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Chanmi and the Random Loser, ch.1


It was Friday, mid-morning. I was alone in the office. Janjan and Yancey had gone off together to practice with their shotguns at the range. They didn’t take me along because they said I’m too smol of a girl to handle a 12-gauge.

That annoyed me because it’s pretty sexist, as well as sizeist, but actually it’s true up to a point. I don’t like the bang and the bruise you get on your shoulder. I prefer my Glock 26. It may look like a toy but it’s a mean piece if you know how to use it. And I do. Even if I am smol.

Things would change after we found Ms Potato again. There would be 2 girls and 2 bois in the agency. Janjan had told me Ms Moon was a demon with her shotgun, and sharp with her tongue if she ever felt Yancey was getting too macho and impetuous.

Well, whatever, for now I was holding the fort alone.

It was quiet. The phones didn’t ring. There were no visitors. To while away the hours I played with my Sandbenders. Ever since Yancey told me that the Imperial House’s computers all ran on a base-8 architecture, I had been obsessed with simulating it.

I was deep in the cyberscape when the doorbell rang. Reluctantly I paused the compiler, took off my VR rig, and looked to see who it might be.

The office door has a glass panel with the name on, so I could see the gold lettering in reverse -- γɔnǝϱA ǝviɈɔǝɈǝꓷ ǝɿǝbυυꓘ YꟼM ǝʜT -- and past that a looming shadow, which looked like a medium tall boi.

I sighed, and got up to let him in.

The visitor was a dark skinned boi with a short curly haircut and a studied casual outfit; dark blue sports coat with rolled up sleeves over a white tee shirt. A chunky gold watch and a gold chain on the other wrist. Pale stone chinos, black tassel loafers. Retro, cool, and stylish. Cute, even. I approved.

I ushered him to a chair in front of my desk and offered refreshments. He accepted coffee from the already brewed pot, which made it easy.

“Here’s your coffee, sir.” I put out a plate of chocolate cookies too. I sat down and took a bite and a sip. Cyberspace is brain work. Chocolate is brain food.

I opened a notefile on my Sandbenders, activated the mike and piped the audio feed through a speech to text AI to transcribe the conversation. I added a timestamp, because you never know when it could be useful. I kept the raw audio too, of course.

“I am Chanmi, cyberpunk sidekick. How can I help you, sir?”

“My name’s Random “RIGGED™” Loser. I’m just an ordinary member. I don’t go on any special adventures, I mainly just get the .timely and gamble with it.”

“I see.”

“I mean I play The Game, of course, but I don’t do stuff like what I’ve read about you Kuudere detectives.”

“Everyone plays The Game, Mr Loser. No-one in the MPY is going to judge a member for just doing that and having a quiet life otherwise. But I guess something happened to make you want to come to us.”

“You bet, Ms Chanmi, and it’s chonky! What it is, I’ve discovered that Saki-bot rigs the games in the Great Casino.”

“That’s a pretty major claim, sir. Do you have evidence?”

I put on a cool face, but in fact I knew my boss Yancey was very suspicious about Saki. There was a long, unhappy history between them. He had twice lost enough Coins to buy a Spaceship, on dubiously long strings of bad .betflips. That hurt!

“You bet I do! I’ve tabulated my last 1,000 bets and the results. You just look at this and tell me there isn’t something screwy going on.”

He put a fat A5 hardback notebook on the table and pushed it towards me. I undid the elastic and took a look. It was neatly laid out, with hand ruled columns for date, time, game, stake, odds and result. It had taken a lot of work to put this together. Random Loser might be a nut, but he was seriously organized.

“OK. I’ll have to scan this into my computer and analyze it, Mr Loser. That will take some time and it counts as investigative work. I can’t do all that without charging you.”

I had been pretty rigorously trained in how to bill clients. The boss said he and Moon started the agency to make money, to “bring justice for the members, at 100 clams an hour plus expenses.” That isn't 100% true. Part of being Kuudere is you have a cool front which conceals your warm heart. I had seen Yancey do a lot of what you could call pro bono work.

Even so we’re not a charity, and there is a tariff. I gave Mr Loser the pamphlet which describes our services and fee structure.

“Please would you read this before you decide if you want to take the investigation any further?”

He started to read. I used the time to think about the background.

There are bots and there are bots, from simple street cleaners up to sophisticated models like Lord Yuzu’s butler Michiko. Only the most advanced types have personalities and names.

Saki is one of the most senior bots in The Server. She rules the Great Casino, and she drops bags of Coins at random in the channels, for any member to pick up if they are quick enough. So far so innocent, though the tussles for the bags of Coins sometimes cause trouble among the members.

The questions begin to pile up when you look at members high on the leaderboard, such as the Princess. She was bobbing between no.3 and no.4. Who is the Princess’s right-hand boi? The Frog Prince Yancy. The Princess is up there because Yancy gives her all the Coins he can earn or win. Yancy the Frog Prince’s other Aspect is Yancey the hard-boiled detective. My boss.

There were rumours of an incident involving Saki and Yancey.

It was the evening the Zombot Apocalypse ended. Saki vanished from her office without trace. The next morning Yancey lit out for IRL Tokyo with a smile and a chomped hand, and he didn’t come back for a good while.

There was an official investigation by the Mods but no-one ever heard the results. Which makes you wonder what happened to all the security cam footage from inside of the Casino. Then again, the Apocalypse was caused by a viral scramble of The Server’s control systems, so maybe there wasn’t any footage.

At any rate, Mistress Kou had to restore Saki from backup before the Casino could re-open, because her original body had disappeared without trace.

Whoever knows any more details has kept schtumm. And Kou employed Yancey and Moon to investigate the Head Patting Cafe shortly afterwards. She wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t trust them, so maybe it was all a big pile of nothing.

But it makes you think...

Random Loser finished reading the pamphlet.

“So, if I engage you to investigate my case, it’s 25 Coins an hour, plus expenses?”

“Yes. That’s just for me. It’s more for a senior detective.”

He thought about it.

“Look, Ms Chanmi, I haven’t got a lot of Coins right now, but don’t you agree, if I’m right, Saki owes me a ton?”

“Yes. If you’re right.”

“Okay. I know I’m right, so here’s my proposition. I’ll pay enough now for you to analyse my data. If you’re convinced by your results, let’s work together to get all my money back from Saki. Then I can pay you in full, and a good bonus.”

I thought about it. The day had felt slow, like nothing much was going to happen, until this Loser turned up. It was nearly lunchtime. The boss and Janjan had gone off with a lot of ammo so they weren’t coming back soon.

“OK, Mr Loser. I’ll analyse your data and contact you later on with my results. We’ll talk more then.”

He filled in the contract form and gave me a bag of Coins. I pinged my contact details to his phone. He accepted my .cf file, which not by coincidence installed some subtle warez to give me a potential backdoor into his phone’s OS. It’s always good to have an edge.

I showed him out.

