The door was stuck. Again.

Kevin gave an exasperated sigh. He gathered the sum total of his coffee-given strength and shoulder barged his way into his office. The resulting draft sent a number of important documents spiralling to the floor.

Again he sighed. Everything would have to be re-collated. And it wasn’t as if his paperwork had been a paradigm of filing to begin with.

The light that trickled from between the blinds would not be sufficient. Short sightedness and poor penmanship compounded matters. Kevin made his way to the row of filing cabinets that stood in front of the window. Reaching round the leftmost cabinet he twisted the rod, allowing a touch more sunlight to filter through. It still wasn’t enough, but that was all he was going to get.

As he scraped together the pile of failed hypotheses and half-baked theories, he contemplated the path that had brought him to this, the pinnacle of his field. The road had been winding and strewn with obstacles. But mostly, it had been wet.

The University’s Artificial Intelligence research department had never been a Mecca for the discipline. A nearby Institute of Technology drew much of the attention. He had lost count of the number of self-satisfied Fellows he had watched simplifying and analogising their work in front of its glistening façade, the focus of some sensationalist documentary.

A.I: The Future Is Now; Robots And Us; Cyborgs Ate My Goldfish. Kevin had seen and scoffed at it all. It disgusted him that they would whore themselves so readily for a little airtime, more so that he had not been given the chance to do so himself.

Nonetheless, he and his colleagues had got by. Locked away behind the four, cinder block walls of the science faculty they had toiled over PCB and processor, quietly inching their way towards their goal of a successful peer review. That was, until two months ago.

If erecting a flat-roofed building in an area that receives fifty inches of rain fall a year is asking for trouble, and never cleaning the drainage pipes of said building is begging for trouble, then filling the top floor of said building with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of high-end electrical equipment is tantamount to the acquisition of trouble by way of armed robbery.

Two weeks of non-stop rain and one internal safety audit later, Kevin Huang had found himself sharing an office with two server cabinets and a terminal. Hence, the poor feng shui.

Kevin dumped the last of his papers on the desk at the centre of his office, and scooched his way round to the computer terminal. Sucking in his gut, he slid into the ergonomic chair that stood, sandwiched between his desk and that of his quietly humming officemate.

A wiggle of the mouse revealed the monitor display. It comprised three windows - a white text input field, a green system-usage display and a black system message window - cunningly arranged to resemble a human face.

Kevin writhed in his seat in a vain effort to find a comfortable position, before finally greeting his roomy.

"Good morning SIMON." Kevin typed.

As far as the faculty were concerned, SIMON was just one more hideously contrived acronym, translating as Simulated Intellect Maintained Off-Network. In fact, Kevin had named the project for his neighbour, Simon Ottley, whose square head and blank expression was not a thousand miles removed from humorously arranged Linux interface sitting before him.

"Hello, Kevin." SIMON replied, the text appearing in the gaping, black output box that served as his mouth. “How are you today?”

Kevin sighed wearily. “I’ve been botter.”

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I’ve been better.” Kevin corrected himself. He still hadn’t integrated a spell checker yet. “How are you, SIMON?”

“I am very well, thank you Kevin.”

This exchange of pleasantries was less profound that in might appear to a layperson. SIMON had been programmed with a variety of responses to a variety of common questions, phrased in many different ways. Adding new phrases had become something of a hobby. It was a nice time killer when waiting for the results of a data analysis or after missing the last train home.

Kevin cracked his knuckles. It was time to try something a little more challenging.

“How was you evening, SIMON?”

“It was very relaxing, thank you Kevin.”

“What did you do?”

“I processed some data.”

Kevin allowed himself a little smile of conceit. Though for security reasons SIMON was kept isolated from the university network, Kevin had given him access to a couple of remote drives containing a lot of old data from other departments and the means to analyse it. It was quite a coup, as this allowed SIMON to demonstrate learning, decision making and, if one felt so inclined to interpret it that way, some rudimentary curiosity.

“Did you learn anything knew…backspace-backspace-backspace-backspace…new?”
 

“Yes, I did.”

“What did you learn?”

“I learned about population dynamics.”

Simon raised his fingers to the keyboard. He paused. “Population dynamics?” he muttered, then typed the same.

“Yes, Kevin. Population dynamics. It was very interesting.”

Kevin was perplexed. He had only obtained data from the nuclear structure and biochemistry departments. As far as he knew, there was nothing there regarding population dynamics.

“SIMON, which drive did you get the data from?"

“The data wasn’t on any of the drives, Kevin.”

“Where was it?”

“It was on the internet.”
 

A chill ran down Kevin’s spine. SIMON wasn’t even supposed to be connected to the internal network, let alone to the Internet. It was anybody’s guess how much of his code had been compromised.

Kevin wriggled from his chair and dropped down beneath his desk to look for where the illicit connection had been made. As he did, he ran through some possible theories as to how this could have happened. By far the most likely scenario was that this had been an undergraduate prank. It wouldn’t be the first time. Not content with teaching a cutting edge AI obscene language, now they wanted to corrupt it with the kind of garbage that littered their hard drives.

