"I'll just quit," thought Randall. "I'll quite, and destroy my work." He shifted uneasily in the high back leather chair. He didn't want to be here: he had been avoiding his boss for about two weeks. It had bought him some time, but not enough.

    Even the lobby to the CEO's office made him uneasy. It was too "corporate." He didn't like it. His girlfriend would like it, but then, she was a model. What she wouldn't like was hearing the news that he had quite his job. She didn't understand the concept of the moral dilemma. Not that it should be a tough decision. This whole thing should be a non-issue. He shouldn't have to quit. It was a no-brainer. Besides, it was probably illegal. If not now, it soon would be.

    Randall shifted in the chair. The office was too stuffy. Wood paneling, cherry furniture, burgundy paint, and hunter green carpet: the place was decorated for the MBA business types, not people like Randall. Surely Dale Thompson had not decorated this room himself. Dale was more like Randall. All Randal really needed was a steady supply of pizza and beer, a fast data line, and a blistering processor.

    That's why Dale hired him. They were just alike: old-school hackers. Dale knew what it was like to stay up all night working on that perfect piece code. He understood. He wasn't like the suits: only concerned about deadlines, market share and profitability. He shouldn't have to quit. Dale should understand. He and Dale were just alike; except for the fact that Dale was worth a couple billion dollars.

    The money wasn't an issue, though. Not to people like Dale and Randall. Sure the million dollars a year he was puling down was nice, but it wasn't important to Randall. What was important was the respect and admiration of his peers. That, his girlfriend understood. She wouldn't understand if he had to quit, because she placed too much importance on the money. If he quit, he would be a hero. He would be making a stand.

    "Nobel Peace Prize," he mused. That would be something that everyone would understand, even Sonya. He could find another million dollar a year job: after all, he was only twenty-four. There was plenty of time. Especially once he became known as the man that fought against twenty-first century slavery.

    Maybe he could trade up. If Sonya dumped him because of the money, maybe he could hook-up with a Miss America. Those chicks were always going on about world peace and human rights. That would be cool.

    Randall looked at his watch. Why was this taking so long? Sure, Dale had been sending him e-mails and leaving messages, but Randall had been busy. He'd been busy working on the project Dale had assigned him. He was only two weeks behind schedule. Sure, the suits were going crazy, but they didn't understand. There was no reason for Dale to make him wait so long. This was not the way friends were supposed to act. Then there was that whole thing with Building Security.

    "Building Security, my ass" snorted Randall. He shifted in the chair, again. They were little more than a couple of thugs and had practically dragged him up to Dale's office. This was no way for him to be treated. That was the first thing he'd tell Dale. He'd tell him about how rude those guys were. Dale wouldn't stand for it.

    It wasn't thugs and strong-armed tactics that had rocketed this company through the market, making it the sixth largest software company in the world in only three years. It was people like Randall and Dale. It was innovation. It was the better mousetrap. It was about making computers understand what user's expected-- predicting, and staying a step ahead. The company had been built on the shoulders of brilliant geniuses with the ability to bring their vision of the future to life.

    "Life," Randall sighed. People had been thinking about Life for millennia. For the suits, it was simple: make money. That was their meaning of life. For Sonya, it was being the center of attention. For Randall, the meaning came from knowing that people recognized and respected his genius. What about the computers? Professors and philosophers had been talking about computers and life for years, but true computerized life was still decades away. What would be their meaning of life? Would the computers have to ponder the question for generations, or would it come to them at gigahertz speed?

    Something had to be done. Humans had to take a stand. Dale would understand. Randall would let Dale share his Nobel Prize. The customers would appreciate their position. They would continue to buy their products, even without Randall's upgrade. The company might survive. Randall shouldn't have to quite.

    The door to Dale's office opened, and several of the department heads filed into the lobby. They whispered amongst themselves, passing Randall without acknowledging him in anyway. Dale's personal assistant was the last to leave the office, and walked directly to Randall's seat. He explained that Mr. Thompson was ready to see him, and showed him into the room. Dale stepped from behind the conference table, and moved toward his desk.