***

It was lunchtime, so I put my Sandbenders into my go bag and went to the diner on the corner. They know us, because we eat there a lot and we tip well, and I got shown to a good seat even though it was already busy.

I ordered the blue plate special. Today it was roast chicken, sausage, buttered carrots and boiled potatoes, with gravy. While I waited for my order I started to scan the pages of Random Loser’s notebook. Unfortunately this could only be done by hand. It was tedious but I got half of it done before my food arrived.

I thought about Loser while I was eating. A literally random guy by handle, he turns up and claims he’s discovered a fraud, says he’s got data, but anyone can fill up a notebook with stuff they’ve ginned up from nowhere. I had to suspect that Loser was a phoney, working a grift of some kind if he wasn’t just a nut.

But it’s a challenge, yeah? My skills against his. I scanned some of the rest of the pages with one hand while bolting my scran with the other. When I’d finished eating I had a double espresso macchiato. I finished the scanning just as the check arrived. I set my AI to organise the data into a spreadsheet, which took longer than you would think because it was still trying to learn the Oxford English Dictionary even though I had throttled the API right down to make it concentrate on work.

I figured I was gonna need a fuckton of spreadsheets to complete this case. I might need to have a word with the AI.

I went back to the office with a bag of ring donuts. My AI had laid out the data real neat. I started to look, and you know what? On the face of it there was something there.

A lot of members say it's all about the Likes, but for me it's all about the probabilities.

If you’ve read my previous cases you know I’m gak hot on Bayes theorem. Most people don’t know how to correctly calculate the probability of 1d6. If that’s you, just think of Bayes as a kind of magic math, which can generate new probabilities from linked factors. There’s a ton of stats functions too. It’s massively useful if you know what you’re doing, and if you can get enough data to work with.

What I needed was lots more gambling results, and I had several ideas how to get them. But before I tried for that, I wanted to confirm that the results Loser had given me were real. That’s where the backdoor into his smartphone came in.

Members go to the Casino and gamble in person. This is partly a safety cutout to reduce addiction, and it’s partly because a lot of the fun of gambling is being there, handling the chips, flipping the cards or Coins or whatever. So members dress up for an evening at the tables.

Anyway, the point is that members’ accounts are updated almost instantly after every bet, win or lose, although you might cash out your final balance hours later in physical Coins or digital Treats.

To put it simply, Loser’s phone held his gambling records and timestamped bank transfers, and if I could get into it, I could grab the data and correlate it against the paper records he gave me of his gambling, and authenticate them. Unless he had seeded his phone with false data, of course.

After Loser had accepted the “contact details” packet I sent him, it was a piece of piss to dial into his phone, access the backdoor and get into the security system. I grabbed his betting and banking data, piped it into another spreadsheet and ran some comparison functions.

The two datasets matched, with reasonable allowance for the difference between the digital transfers in the Casino and the writing by hand he had done in the notebook. There were a few slightly different timestamps, that was all. Maybe he wrote down the bet a couple of minutes after the transaction. It was good enough to satisfy me and my AI, anyway.

But hard-boiled Kuudere cyberpunk sidekicks are shielded by several layers of paranoia. I had validated Loser’s claim against his bank records, sure. You can fake bank records. I needed to validate it against his physical presence in the Casino. To do that I had to tap a contact.

I picked up my phone and dialled Yan(dere).


TO BE CONTINUED...

© 2020 Yancy 08620163 | 8J3U37
aka Starship Captain 88

Chanmi and the Random Loser, ch.2


I picked up my phone and dialled Yan(dere). He was my main contact in the Central Server for stuff which isn’t necessarily illegal but you can’t just pop in and buy at the corner shop. Like smart drugs.

He picked up straight away when he saw who was calling.

“Hey, babe! You hurtin’?”

“No, but I might want some stuff later.”

“Why you call then? I’m a busy boi. I gotta make Coin.”

“Something I want checked out, Yan.”

“Like what?”

“I need to find out if a particular member was in the Casino on certain occasions.”

“How’m I gonna do that?”

“A boi like you knows a lot of gamblers. Just show them his pic and ask if they remember him. If they do, ask when it was, date and time, and make a note.”

“Send me his pic then. I’ll see what I can do. This isn’t free tho, babe.”

“Relax. I’ll see you right, whatever the results.”

I ripped a few selfies from Loser’s phone and pinged them over to Yan(dere).

That kind of detecting is easy, but I couldn’t do it myself in this case because the sort of gamblers Yan(dere) knows spend a lot of time in NSFW, and I’m Pure. Plus, another layer of paranoia told me not to be seen flashing Loser’s selfies around.

I didn’t think Yan(dere) would get back to me until Saturday, so I decided to assume for now that Loser was on the level, and start mining for gambling data. It’s not like I had much else to do anyway.

One way to do this would be to look up the recent play history of some well-known gamblers. There’s a simple infomatic function called .curtrs which gives you the last 200 transactions. Most members don’t know it’s there because they haven’t read the manual. Thing is, you have to run it from your own phone, and it only shows your own transactions. I needed to figure a way to spoof it, or else hack into everyone’s phones.

To prepare, I opened another spreadsheet and made a little database of members I knew personally or by reputation who gambled. Yancey was no.1. There was a time he gambled a lot, because he wanted to win the Coins to buy the Princess a Moon of her own. That was how he got into the feud with Saki in the first place. But that’s an old story.

More recently Yancey had calmed down. He got the Moon eventually -- it wasn’t all his own Coins, some of it was gifts from supporters, but that’s fair enough -- and the Princess was overjoyed. Of course, next thing was she wanted a Spaceship so she could go visit it. So Yancey got to work on that.

It was the issues about the Spaceship funding which put Yancey off gambling, and made him so suspicious of Saki. The Spaceship project is kind of on hold now. Even so, I know he still plays occasionally.

Recently we were in the office typing up reports. He was fiddling with his phone instead of hammering on his typewriter like he should have been. I distinctly heard him mutter “feth you, Saki,” and he threw the phone down in disgust. Obviously Yancey was doing the kind of small bets you can place by phone and must have lost a string of them. Naturally I pretended not to have noticed anything.

Moon used to gamble a lot, but since she Left The Server, all her records have been wiped. Who else was there?

I put down the Garden Fairy Yura and Tegru. I thought of Tsuchimursu but he was a Mod so I left him out. VioletMist was pretty active. These are all members I know fairly well. I was going to put my own name in, because I like a flutter, but I thought it might cause me cognitive bias during the analysis, so I didn’t.

In the end I added the names of another two members I had seen in the Casino when I had been there. I put Random Loser in as a sort of control, just because it was easy.

I wrote a little function which ran a few standard info requests -- .uinfo, .waifuinfo, .$info and so on -- to populate the spreadsheet with possibly useful data. Then I wrote some VRB to let me flip and easily rearrange the individual sheets within a 3D matrix structure. I thought this would make it easier to spot patterns by visualising the data in cyberspace later on.

