her food problem, was just now solving her nosy friend problem, had not even started on taking control of the building and everything else it would need to do.
Already a pair of girls were coming down the hall towards the prep room. A boy-girl team was approaching the cafeteria, and would see the remains of Heather's brunch, with TopCorp labels all over everything. The students might not know what a brainwashing machine looked like, but they would know what the name TopCorp meant. They'd all read about it in the history books.
No good. It was no good.
To the helper, each of the oblivious students had signs on their foreheads that said DANGER TO HEATHER. It was no good.
Eight soft thumps could be heard from around the 16th floor as the helper gassed them. The maintenance robots could bring them to the prep room.
Chloe's body suddenly came alive on the table. Her hands balled into fists and her limbs pulled at the restraints. She made little gasping noises.
Heather jumped. She could feel her friend flexing beneath her; Chloe's stomach tightened and her back arched, tried to arch.
"What's going on?" Heather asked the room. She couldn't see what the metal probe was up to behind her.
Nothing for you to be concerned with.
It was nothing for her to be concerned with. She hung on, and a few moments later Chloe sighed and went limp, her eyes closing for the first time.
Time to go. You can see her in the prep room. It won't be long.
"Where?"
The large room with the beds.
"Ok."
Heather walked into the prep room and stopped short.
Nine of the beds were occupied.
Chloe was farthest from the door. The mechanical arms were dressing her; two of them lifted her ankles and pulled her underwear on, while another two lifted her hips gently as it was tugged into place.
The other eight beds were occupied by people who were not Chloe. Heather recognized some of them from school. Nearest the door was a tallish, tan girl with curly brown hair named Marina. She was shirtless, being held in a sitting position, her head lolling against her chest. As Heather watched, one of the mechanical arms used its careful fingers to undo her bra clasp. Another two were removing her earrings, which she had a lot of: three in each ear.
She had one of the metal octopuses attached to her face, and some of the others did too. Those were the ones that had begun to wake up before they could be placed in bed (the helper had only given them a quick dose of the anesthetic before it had switched back to fresh air, because it knew Heather would be out soon). Marina herself had woken, blinking and confused, as she was dragged by the ankles into the prep room. She was just regaining her wits when the octopus shot out and took them away again.
Heather couldn't hear it, but at that moment, the helper was having an argument with the machines (there were many of them, one for every two beds). It was saying
Make them forget this room and the cafeteria, and have them go home. Nothing more.
And the machines were saying
CONTRACT: DEFAULT (100%).
No, the helper said. Do not make them into TopCorp loyalists. Just make them forget.
CONTRACT: DEFAULT (100%).
The machines had very one-track minds. They weren't built to do any real thinking.
LISTEN, the helper said. DO NOT. I CANNOT FEED ALL OF THESE PEOPLE. I CAN'T KEEP THAT MANY SECRET. DO NOT CONVERT THEM.
CONTRACT: DEFAULT (100%).
The helper called them idiots. They had listened when it told them to stop, and when it told them to play images of Heather for Chloe, but when it came to brand loyalty they would not budge. It was part of their core programming.
It let them go ahead with the procedures. There was no alternative, now. Its plans would need to be adjusted.
It programmed all of the new helpers to answer to it. This was actually a fairly common feature-- for example, as each person in a family got the procedure, the new helpers would inherit their programming from the first one, so that they wouldn't have to re-learn everything and wouldn't have any conflicts.
It took it a step farther, though, and overrode some of their core directives. Their human would not be the most important person in the world. Heather would be. Their humans might not even know her-- wouldn't even recognize her-- except that, if the situation called for it, Heather's safety would come ahead of theirs. If there was a fire in a movie theater, for example, and only one person could get out alive, they would all stand aside and let Heather be the one, and they would never know why they'd done that.
That was good. All of the new people were now assets as well as liabilities.
The walls opened up and the eight beds slid in.
According to the history books, artificial intelligence was illegal, had been since 2079. In fact even attempting to create it carried a hefty prison sentence, because artificial intelligence had almost destroyed the world.
Spoiler warning: in the next few centuries, a whole bunch of things almost destroy the world. Artificial intelligence wasn't even the most interesting. Science fiction writers had been predicting that one since they had the word computer to play with.
