Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [10]
"However, you will not number me among those admirers. All you have proven is that you are able to parrot back the works of greater intellects. The fact that you had to work so hard to comprehend this class merely proves that you lack the creative spark yourself. You are, in fact, precisely the sort who will become the type of corporate drone that I despise. The only difference is that you will be much much better at it than most, though to my mind that is akin to being the best muck-raker in the cow farm.
"Nevertheless, you have performed the tasks you were given in the class, and I would be dishonest if I did not give you fitting reward for that accomplishment, even if it is less of an accomplishment than I might desire.
"A."
In later years, Lisa would admire Dr. Barr's ability to fulfill her every wish and destroy them all at the same time. Back then, however, she was up most of the night crying.
Now here she was, ten years later, having fulfilled his prognostications by spending her career as a corporate drone—even excelling at it, as he had also predicted—only to find herself providing security for his latest and greatest system.
The Red Queen.
Barr was currently working in Umbrella's London office, working on some new system that would be even better than the Red Queen, but for now, this AI—which was about a decade ahead of any other computer system available on the open market—was the best possible.
This was a computer system that was in many ways the holy grail of AI: it was adaptable, flexible, and even had a personality.
For some inexplicable reason, the personality he gave to the Red Queen was that of a ten-year-old girl. Specifically that of Angela Ashford, the young daughter of one of the muckitymucks in Research & Development. Lisa couldn't imagine that Barr came up with that himself, as it required a level of sentimentality the old man simply did not possess. No doubt it was required by Ashford or one of his supporters on the Board of Directors.
Never having met Angie Ashford, Lisa had no idea if the personality Barr had programmed in matched that of the young child. She suspected it didn't, that Barr had made the girl as unpleasant as possible in revenge for the political sop to Ashford that modeling the computer after his daughter likely was.
If, on the other hand, the personality did match that of the real Angie Ashford, Lisa had the utmost sympathy for Dr. Ashford's pain and suffering.
Lisa's job description was to make sure that the Red Queen's systems remained secure. In reality, this meant spending all her days dealing with a ten-year-old girl who had inherited her creator's attitude problem.
"It isn't working," the Red Queen said in her prissy little schoolgirl voice. The voice came crisply from the Perrymyk speakers sitting on either side of Lisa's flatscreen monitor. The upper-right-hand corner of said monitor was taken up with the image of a prissy little schoolgirl face, whose lip movements matched the sounds.
Sighing, Lisa wondered why anyone would find this preferable to a simple error message. As it was, that face was a daily reminder of why she was eternally grateful that she and Nick had decided not to have kids.
"All right," she said, typing in a sequence of commands, "let's compile it again, see where the error crops up."
"We don't need to do that. The error is in the patch you wrote. Don't worry about it, I can rewrite it for you."
"No you can't, either," Lisa said. "Show me where the error is. I'll fix it."
Eight weeks, and the damn machine still was treating her as if she were an idiot. Like programmer, like program.
"Very well, if you insist, but it's wholly unnecessary. I can do this myself. The whole point of having an artificial intelligence is to give me the opportunity to be intelligent."