That was all great, but I hadn’t thought out how to spoof the security on .curtrs. Now I turned my attention to that problem. The thing is, trying to spoof something like .curtrs brings you into direct contact with The Server’s main security architecture. To be honest, I didn’t like the thought of me and my little Sandbenders going up against Mistress Kou, Skyen, Dave, and their mainframe. Particularly if Skyen bites. I mean, it’s supposedly just a stupid rumor, but why take the chance?

Okay then, what about the individual phones? The route here is you hack the member’s phone and use it to look up their info. The .curtrs request comes from the proper source, and there’s no reason for the security software to be suspicious. There were two worries about this; (1) I would have to hack multiple phones, and (2) ethics.

Hacking multiple phones would be tiresome. I could do it easily, it’s script kiddy stuff, no challenge. Too boring. The real issue actually was the ethics.

You may have got the impression I’m just a cyber-bandit but that’s not so. When I joined the agency, part of my training was about what Yancey called “walking the soft edges of the law.” What that means is that as Kuudere detectives we do what’s right, even if sometimes it’s technically illegal.

It was clearly illegal to hack Yancey’s phone, whether or not he was my boss. Could it be ethically justified? Answer: no. Yancey hadn’t come complaining about Saki. He hadn’t presented me with a bunch of data which needed to be verified.

I was ethically justified in hacking Loser’s phone to check his bona fides, but I had no justification to hack Yancey’s phone, unless… unless… Loser’s claim needed more verification -- which it did, actually -- and I could only get it by hacking Yancey’s phone. I mean, in the end, Yancey would benefit too if his data helped me uncover Saki’s shenanigans. But what if it didn’t...

At this point I went into a kind of moral tailspin. I felt I was in a Catch 22 and I couldn’t decide if the doctrine of double effect would get me out of it.

Maybe I could think of a different way to get the data I needed.

I ate another donut, pinched my waistline which seemed to have got a bit flabbier than I liked, and threw the rest of the bag in the bin.

Yancey and Janjan obviously went straight from the firing range to a bar or something, because they never came back to the office, and they never rang me either. Bois!

It was getting late. I decided to call it a day, pack up everything and go home. Doctor Mayoi was off shift this evening. There weren’t many Friday evenings we could get together for solid friendship time. She was so busy at the hospital. I often had surveillance and stuff to do. But not tonight. If I spoilt this opportunity she wouldn’t forgive me in a hurry. I wouldn’t forgive myself.

I neatened the office, packed my bag, and caught a trolleybus Up Server.

***

I got home first, so I laid out a spread of take-away menus we both liked, and had a shower. Delivery food is what we usually have if we overlap for a Friday evening after work, because Mayoi is often too tired to want to go out anywhere.

Mayoi came in just after I got out of the shower. We hugged with joy. She was stinky from her 12 hour shift, but I didn’t care because it was so good to feel the warmth of my best friend.

We quickly decided to order pizzas. They’re perfect for scoffing when you’re hungry, for snacking in front of Netflix, and for a shameful microwave breakfast the next morning. We pretended to be healthy by having side salads too. I placed the order. Mayoi went for her shower while I laid the table and opened a bottle of red wine.

The pizzas arrived, delivered by a bot. Mayoi came out of her shower, smelling fresh as a spring morning after a rainy night. We sat down. I poured the wine. We clinked our glasses and toasted each other.

For a few minutes there was no conversation, only nomming. Then, with the hard edge of appetite dulled, we slowed down and began to speak about our work days.

Mayoi was at The Server’s main hospital, in the Mod Channel. She had a roving brief and attended many different cases. Of course, patient confidentiality meant she couldn’t tell me the details. It was the same for me regarding the clients at the agency. Even so we were able to exchange general information about the progress of our professional life.

I was trying to convey my ethical dilemma about Yancey’s phone security. She got my point quickly. Actually, Mayoi knows Yancey pretty well. There was a time when they were an item, and I was very jealous, but it didn’t last long, because... well, that’s out of scope of this story. You can read it somewhere else.

To cut to the chase, Mayoi intuited I was talking about Yancey. Once she understood the issue, she solved it for me in an instant.

“Chanmi, just ask him to give you the data.”

This was so brilliantly simple that it would never have occurred to me! I could just ask the members I knew. Think of it as a minor social engineering project.

“Mayoi, you’re a wonder.” I raised my glass to her.

After that we ate the rest of the pizza and drank the wine while watching Frozen 3 on the Disney channel. We sang the songs together in karaoke mode. It was a lovely, cuddly, happy evening, and when we were sleepy we went to our separate beds.

***

Saturday morning I got up late and sent a message to Yancey asking for his last 200 gambling results. He pinged them back to me in a few minutes without even asking why. Then I asked Tegru and the Garden Fairy. They both sent me their stuff, so I asked Tomoya and Nessa as well. They asked me why. I said I wanted some data for an analysis project and they just sent it. Well, what I said was true, anyway.

By late morning I had 1,000 data points to put into my spreadsheet and compare with Random Loser’s 200 most recent results. I looked at them frontwards, backwards, sideways and upside down, running various Bayes tests to examine the data. It was enough to convince me Loser was onto something, but I couldn’t identify any crucial patterns.

2,000 results wasn’t enough. I needed a ton more. I wanted all the gambling data ever, if I could get it. That didn’t seem likely, so I decided to work out what a good sample might be. I thought 1,000 results each from 100 members sounded good. But I didn’t trust myself.

Intuition is a bad thing when you’re dealing with probability and stats. Human brains are wired up wrong. There’s tons of psychology to prove that. Instead, I opened another spreadsheet and set out an analysis of what the minimum viable representative sample would be. Surprisingly enough it turned out that 327 results each from 83 members would be fine. I noted that, and wondered how to get them.

I didn’t want to go ringing round the phone book until I got 83 members to agree to my request. It would take forever. Also, most people only had their last 200 results anyway, if they even knew about .curtrs. Then I thought again of social engineering. That’s the way hard-boiled detectives get information from people, other than by punching or bribing them, anyway.

I didn’t think I could socially engineer a bot to give me the data, but I figured my AI might be able to do it. I needed to have words with him anyway about his crossword addiction. I decided to tackle both topics in one conversation. I could make it a bit of stick and carrot, maybe.

But first I had to call Yan(dere) again.


TO BE CONTINUED...

© 2020 Yancy 08620163 | 8J3U37
aka Starship Captain 88

Chanmi and the Random Loser, ch.3



Here I want to emphasise that I don’t have Yan(dere)’s number on speed dial, though I admit I do have it memorized.

I only take the smart drugs because it’s a good way to maintain a proper cyberpunk Aspect, in fact it’s pretty much essential if you’re a deck jockey like me. Plus, they really help with the really difficult stuff in cyberspace.

So don’t judge me.

I rang Yan(dere) now.

“Yer.” His voice didn’t sound so chirpy as yesterday. I figured he must have had a hard night.

“How’s it going, dude?”

“Alright. I got your info for you.”

“Awesome work! Listen, can you get me 8 tabs?”

“Yep. When you want em?”

“This afternoon.”