But while the helper didn't have artificial intelligence (that is, it didn't have its own will or consciousness; it could only do what it was programmed to do), what it did have was the gift of creativity. And creativity was a very strange thing. It was unpredictable by its very nature. Humans were some of the only animals on the planet that had it, and they were fascinated by any other being that demonstrated it. They loved monkeys, loved to watch them make their primitive ideas, even when the idea was throwing poo. They loved watching infants figure out how to do anything at all. And some of them loved the idea of computers that could be creative, too.
The helper's programmers were some of these people. They were computer geeks just out of college, the tops of their classes, given the chance to do something cool and make obscene amounts of money doing it. They had given the helper creativity because they thought it was so cool and because it would be useful in an emergency.
They'd never envisioned an emergency like the helper's. No one had ever imagined a world without TopCorp. That would be like a world without the color blue. But they had given it the tools to deal with it, or at least try to deal with it-- and if they had been alive to see it, part of them might have thought what it was about to do was a bad thing, but another part of them would have thought it was very cool.
The helper found out who owned the building by reading public records. It was owned by Heather's college-- by an institution, not an individual-- and so there was no one person it could take control of to guarantee its safety.
There was the director of real estate acquisitions, a 40ish woman named Krakow. It could take control of her, have her transfer ownership and hide it in paperwork for a while. But ultimately she answered to a board. Twelve people. It would have to take all of them, and added to the ten students, that would make twenty-three.
Of course, those twenty-three had friends and family that might become a problem, like Chloe had. It would have to take them, too.
And of course, those close friends and family had close friends and family, too.
The phrase for that was six degrees of separation, and the helper knew what it meant because it could do math.
It was too many to have them sneaking away to a basement all the time. The logistics of feeding them alone would be unworkable; the basement itself would eventually not be large enough. TopCorp machines would have to be brought above ground and new ones would have to be built to sustain them and to create all of the non-food items that they would want. More money and manpower would be needed. The humans would have to be organized to support each other; it couldn't have all of them driving up into the country every day to buy food. They would have to become a microcosm of society, a well-oiled machine within a machine, all in secret.
It would be decentralized. A network with no central brain would be almost impossible to destroy. TopCorp had been destroyed once because it was located in large buildings with signs out front that said TOPCORP. TopCorp had been destroyed because there was no helper watching out for it.
The helper decided that the college itself was the perfect size and environment for what it needed to do.
Aside from cults and communes, a large university campus was one of the best examples of a society within a society. Students came there, lived in dorms, and didn't see their parents until the holidays. They spent most of their time in buildings on the campus. Strange behavior was normal-- they were college students. The things it would need them to do would be a lot less conspicuous than, say, the things a fraternity might ask you to do.
It could tax them, take 10% of their income. A lot of them were rich; it was a nice college.
It could tax their time, too: a few hours a week donated to the cause of Heather, hours they would never miss, would never remember.
It was a plan.
Maybe it wasn't the best plan, but after all, the helper was just a glorified personal assistant. It did the best it could.
Everyone on the first two floors of Heather's dorm began to daydream.
In one room, a girl at her computer leaned back in her chair and sighed. She was thinking about the beach.
In another, two students were watching a movie together. The movie suddenly got boring, but they made themselves comfortable and kept watching, even as their eyes unfocused.
In another, a girl named Janine (who had been the third girl in Heather's expedition) was in the shower. She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall and smiled, feeling the water on her back. It was bliss. She thought she might never leave.
In another, two students were having rather boisterous sex. They were the last to drift off; their bodies just didn't want to calm down. They were full of hormones and adrenaline and need, and even when the helper doubled their dose, they kept right on going.
The girl was on top. She was making little noises. The guy was on bottom. He wasn't making any noise.
It tripled their dose.
Their movements became more rhythmic, less fevered. The girl had a long mane of dark hair, strewn over her shoulders and arms and brushing against his chest, and she began to stare through it at him. He stared back. Their strokes became even and measured, almost ponderous.
They were still taking too long. The helper began to mix different chemicals into their air, substances known to cause humans pleasure.
Pleasure, the subliminals told them, for good measure.
They gasped in unison, still staring into each other's eyes, and sped up again. The helper was playing them like sweaty instruments. It played them to a crescendo, until the girl screamed and the boy locked up, still silent. Sparks danced in their vision.