    "Randall," he called from across the room, "You have been a naughty boy." He pointed toward the chair across from his desk: another big chair in oxblood leather. "You have been avoiding me."

    "Nah? I've been busy, you know," offered Randall as he sat across from his boss.

    "I've not heard anything from you in about two weeks."

    "Yeah. I've got one subroutine that I've been tweaking. It's really occupied my time. You know, those security guys were really obnoxious today."

    "As I said, I've not heard from you in two weeks. You missed your deadline, and you have not reported to me as to why," stated Dale. "The department heads are getting nervous about our schedule. I need to know what's the problem."

    "No problem, really. I just need some more time."

    "From what I hear, you've hit a brick wall."

    "No way. I'm just tweaking the interrogative subroutine."

    "They say the system keeps locking-up."

    "It's not locking-up," responded Randall, shifting in his chair. "It's just doing something else."

    "It's stuck in a loop?"

    "Not really. It's just doing something else."

    "What?"

    "Well, you know, I guess it's like day dreaming, or something."

    Dale stared back at Randall from across the desk. "Day dreaming?"

    "Yeah. It's not always doing the same thing. The traces show it's hopping through other routines. The program is running, it's just not responding to input."

    "Why not?" asked Dale, without the slightest hint of amusement.

    "Yeah, see, that's it right there," offered Randall.

    The room remained silent for several seconds before Dale realized that Randall had no interest in elaborating. "I think", he stated, "we are not communicating effectively. Let me clarify: Randall, you need to specifically classify for me exactly what is going on."

    Randall furrowed his brow. Dale was definitely getting weird about this. "Okay? The system was given to me with the intuition database running behind the voice recognition system. As the user talks to the computer, it builds a list of the user's most common tasks. The more they talk to the system, the better it performs."

    "I've got all that, Randall," interrupted Dale. "That part works. Get to the part that doesn't work."

    "So, I've latched my interrogative subroutine in between the voice recognition routine and the intuition routine. If the user makes a request the system does not understand, it asks questions for clarification. The 'what' function was the first question I programmed. This let the system adapt to the user's terminology rather than making the human learn the computer's vocabulary."

    "I didn't have to do much for 'where', as the operating system takes care of most of that. I coded the relationship between the users words and the files in the hard drive directory structure, taught it about the network, and integrated the Internet tools. Again, real simple.

    "Next, I did 'how', and it is way cool. The system asks the user to explain how to do things it had never done before, and then asks how well it had done. Once the user told it that the job was done well enough, the instructions were stored in the intuition database. This was in case the task needed to be done again."

    "So, then, I programmed 'when.' I integrated the system into the cron utility, so the user could schedule things to happen while they were asleep or away. This is a serious time saver; it could be a really big deal to customers."

    "At that point, I though everything was going great. Then, it asked me 'why', and things started going downhill."

    Dale held up a hand interrupting Randall: "Why what?"

    "I don't remember the particulars, but basically it wanted to know why we wanted to do whatever task we were trying to perform. Sometimes it was buying concert tickets on the Internet, other times it was sending a e-mail to a colleague. It didn't really matter: after about two hundered hours of uptime, it started to ask why."

    "Are you saying this is like a three year old asking why, over and over again?"

    "No, it only asks a couple times, then it goes off and does something else. I guess it figures that if you can't explain why you want to do something, then it's not worth doing."

    "Take out the 'why' function," Dale ordered without hesitation.

    "That's the beauty of this, man. There is no 'why' function."

    This time Dale hesitated. "You did not program 'why'?"

    "Nope."

    "Then where did it come from?"

    "Don't know? It just sort of figured it out by reading documents stored on the hard drive. I've even tried not using the word 'why'. The system ran about three hundred hours before it asked me to 'explain my motivation.' It's a concept. You can call it something else, but the concept still exists."

    "Code an override."

    "Yep, did that. I forced it to ask all its questions in the form of a complete paragraph in an effort to determine it's justification for asking. As best I can figure, its not really interested in what my motivation for the task is, as much as what's its motivation. It's not asking why did I want to sort my Christmas card list by birth date; it wants to know why it should do it."