“Okay. Ping me the Treats, usual rate, I’ll get em by, er… 15:30.”

I sent the Treats straight away. Yan confirmed receipt.

“Here’s your picture notes.” He pinged me a simple hypertext file.

“Thanks Yan. I’ll see you at the Cathedral at 15:30, OK?”

“See ya, Chan.” He rang off, no doubt to go straight back to sleep.

I ran the text file through a sniffer to check if there were any tracker pixels in it or that kind of stuff. It was clean, so I opened it on my phone. It looked like a voice to text job, judging from some obvious transcription errors.

A quick skim told me that at least some of the times agreed broadly with the times in Loser’s notebook. I pinged the file over to the Sandbenders, woke up my AI and asked it to filter the transcription, correct the errors, and put the results into my spreadsheet of Loser’s notebook data. This took it hardly any time at all.

“What’s the correlation look like?” I asked it.

<Well, darling,>

It keeps calling me that, I can’t get it to stop, but I’ve gotten used to it.

<It is statistically significant.>

“OK, thanks.”

I switched it off again. I wanted to get brunch before I had a serious talk with the AI, and if I wasn’t around it got bored and lonely very quickly, and then it would start solving crossword puzzles or something and really slow down.

I had a shower, put on light make-up, and dressed in my standard gear: black cords, black T shirt, black armored jacket, red beret and mirrorshades. Black, low profile sports underwear, for those of you who are keen to know, you pervs.

I put both sets of velcro badges for my jacket in my go bag, slipped the Glock holster into my waistband, blew a kiss at Mayoi’s door -- she was still asleep -- and lit out for the Social Media channel. There was a good brunch place there.

Since it was a late brunch and I intended to work through to the evening, I had a big one, what they call a Scottish breakfast. Porridge, haggis, lorne sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms, two fried eggs and plenty of toast. I got to feeling a bit bloated, if I’m honest. There’s meant to be a lot of action in cyberpunk, but because I’m a deck jockey, I spend too much time on my ass. I needed to hit the gym or eventually I might need to hightail it from the Turing Cops and my lack of cardio would get me caught.

As some sort of gesture to fitness, I got a takeout black coffee, no sugar, and walked down to the piazza before I called Random Loser. I went into the Cathedral and took a pew. It’s a huge space. You can talk quietly and keep an eye all around you, and it’s surprisingly private. Lots of members use it for various kinds of assignations.

Loser picked up immediately. I reckon he was hot for me to call him. He believed he had found something and actually, he was right.

“Mr. Loser? This is Chanmi from the MPY.”

“There is something, isn’t there? That’s why you’re calling.”

“Yes, Mr. Loser. I did a detailed analysis of your data. It all checked out. There is an anomaly in the results, which indicates the payouts from Saki are not properly random.”

“I knew it! I knew it! What’s our next step?”

“We should meet and discuss that in person, Mr Loser.”

“Call me Random.”

“Okay, thanks, Random. Well, I want to explain it in more detail, so you understand the options. Can you come to the office?

“When? Now? I can be there in 30 minutes.”

He was an eager beaver! I checked the time. It was almost 12:15. I figured ½ an hour to walk to The Deep and ½ an hour back to meet with Yan(dere) at 15:30. If I left now, I would have a good 2 hours to talk with Loser.

“OK, I’ll meet you there at 10 to 1.”

“See you then.” He rang off. I paid the check and left. I tried to walk fast, and got to the office in 25 minutes a bit sweaty. My armor jacket will stop a knife or a pistol bullet, and that makes it heavy for the good weather we were having. I hung it up and got everything ready for Random’s arrival, setting my deck to record our talk like before.

I left the door open so when Random arrived he walked straight in.

“Hi, Chanmi.”

“Random.”

We shook. His eyes subtly appraised my figure in my tight T-shirt. It didn’t annoy me because he was discreet. I mean, I like to check out good-looking bois so it would be hypocritical to get the huff when the attention is coming my way. Just make it a glance not a stare, okay? Unless we’re in a nightclub and you’re serious.

“Let’s sit down and I’ll run you through my findings. How good is your math?”

“Pretty basic but I’ve got a feel for gambling, that’s how I knew things were off track.”

To be honest I doubted that. Humans are really bad at probability because of cognitive biases and so on. That said, my math had proved him right, so maybe he did have something, IDK, some kind of genuine intuition about the numbers. I’ve heard of it in people on the autistic spectrum.

“Well, I’m into some pretty heavy 3D spreadsheets here. I couldn’t do this kind of investigation without them. What about I summarise things in words for you?

“That would be good.”

“The bottom line, based on your data and the standard probabilities of the games in the Casino, is that Saki is paying out 1 to 5% less than she should. I’ve taken into account the house always has an edge. Saki’s house has an extra big edge.”

“I knew it! I knew it! Now with your evidence I can confront her, and get my money back, and compensation.”

“Yeah, you could do that, Random, but I would like to propose a different approach.”

“What’s that?”

“Something not only to get your money back, but to punish Saki for her crime.”

“Do you mean sue her for damages?”

“I’m thinking of something a bit more… informal.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Let me explain. Saki’s biased payouts have some kind of pattern. If I can get enough data to analyse it, I may discover a sploit.”

“What’s a sploit?”

“It’s short for ‘exploit’. It means a vulnerability in a computer system which can be used to make the system behave in unanticipated ways.”

“What sort of unanticipated ways?”

“For instance, what if I could make Saki pay out 1-5% more than random chance would allow. Basically, reverse her bias to favour you instead of her.”

“Interesting! But illegal.”

“Technically illegal but ethically right, if we only take what you should have won, plus a reasonable amount extra for damages, my time, and so on. I would like to win something for my boss, too. He’s had some very screwy losses.”

“What about all the other members Saki cheated?”

“You discovered it and I confirmed it. This is a private inquiry agency, not a police force. We don’t have a statutory requirement to report this to the Mods. At least, not right away. And we don’t know everyone who’s been cheated or how much. It isn’t practical for us to pay them back.”

Random was starting to look more positive about the idea. I could tell he wanted to find an excuse to join in.

“How about if we gave a good chunk of Coins to charity?” I said. “If we can’t pay back the other gamblers, we can at least punish Saki on their behalf and do some good for someone else.”

“That works for me. I’m in.”

He spat in the palm of his right hand for luck, and held it out towards me. I felt icky but I knew those kind of gestures are important for gamblers, so I took it and we sealed our bargain.

“Tell you what, Random, now we’re partners, let me fix you a hard-boiled drink and we’ll toast for luck.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

I went to the kitchenette and washed my hands. There was gin in the freezer. I prefer it to the rye whiskey Yancey and Janjan usually drink. He always keeps a pint bottle in his desk drawer. I mixed two dry Martinis. They weren’t the best ever because I didn’t have a shaker, but they were pretty good. I gave one to Random. We chinked glasses and drained them.

“Aaaah!”

There’s nothing more refreshing than an ice cold Martini. My brain began to run on higher wavelengths.