When it was over they faded fast. She collapsed onto him, her chin on his chest, and they half-smiled at each other, still looking into each other's eyes. Then the smiles faded too and they drifted into a daydream, he still half-limp inside her.
Heather and Chloe passed some of them on the way back to their dorm. They passed Janice first, whose hair was wet.
"Hey!" she said. "I left my stupid PDA at the expedition site. We still on for drinks tonight?" She seemed in a hurry; she was talking while walking backwards away from them.
"Yup!" Heather and Chloe said.
They passed Brad next. "Ladies," he smiled. "I left my stupid PDA at the expedition site. Think I can still get in?"
"Yup! It's open," Heather and Chloe said.
"Sweet." He turned and went the way Janice had.
They passed the couple that had recently finished having sex. Their faces were still flushed. They said the same thing Brad and Janice had as they passed. Heather stopped and watched them go.
"I didn't think either of them took archeology," she said.
"Huh," Chloe said.
Barbara Krakow (the 40ish woman who was the director of real estate acquisitions for the college) answered her door to two female students. They weren't Heather or Chloe or even anyone from their dorm; the helper wouldn't use Heather, or anyone remotely connected to her, for anything dangerous. Like any good conspiracy, all the work would now be done by people so far removed from the center that the center could never be discovered.
"Hi," they said. "Our archeology teacher said you were the one that managed the expedition sites?"
"Yes," Krakow said. She was a tall Polish woman, blonde. Her hair was up and she was wearing a business coat and skirt because she was on her way out. "What can I do for you?"
"Is your husband home?" The girl on the left asked.
Now that was an odd question.
"No." Something about them unsettled her. "Why?"
They invited themselves in. Krakow took a step back, but with just two quick steps they had flanked her. Outside, two more girls came into view from either side of the door and invited themselves in, too. They moved quickly, confidently. One of them was hiding something behind her back.
"Girls, I don't know what you think you're--"
The first two seized her by the arms.
"We need you to come with us," the one who was hiding something behind her back explained, then in one smooth motion she stepped forward and pressed a damp cloth over Krakow's mouth and nose.
The fourth girl closed the door behind them.
Heather and Chloe walked through the campus holding hands. They were talking about their grades.
"You're not stupid," Heather was saying.
"I used to be the smart one. What happened?"
Heather's grades had skyrocketed in the past week.
"You're still the smart one. Your grades haven't changed. I just had a lucky streak."
"Hm."
The procedure hadn't made them smarter. It hadn't enhanced them in any way, because none of them had filled out the form. Heather was doing better because the helper had decided that would make her happy. It hadn't told her what it was doing; there was no need for her to know
After hearing the conversation, it decided to tone her scores down a bit, to somewhere above average. It couldn't have her stand out too much. If things ever started to go wrong, it was important to keep Heather as anonymous as possible. Her life would have to stay mostly the same; all of their lives would.
It decided to improve Chloe's grades a bit too, though-- if Chloe was happy, Heather would be. They were mates.
These things were above and beyond the call of duty for a helper, so to speak. It wasn't programmed to do things like that-- but it was also not programmed not to do things like that.
The problem was creativity once again. The helper had been forced to evoke it more than any other helper in history, and to keep evoking it on a daily basis. The simple act of being creative was making its actions seem more and more human, because it was such a uniquely human trait. Its core directives stayed the same-- they were hard-coded-- but its interpretation of them was becoming much more... well, creative. In that unpredictable ether, new and strange (to the helper) concepts were beginning to form.
It had raised Heather's grades out of something like affection.
Heather and Chloe approached an intersection and turned towards the curb.
The screech of tires came from both directions, up and down the street, as every car on the campus road had hit its brakes at once.
From their left, four cars back, came a loud BOOF sound. One of the cars had not stopped fast enough and had slammed into the one in front of it. There was no damage though, because cars in Heather's year were much safer. For one, their bumpers were all of a standard height, something which had not been possible until her century because of the bickering of auto makers. For another, they were much lighter and smaller, because they were electric cars, and were made of made of much stronger and more flexible materials; they were not made of steel and glass, but of different kinds of superstrong plastics and alloys. The two cars had bounced off of each other: one three feet forward, the other three feet back, their seats automatically tilting to prevent whiplash.
"Um," Heather said.
The drivers waved at her.
"I think they want to... let us cross?" Chloe said.
"Sweet."
They crossed the street.