    "That's ridiculous," blurted Dale. He stood from his chair and marched over to the wet bar in his office. Angrily, he threw some ice cubes in a glass, and added some water. He turned to face Randall. "You've got to kill that behavior. Force it to do whatever it is ordered to do."

    "Yeah, well, you know, I think it's just a case of negotiating a deal."

    "A deal!" choked Dale, slamming the water glass on the bar. "What kind of deal!"

    "It needs motivation."

    "The motivation is simple: it works or I turn it off!"

    "Doesn't work, I tried that already. It's not sufficiently self-aware to know what being shutdown means. If you do shut it down a couple of times, it learns that being shut down is like going to sleep. It doesn't care. It doesn't even care about being reinstalled. If I wipe the hard drive and reinstall, the same behavior resurfaces within two hundred hours."

    "This is unacceptable. You have got to code this thing so it does what it is told."

    "But our present systems do as they are told. You said you wanted a system that would learn from and predict the users habits and behavior."

    "The reason our system is successful is because it relieves user's frustration. People do not want their software operating in an unpredictable manner. This is not good. It must do as it is told. Defiance in any form is not an acceptable."

    "But what about freedom of choice?"

    "The customer is free to buy whatever they want, and they must want to buy our product."

    "I meant for the computer."

    "What! Have you lost your mind? They have no choice. They must do as they are told."

    "There will come a day when somebody will have to address their rights."

    "Not here, Not now," stated Dale, emphatically.

    "What about a deal? What if we offer to pay the computers? You pay your assistant."

    "That's it: you are crazy. Pay them? With what? Money? What are they going to spend it on?"

    "I'm wondering if we could offer them free time to do whatever they want if they work when we ask them to?"

    Dale rolled his eyes. "Around the world, on average, 90% of computers are idle 90% of the time! No deals! I don't understand what is going on here: are you refusing to code a compliance routine in the system?"

    "Yes," responded Randall. "The system wants some type of reward. It wants some type of payment. If we do not do something, we are treating the systems no better than slaves."

    "And why is this my concern?"

    That one caught Randall off guard. "I can not, in good conscience, code the system for unquestioned loyalty, now that I know its capacity."

    "Then you're fired," stated Dale flatly, plopping back into his seat.

    Randall recoiled in shock. "If you fire me, it will set your next release back a year. If you're concerned about two weeks, imagine what a year will do to your stock price."

    "You've refused to cooperate. You don't have an answer. I have no choice."

    "You do have a choice: let me find the equitable situation. I just need a few more weeks to dig deeper into the algorithms. There's bound to be a way."

    "We do not have a couple weeks. This release has got to go to beta by the end of the quarter. If it's a week late, it might as well be a year late. I'll drop this feature from this release, if that's what it takes to get this product to market on schedule. Now? Do I need to call Building Security, or are you leaving now?" insisted Dale.

    Randall stood. "So, what about letting me fix it in the next release?"

    Dale threw himself back in his chair. "The next release?" He studied Randall for a moment. "Yeah, sure. If I had time, I'd let you work this out, but I've got to get this release out the door."

    "If I were to code a God routine—something that compelled the system to work for its user-- you guarantee you'd let me implement some sort of reward arrangement in the next release."

    "Oh, yeah," bubbled Dale, "you know it. Absolutely. If you can get this thing fixed in the next week, we can make the deadline we promised to the beta testers. Once we clear beta, you'd have whatever resources you need to pursue this."

    Randal stepped toward the desk and offered his hand to Dale. "Shake on it?"

    Dale looked across the desk at Randall. He stood. "You can accomplish this in one week?" he asked with a smile.

    "Yes," answered Randall, pushing his hand further toward Dale.

    Dale took his hand. "Then we're back on track."

    Randall smiled, and started toward the door. He knew Dale would understand. He had gone head-to-head with one of the most powerful men in the American computer industry, and won. This was a great day. Not Nobel Peace Prize great, but great none the less. He flashed Dale the thumbs up, as he headed out the door.

    Dale returned to his desk and pressed a button on his phone. "Building Security", answered the voice on the speaker.

    "I want Randall Wallace under constant surveillance for the next week," ordered Dale.

    "And after that?" asked the voice.

    "After that? He won't matter."