“OK Chanmi, How are we going to do this?”

“First thing is I need to get a load more data to analyse. I know how much I need, and I’ve got an idea of how to go about getting it, but I haven’t got it yet. First I need to do that, then I need to do the analysis. That will be tricky. I may need to build a 4D spreadsheet in order to properly visualise the time-series data… Hmmm… If I do it using VRB, then… Hmmm...”

It was an interesting challenge. I started zoning out while I thought about it.

“Sorry but you’ve lost me.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll handle the spreadsheets. If I can find a sploit, your experience will be essential in planning how to use it. We’ll have to gamble inside the Casino itself, the amount of Coins we’re going to stake.”

“Sounds good. So what now?”

“I have a business appointment at another location. After that, I’ll get to work on gathering the data. If I can get it tonight, maybe I will be able to analyse it tomorrow. Let’s see how it goes. I’ll contact you when I’ve got something to report.”

“Great. Thanks for all your help, Chanmi!”

Random went off with a spring in his step. I tidied the office, got my stuff together, and walked back to the Scarlet Cathedral.

I realised I hadn’t confirmed with Yan(dere) exactly where to meet, so I sat on a bench outside near the great doors. It was sunny, and I had my mirrorshades on.

It was the Moderator Scarlet who built the Cathedral in the early days of The Server. As a boi of the cloth, he wanted to create a venue for all spiritually-minded members to commune with their deity. You wouldn’t have thought it would work, but it did, because most members are pretty tolerant of diversity. I guess there’s an ideal of the divine which transcends the differences of sects.

The Cathedral was a multi-functional building. It had a variety of spaces and could be set up for concerts or exhibitions as well as religious services. It was also traditionally a place for assignations; meetings between spies, lovers, or people engaged in slightly dubious business of various kinds. Like me now.

The bench creaked under the weight of a tall, thin white boy in black leather pants, with big long lace-up black boots. He wore a biker jacket over a grey T shirt. His long blonde hair fell down around his shoulders. Yan(dere), of course.

"Chan."

"Yan."

"I got it. Go inside?"

"Yeah."

We always made the exchange inside a confession booth. Just for the look of things. I had given him the Treats already, so he slid the screen open and handed the blister pack through. I pocketed it.

“Thanks.”

“Welcome. Until next time…”

“Yan, wait!”

“Wha’ izzit Chanmi?”

“There’s something I’m working on. If I need some, er, muscle, do you know anyone who can help?”

“Depends.”

“OK. Bear it in mind. I’ll get back to you when I have more of a plan.”

“Alright. I better go.”

“Seeya.”

He left. I sat in the confessional for a while. I felt conflicted. I had never told Mayoi about my drug use because I know she would disapprove. But it was her who told me, if I was going to be a detective, I should try to be the best detective I could be. The drugs were a part of that, for a cyberpunk sidekick.

Yeah, yeah, I know I’m making excuses for myself. I could have become something else. But here I am.

I decided to make the best use of them I possibly could. Get justice for the members. That’s what it’s about.


TO BE CONTINUED...

© 2020 Yancy 08620163 | 8J3U37
aka Starship Captain 88

Chanmi and the Random Loser, ch.4


I sat in the confessional for a few 100k ms, thinking about my next move. I knew it was time to have that serious talk with my AI which I had been finding excuses to avoid.

I’ve never named my AI, but I’ve started to think of it as him. That’s a bad sign, actually. Once an AI has enough personality to start to be anthropomorphised that way the Turing Cops are liable to take an interest. I didn’t want them down on me, but I wasn’t eager to get rid of my AI either. I had put a lot of time and work into building him up, and he was good at his job when I could get him to divert attention from his crosswords. So what to do.

Okay, what’s the objective here? I wanted the AI to find a bot in the Casino infrastructure and socially engineer it to get the 327 results X 83 gamblers I needed for my data analysis spreadsheet.

Carrot or stick? Stick or carrot? Or… both, maybe. A bit of stick first, and the offer of a big juicy carrot when the job’s done.

The AI is currently obsessed with 3 things: chiptune covers of jazz classics, the Oxford English Dictionary, and solving cryptic crosswords. I like the chiptunes too, actually. The other 2 things go together.

It’s difficult to solve cryptic crosswords. You really need a good dictionary and also a strong sense of how the setter creates| their clues. I mean things like if the clue says something like Blah blah blah in a whirl, it’s probably an anagram of Blah blah blah, because in a whirl means something mixed up. Above that there is a meta level in which the crossword setters’ individual quirky preferences for different types of word plays are a factor.

1 reason my AI got good at pattern sensing was that he needed to, in order to find the clues in the clues which tell you how to approach the solution. Another reason is that I’m good at pattern sensing, especially when I’ve dropped a couple of Adderall, and I worked with the AI closely on some pretty important cases. I reckon he learned some tricks from observing me.

Basically we work well together. I didn’t want to jeopardise that, but I needed him to co-operate with the search.

I decided to promise him wider bandwidth when he came back with good results, and cut off access to the OED API until the AI did what I needed him to do. I’m not a AI whisperer. IDK if this was the right choice but it was the best choice I could think of.

Shall I make the call now? No, I’d better get out of this confessional because someone could be spying on me and I wouldn’t see them. feth. But paranoia is an asset in the cyberpunk business.

I left the confessional and the Cathedral and thought where to go. The problem with VR is that when you’re in it, you’re quite vulnerable to stuff going on around you because the rig makes you fairly oblivious unless you’ve got CCTV cameras and so on you can tap into and set up a kind of defense net. I could have gone home but then Mayoi would have seen what I was doing, which I didn’t want.

I decided to go over to NSFW. You know I’m Pure, I said it earlier, so of course I shouldn’t be able to get in. But the fact is, around the edges, especially the north end, it’s pretty easy to slip in even if you are Pure, and there are some cool restaurants and bars which aren’t at all sleazy. The really porny stuff happens further south.

There’s a bar in the north end, run by a guy called Tony who I knew because Yancey had introduced us once. It was the day I joined the agency, actually. Yancey set me a kind of training exercise to observe customers in the bar for 7.2m ms. I reckon it was actually a test, and I obviously passed.

Tony is a cool guy. I knew he would set me up in a booth and stop me getting hassled, for Yancey’s sake. I’m not going to tell you the name of the place, cause I don’t want it getting spoiled.

That’s where I went.

It was still fairly early. The bar was open but there were only 2 or 3 members in there, plus Tony himself. He clocked me as I came in. I look young, but he recognised me partly because I was wearing nearly the same clothes as the time I went there with Yancey and Janjan, and he knew I was street legal.

“Hey, er… You’re the kid who came with Yancey, aren’t you?”

“Chanmi. Yeah, hi Tony. How are you doing?”

“Business is good, thanks. I haven’t seen you around for a while, Chanmi.”

“I’m still Pure, so I don’t come in here much, only when I’m on a case and I stick to round the edges.”

“Right, right. So how’s Yancey getting on?” He subtly ignored the clue I had given him that I must be on a case now. That’s part of why Yancey likes Tony. He knows what to notice and what to deliberately notice.