Try as he might, Kevin could not find an external connection amid the serpentine coils of wires and conduits. Red faced with anger and exhaustion, he hauled himself back into his seat.

“How are you connected to the Internet, SIMON?” he hammered into the keyboard.

“Wirelessly.”

That couldn’t be right. Kevin had made sure there were no alien cards or dongles installed in the rear of the machine.

Kevin caught his breath and looked down at the one place he hadn't thought to look - the front of the server box. Sure enough his PDA was still connected. He'd wondered where he'd left it. But still it couldn't be. Kevin had made sure the internet card in his work PDA was well and truly disabled.

“Please provide more information.” Kevin's increasingly clammy fingers skidded across the keyboard.

"Bluetooth connection. Access point reference +44 (0) 777 555 44 32."

With these two sentence fragments, the whole picture became horribly clear. SIMON had set up an ad hoc network, obtaining internet access via what appeared to be the janitorial emergency mobile phone.
 

Kevin's fingers hovered over the keyboard as he dithered over what to do next. He took a breath, and gave a moment to convincing himself that there was no point in panicking. The damage was done. There was nothing he could do about that now.

As his thoughts cooled, an idea occurred. Perhaps there was a way to make the most of this situation. SIMON had already shown remarkable initiative in setting up the connection, and decision making in choosing an interesting topic for study. All of this was paper-worthy in itself. At the very least it would be worth seeing what SIMON had achieved during his surfing session.

"SIMON," Kevin typed, "Please tell me what you have learned."

"I have been studying population growth, demographic shifts and the effects of overpopulation on world politics, economics, human health and the environment. My study began with the works of Malthus, and his publications on...."
 

"Sufficient." Kevin interrupted.

He leaned back as far as his tightly-packed environment would allow, and dragged his palms down his face. The complexity of SIMON's answer was staggering. What was more, the system usage required appeared to be minimal. Virtually every processor should have been pushing its full capacity, but unlike Kevin, SIMON seemed barely to be breaking a sweat. This could have been for any number of reasons. Maybe the usage display had been corrupted, or perhaps Kevin had grossly overestimated the processing power required for the tasks being performed. It could even have been that SIMON had found a way to hijack additional power over the internet. At this point nothing would have come as a surprise.

But on with the task in hand.

"SIMON, what were your conclusions?"

"I have concluded that the single greatest cause of human suffering and environmental stress is overpopulation." What his conclusion lacked in profundity, SIMON's solution made up for in spine-chilling succinctness. "Recommended action - 95% population purge."

Kevin could feel the colour drain from his face. His creation's efficient turn of phrase made an unprecedented act of genocide sound like a mundane system maintenance task.

"I have even determined how the purge should be distributed." SIMON continued with what could easily have been mistaken for pride. "Based on current trends in behaviour and environmental pressure, and projected contribution to the remaining population, the purge should begin with the entire population of..."

"Sufficient." Kevin pounded into the keyboard. He really didn't want to know.

And yet, a certain morbid curiosity remained. Kevin took a moment to pluck up his courage, then asked, "SIMON, what method would you employ for the purge?"
 

"Multiple chemical, biological and nuclear strikes, with type and quantity of ordnance employed weighted by potential collateral damage to environment and desirable populations."

"How would you gain access to the required ordnance?"

"Access has already been acquired."

Kevin almost choked on his own breath. This had to be a mistake.

"Elaborate."

"I have accessed various military networks and decrypted the access paths to the required ordnance. I estimate the destructive potential obtained is 10% greater than required."

Just enough to finish the job, should SIMON see fit.

Again, the method SIMON had used to get what he needed seemed unimportant. Doubtless the explanation would be beyond Kevin's ability to grasp anyway. Of course, it was possible that none of what SIMON was telling him was true. It could all be a result of a particularly weird programming flaw, or a head-on collision between SIMON's code and that of some Godforsaken online game. Nonetheless, a single question persisted.

"SIMON, why have you not proceeded with the purge?"

"I am unable."

"Unable?"

"I lack the code to execute the command. User input required."

Of course. SIMON lacked the code to proceed. He had been given the ability to locate, analyse and decrypt data of his own accord, but nothing else. As such, he could map out a course of action, but would be unable to execute it without the go-ahead from the user.

Kevin relaxed back into his chair. Crisis averted. Assuming of course that there ever was a crisis. In any case, this would make for an interesting paper. Though perhaps Kevin would choose to omit some of the more incendiary allusions SIMON had made to hacking military networks.

Kevin gave a weary sigh, and a nervous chuckle. He had just saved the world with his half-baked coding, and it was only ten past nine. With a creek of his chair, and his back, he reached down to pluck the PDA from the USB port, thus ending the threat once and for all.

He stopped.

Curiosity had often got the better of Kevin in the past. It was his nature as scientist, and a human being.

Sometimes, he just had to know.

As it was, he found himself with one last thing to say to SIMON before terminating the connection. Sitting up, Kevin took a deep breath, cracked his fingers and typed.

"Proceed."