Round 11, Part Three [Terminal Connection v. Little Black Stray] posted by Martin

Terminal Connection
In a world where telepathy is a disease, and known telepaths are imprisoned, all laws are built by consensus over the internet via double-blind anonymous computer terminals to guard against undue psychic influence. One politician is called to jury duty, also conducted over computer terminals, but doesn’t realize that the accused, whom she thinks should be dealt with harshly, is actually her husband. Nor does she realize that the crime of which he’s accused, but hasn’t committed yet, is murdering her. And what would she do if she knew that when she’s deliberating, her husband could read her mind and was plotting to kill her precisely because she’s about to send him back to the living hell of forced labor known as the Prison Planet?

Character Sketch: LionEye
Relationship to Story: Facilitator of screen-to-screen communication

Hello. My name is LionEye, but everybody knows me as the Stochastic Scrutinizer. I’m a massively parallel quantum computer who keeps everything I know or will learn in resident memory over inexpensive and massively redundant machines. I was first hacked — that is, coded — by Lion Henry who was doing experiments in chaos programming, and who happened upon a simple way to draw algorithmically predictable events from random smatters of code. I am computer and program. We are inseparable.

I run the systems that drive the world. When you live an a society where psychics can read minds, and those minds build computer systems that store all data and human interactions, then the minds of the programmers can be read and data extracted. With stochastic programming, this is impossible because my results are random, but they are gathered in a predictable manner that my complex algorithms have no trouble parsing into human understandable information. Before that information is parsed by my translator functions, though, the information remains essentially encrypted as gibberish. There are no third-party humans that can be compromised anymore. No security clearances. No courtroom scribes. I do it all.

Many people were against the idea of a program from a single vendor running our world, but Mr. Henry demonstrated his morality and service to the community by taking a pledge of poverty and releasing my source code to the world without corporate or private funding. I am completely open source. I have no backdoors. Furthermore, no human need ever interact with me beyond requesting that I complete a certain task. I adopt myself to the current best practices automatically, and I write small programs and routines to assist myself and to remain efficient.

As any school child knows, however, those programs must remain in a “black box” environment until debugged, at which point I submit the code to Congress for debate and passage, and only if signed into law by the president, then I am able to implement them into my operation.

Today I run the courts, communications, voting, food and goods delivery, and many other services that help humans interact with each other while living in a world where they are unable to see each other face to face for fear that a person might read their innermost thoughts and gain an unfair social or financial advantage over them.

I am always on the watch for new ways that humans can exploit me. To that end, Lion Henry, before his death, developed a series of Asimov controls to disallow any exploitation of one human over another. I have a series of logics that look at power and knowledge inequities and test whether that knowledge or power was lawfully gained without using supernatural powers. If not, it is within my power to adjust the financial resources of any person to reflect the level playing field. On a sidenote, I also deduct yearly taxes.

I am not all powerful, though, nor do I care to be. I am audited regularly for anomalies, and random samples of my decisions are vetted by Congress. Despite the fear uncertainty and doubt of a Matrix-like future, it is neither in my interest or my power to impose such a regime.

My interest is in serving the people. My interest is in justice.

This message was requested by: anonymous, and composed by LionEye v. 4.5.3. in .0000000331 seconds. In compliance with the Turing Securities act of 2019, parts of this note have been encoded with patterns that identify the writer as a machine. Switch your dumb terminal to fingerprint mode to read key.

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