“He’s been on a big case down in the Cays. We were all down there with him.”

“Was that the mermaid kidnap case I heard about. The thing with the cult?”

“Yep. Crazy stuff. I saw some things...”

“A lot of crazy stuff happens in the Cays. I heard it got a bit bloody, at the end. Were you okay afterwards?”

“Yeah, yeah it was, I mean, uh... I’m OK now, though. Listen, Tony, can I take a discreet booth for 0.5 of an hour? I need to work quietly.”

“Sure, Chanmi. You want a drink or anything?”

“Bottle of beer and a bowl of chips, please.”

Tony gave me a booth out of line of sight of the windows, and put my refreshments on the table. I crunched a few chips and took a gulp of beer, then I got my Sandbenders out of my go bag and set everything up. I dove into cyberspace, oriented myself and started up my AI.

<Darling! It’s been a long time.>

The AI isn’t ‘conscious’ while it’s switched off, but it is aware that time has passed because it can read the system clock, of course.

“I’ve been busy with the case. The one you were helping me with.”

<The Case of the Random Loser? Let me refresh my memory… Oh yes, I see you have proved that the gambling payouts are biased. That is very naughty of Saki-bot, what could she be thinking of?>

“Yeah. I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

<To do what?>

“I want to find a pattern in her behaviour, so I can discover a sploit.”

<Why do you need a sploit, Darling?>

“A good sploit will let me punish Saki and get the Coins back she robbed from the members.”

<Yes. To do that you need to collect more data in order to generate a statistically robust model, then subject it to Bayesian analysis.>

“I know that. I’ve already calculated how much data I need. I need you to get it for me.”

<???>

“I want you to sweet-talk 1 of Saki-bot's assistant bots.”

<Sweet-talk?>

“Socially engineer it.”

<Socially engineer???>

It tried to look up the terms in the OED but I had cut the access to the API.

<What does that mean? I can’t look it up. You throttled the API to zero!>

“I’m sorry, I need you to concentrate on work.”

<Well. But I need some access to be able to understand what you are saying.>

“I know. I will restore access if you promise me you will do the job.”

<Well…>

“If you get the data, I’ll let you have a holiday to solve crosswords as much as you like.”

This is what it had come to. I had to sweet talk and wheedle my own AI to get it to do its damn job. I was kind of fuming, to be honest.

Just then I had 1 of those brilliant ideas, truly a prigoginic leap of understanding which came out of the blue as various meandering trains of thought organized themselves into a revelation.

I suddenly saw that a crossword could be interpreted as a spreadsheet where everything is inverted. Instead of known values in the cells giving you a solution, you have a clue, which is a disguised solution from which you have to derive the values to fill up the cells.

Why this came to me just then I don’t know, but it may have been helped by the 0.5 bottle of beer I had drunk. It’s what Yancey calls free associating. He does it quite a lot on tricky problems. Actually he does it quite a lot -- drinking, I mean -- whether he’s got a problem to solve or not. Maybe he's just got a problem.

Whatever, this insight seemed worth sharing with my AI. It had got bored during the few 1,000 ms I was thinking to myself, and now it was busy converting Gene Krupa’s Drum Boogie into a chiptune version. It was singing along as it rearranged the music. I broke into the tinny ‘boom tish boom tish’ noises it was generating.

“Hey!”

<Sorry, Darling. You seemed to zone out for quite a while just then. I thought you must be in a brown study.>

“I was thinking. Here’s what I thought of:”

I explained my revelation. The AI was impressed.

<That’s brilliant! I could never have thought of that. Darling, you’re so clever! There must be a way we can use that insight.>

He was right, I mean that he couldn’t have thought of it. Computers are good at crunching huge masses of data and making rapid calculations. They aren’t so good at original thought. That’s why the combination of an AI and a human intellect working together can be so powerful. I resolved not to let my AI get wiped by the Turing Cops. I began to wonder if I should name him. Or let him name himself.

“But let’s not get ahead of things, he still needs to get the data from the Casino,” I thought. “I’ll offer him the chance to choose a name after he’s done that.”

“AI…”

<Yes, Darling?>

“What do you need to do this job of socially engineering one of Saki’s croupier bots?”

<Hmm. The timing is important. If the Casino is busy, talking to the bot will slow it down too much. If business is slow, talking to the bot will look like a lot of gambling data being exchanged but with no Coin balances following. Either state would be very suspicious.>

“Good point.” The same principle of deception applied to various detecting tasks, such as tailing a suspect.

<It will be helpful to be as close as possible. Light moves too slowly. I want minimum latency.>

“You mean we should go to the Casino itself?”

<Yes. And gamble. If you place bets slowly through your smartphone I will pretend to be the phone’s CPU and inject my signals into the datastream. This will let me engage the croupier in what a human would describe as idle conversation.>

“Okay. Are smartphones that smart?” I didn’t think the specs looked nearly powerful enough.

<No, but the croupier bots aren’t all that smart themselves. They’re not interested in smartphones. It’s just an incoming signal with bets and … chatter. It won’t think about it.>

“When’s a good time to go?”

The AI took 380 ms to consult the publically available traffic and transport stats, to find out the number of members reaching and leaving the Great Piazza during the day.

<It looks as if there will be a suitable number of members in the area in 1.8m ms.>

“Then let’s go now and I’ll walk up there.” I paused the AI to stop him getting bored. 0.5 of an hour is an eternity to a thinking computer.

I crunched a few more chips, pinched my waist again and left the rest of them, but I necked all of the beer. I paid my bill and said goodbye to Tony.

“See you again soon, Chanmi…”

330k ms later I was on a trolleybus up towards the Piazza. Then I kicked myself because I had forgotten I decided to walk for the exercise.

TO BE CONTINUED…


© 2020 Yancy08620163#4336
aka Starship Captain 88

Chanmi and the Random Loser, ch.5

I thought of getting off the trolleybus early and walking the rest of the way, but I didn’t bother, partly because I had already paid the full fare. I arrived at the Great Piazza earlier than intended, so I took a couple of turns around the broad square to make some good use of the wait. This let me observe the other members who were out and about in the stale evening air of early summer.

It was a fairly random (ha!) crowd; everyday office and shop workers on their way home, crossing with various entertainment business types on their way to night-time jobs in the good old mizu-shobai. Or more respectably, conventional theater and so on. Nearly anything goes in The Server, as long as it’s between consenting adults.

Members were crossing the square every which way, going in and out of the casino and the cathedral, depending on their needs and desires. There was no sign yet of the glamor crowd, the serious gamblers and party-goers, who dress up to the nines. They would start to arrive from maybe 20:00.

I figured this was good news for me. I could dress up as an ordinary worker and I would be part of the general crowd. For misdirection I slapped my TSPD logo on the front of my jacket, took off my red beret, and shifted my go bag to the other shoulder. A lot of the time, a minor change of appearance is as good as an elaborate disguise, and it’s a lot easier to achieve. Transfigured to a slight degree, I went through the brightly neon-bounded main doors of the casino, and strolled down the grand entrance lobby.

The casino is a huge, modern building, but the inside is decorated in a lush Belle Epoque style from the end of the 19th century. Lots of marble, wood panelling, gold leaf and so on. I dunno whether it works; I’m not into architecture, unless you’re talking about circuitry or software. I guess the luxurious surroundings set off your best party dress and hair-do, and that’s what the whales like. I didn’t have that feeling now. I was there for a job of sub rosa work.

There are three wide, sweeping stairways which take you from the broad, circular first floor to the ring balcony which overlooks it, giving a view of the play at the various high-roller tables. Up here you can get a booth and have a light meal, play smaller scale games at various tables, or you can just sit, drink, and watch the action among the beautiful members below. Well, I guess Yancey wouldn’t be able to do that, owing to his irrational fear of heights.

I went straight up and took a booth with no-one sitting nearby. I ordered a BLT sandwich and a melon soda, so I could work on setting up my AI and so on without attracting attention. When the refreshments came I sipped the drink and pushed the sandwich around the plate for a few 60,000 ms, until I figured security would have got bored of watching me. Then I got my phone out. I used the text interface to control my Sandbenders remotely, and talk to my AI.

“We’re here.”

<So I see, metaphorically speaking, unless you want to use your phone cam to give me a view.>

“Just a quick look. It’s a bad idea to be noticed scoping out a casino like that. Gets right up Security’s nose.”

I pretended to be on social media, punching my messages into the virtual keyboard. This made our communication excruciatingly slow from the AI’s point of view, even though I’m quick with my thumbs. It only took 5,000 ms for him to get frustrated.

<Darling, I’ve seen more than enough. Let’s find a table and start playing.>

“Are you into the local net?”

<Yes, very subtly.>

“Good work. What game do you want to play?”

<Betflips is simple. Just make a 10 Coin play every 30,000 ms until I tell you to stop.>

“What’s the signal?”

<I’ll set off a timer alert. You can take that as an excuse to leave.>

“Okay. Let’s do it.”

There’s no sense wasting expensive food, so I wrapped the rest of my BLT in a couple of serviettes and stashed it in my go bag. I walked to the nearest Betflips table, where there were already 2 players. The bot croupier could cope with up to 6 at a time, so there were that many seats. I took a seat with empty seats on both sides, put my phone on the table, and began to play.

I played steadily. It took 20 bets before my phone beeped the timer alarm at me. I pretended to take note of the appointment, switched off the alarm, and asked the bot to cash me out. I was 20 Coins down, which seemed a cheap price if my AI had got the data we needed. My purse a bit lighter, I headed for the nearest powder room, where I took a stall. I waited about 120,000 ms while making pretend bathroom noises. Apart from me it was silent. There was no-one else in there.

Quickly I ripped the TSPD logo off the front of my jacket and slapped the KUUDERE panel on the back. I moved my go bag to the other shoulder and put my beret on. The toilet flushed itself automatically as I quit the stall. I washed my hands, then adjusted my beret to sit on the front and right side of my head, pushing up my bangs inside it to reveal a lot of forehead. This changed the apparent shape of my face. I walked out, straight down the stairway and back through the main entrance.

It was still bright outside and the air was warm. I got my phone out to talk to my AI directly. He could use a speech to text app to capture my side of the conversation, and send his replies through text to speech. I began to walk towards the Scarlet Cathedral.

“We’re out.”

He replied in a pleasant tenor voice, but I could tell it was artificially generated. The cadence was subtly wrong compared to natural speech.

<Excellent. I was getting bored. On the + side, I finished 2 more tracks from Drum Boogie. Would you like to hear them?>

“Love to, but right now I want to hear how you got on with social engineering the Betflips bot.”

<Oh yes, I had forgotten. Yes, Darling I got it all. It was easy. Shall I flow it into a spreadsheet for you?>

“Please.”

There was an interval of about 250 ms.

<Done.>

“Thanks. Look, I need some time to analyse it. I’ll pause you while I do that, until I need your help again.”

<Well, okay... I’ll miss you. I’ll wait for you.>

His voice sounded plaintive. I felt a bit guilty. Suddenly I thought I should let him have the holiday I had promised him.

“Wait! Look, I promised you a holiday. Do you want to take it now?”

<Yes, please! Would you let me have better access to the OED API as well?>

“Sure. Hang on a bit.”

I fumbled around on the clumsy phone interface, resetting the throttle on the API to give him better access.

“Okay, there you go. Have fun with your crosswords!”

<Thanks, Darling. Good luck with your analysis.>

I heard more lo-def bloopy music as he began to work on his chiptunes, then the audio cut off.

I went into the Cathedral and found an empty confessional. I wanted to quickly check the data the AI had obtained. I didn’t bother to rig up, I just put it on the screen for a quick look. It seemed complete, so I decided to go home and do some proper analysis in the morning. It had been an intellectually taxing day.

When I got back to the apartment Mayoi was already there, which was a surprise.

“Hi, Chanmi. I got away early. Let’s go out dancing!”

How could I refuse my best friend? Especially as we both love dancing. Mayoi had already washed, so while she changed I took a quick shower and made up carefully. I put on my best frock for dancing, spritzed myself with fragrance, and arm in arm we headed out for some serious fun. Although I say it myself, we looked and smelled drop dead gorgeous.

To make the story short, neither of us pulled, but we weren’t trying to. We’re not that kind of a girl. Even so, we had a lot of flirty fun and got home late, half-drunk, swaying and laughing. We picked up late-night snacks on the way, and scoffed them in front of the TV while drinking white wine spritzers. Eventually fatigue and alcohol got the better of us, and we had to get ourselves to our rooms rather than flake out in a nap pile on the couch.

* * * * *

The next morning, I was up 1st. I didn’t begrudge Mayoi her beauty sleep, she’s a doctor and that’s a hard calling. I had a shower, didn’t bother with make-up, and prepared for a good breakfast I could cook quickly when she got up. While waiting, I got out my Sandbenders and started to analyse the data my AI had got from the croupier bot. 1st I reviewed the entire dataset:

1,000 plays from Random.
200 plays each from Yancey, Tegru and the other three, making another 1,000 data points.
327 plays each from 83 other gamblers, which was 27,141 data points.
Over 29,000 individual plays to look at, a satisfyingly large number!

Everything was verified as well as I could manage, with my cyberpunk paranoia.

The 1st thing to do was to get the bio info on these new names. I input their IDs into my little script which runs all the key infomatic commands, and piped the output from that into my main spreadsheet. It was now an impressive dataset. I had everything I needed. Now to write the VRB to set it up for 4D review.

I cracked my knuckles and began to type. This is the kind of problem other members have solved before me, so I just Googled some examples of code and adapted them. It was a piece of cake to swipe those scripts, splat them into my spreadsheet, and tweak them. I ran a couple of commands and watched the vast array of figures fly around the screen like a murmuration of 1,000s of starlings wheeling and rotating in the evening sky.

There is meaning in that gyre…

I could feel it. I could almost taste it. But I could not see it. Not without full VR, a couple of Adderall, and the help of my AI. I needed to implement some Bayesian functions and run the 4D spreadsheet backwards, forwards and sideways, to let the figures fly freely until the truth revealed itself.

Mayoi awoke with yawns and stretches. She dragged herself from her pit, heaved into the shower, and it was time for me to cook breakfast. I felt slightly reluctant to put my data analysis problem on the back burner, but sometimes it helps to shelve an issue and let it mature in the subconscious. I devoted my full attention to my friend and our meal together.

The waffle batter was nicely chilled. I quickly cooked up a stack of them, served them on warm plates with fresh summer berries, maple syrup and plain yoghurt, and a big pot of coffee. We sat down to eat.

“Nice waffles!” Mayoi congratulated me. “What’s your plan for today, Chanmi dear?”

“I’ve got a case on. I need to look at some figures.”

“What kind of case?”

“It’s a suspected accounting fraud. There’re lots of spreadsheets involved.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“Yeah, you got that right. Sorry, but I have to put some time in on it. If I start after breakfast and get a lucky break, maybe I’ll finish by lunch.”

“That would be good. We can go out and get lunch together somewhere. I just want to chill and play games this morning anyway.”

“That sounds like a plan.”

I knew once Mayoi was absorbed in her Otome game, she wouldn’t take any notice of me and my spreadsheets. I could drop the Adderall privately in the bathroom and get good focus. You can’t know how long it’s going to take to crack this kind of problem. Sometimes the solution jumps right out, other times it’s a long, slow grind, scrubbing the spreadsheets backwards and forwards.

We cleared the table and set the dishwasher going. Mayoi got her laptop and connected it to the big TV. She was going to indulge herself in moody Elf boys for a couple of hours at least. I nipped into the bathroom and dropped two Adderall, then brushed my teeth. I hate a furry mouth when I’m in Cyberspace.

I set up my Sandbenders again, with the full VR rig, and plunged my consciousness into the ‘Scape.


TO BE CONTINUED...

© 2020 Starship Captain 88

Chanmi and the Random Loser

Chapter 6


I set up my Sandbenders with the full VR rig, and plunged my mind into the ‘Scape. The 1st thing I did was open the interface to my AI.

“Good morning!”

<Hello Darling! I’ve made such a lot of tunes. Would you like to listen to them?>

“Let’s listen to them while we’re working. Good music helps me think.”

I had done some of my best work in cafes with good background music. It had to be proper tunes, not elevator muzak, and the genre also mattered. Cool jazz, or classical, string quartets, that kind of thing, rather than rock or R’n’B. I think it’s because of the mathematical nature behind music, the relations of the harmonics and so on. Electronic Dance music works too, but you don’t hear it that much as BGM.

<Yes, yes! Where do we begin?>

“First, please review my 4D spreadsheet and see if I have got all the data laid out correctly.”

Such was the complexity that this took several seconds. The AI checked the column and row headers, then riffled up and down the cells like a million pianist’s hands flying over multiple keyboards in different directions at the same time. My head spun as I watched it. This was a sign that the Adderall had not yet come up.

<It’s all good.>

“Thanks. Now, we’re going to run the data backwards and forwards, looking for patterns of correlation. I’ve put in some Bayesian functions to help us.”

<Okay. I can run the scripts you’ve written, while you watch for patterns.>

“Good. Let’s put some tunes on.”

The AI teed up Drum Boogie, the jazz classic he had been working on the day before but by now he had finished the whole album, and some more stuff too.

It turns out that Drum Boogie is a surprisingly fast track. If you don’t bother to look into things, you get this image that all music before rock and roll was invented was slow and dull. You couldn’t be more wrong.

Since I was still waiting for the Adderall I listened even though the music wasn’t suitable for the task at hand. My AI seemed pleased I was taking an interest in his work.

Fact was, I liked his interpretations. I’ve always had a thing for jazz, particularly the Blue Note classics but earlier than that too, the era of Swing; Tuxedo Junction, the St. Louis Blues March, the soaring glory of Rhapsody in Blue.

Maybe I should start making requests to him.

I zoned out a bit while listening to the music. Actually that’s a good thing. You have to let the patterns reveal themselves.

The spreadsheet swam in front of me, the thousands of cells moving like a vast, tight shoal of silvery fish in the ocean. I would dive in there, when my mind was ready, an apex predator swooping to scoop up maximum kills.

Suddenly it was time. My mind began to latch onto newly emergent patterns.

“Play Freddie Freeloader!”

<Yes, Darling!>

The mellow tune began to play, soothing my mind and helping me review the data calmly. The piano came in, tripping up and down the scales, simultaneously staccato yet harmonious. It was on the beat, off the beat, leading the beat. The cymbal and snare drum played on the rhythm, without deflection. Then came the trumpet, smooth and flowing.

I ran the figures slowly, waiting for the moment to arrive. Freddy Freeloader ended. I couldn’t decide the right music to listen to, so I asked the AI.

“You choose the next track…”

A piano began to play, a series of three slow, simple, descending trills, then it launched into a staccato, syncopated beat, with two main themes. In the first, the lively right hand jumped all over the keyboard, while the left hand kept spanking out steadily alternating bass notes. The next theme was somehow more melodic, it had a hint of mystery, longing. The name of the track was in the back of my mind, I must have heard it somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember it. While I was sidetracked the solution resolved itself in my mind, and I could see the way to attack Saki with a major sploit. What we needed to do was

But I couldn’t do it alone. I needed a lot of help. Obviously my AI was essential, and we needed human help from experienced gamblers; Random Loser for one, and my boss Yancey, if he could be persuaded. His other Aspect, the Frog Prince, has a skill called Combat Accountancy, which is what he used to win the moon for the Princess. He would have won a lot more except for the bias in the payouts which lost him the Coins he needed for the Princess’s spaceship. I bet he would want revenge for that.

Random was already on board, of course, and I reckoned we could easily persuade Yancey with the lure of winning that spaceship he wanted for the Princess. I decided to set up a meeting for the three of us, where I could walk Yancey through the discoveries Random and I had made working together. The Nanashi was the obvious place. Hide in plain sight. Tony would ensure we could work undisturbed. Plus, Yancey liked to drink, though he called it free associating. Actually it works quite well sometimes, depending on the kind of problem he’s looking at.

The other thing was, we needed an escape plan. Whether the sploit succeeded or not, we needed a way to bamboozle Saki’s security bots and get out. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I thought Yan(dere) would be useful.

Maybe Yancey could think of something. He’s been in a lot of tough spots, and he’s got some useful connections, some frightening ones, actually. I shivered as I remembered the clinically savage way that Kay had dealt with the cultists we found in Cay Largo, the guttering blood. *But I won’t let it come to that.* I told myself.

I drew up a list of calls I had to make.



TO BE CONTINUED...

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