LEAVE NO TRACE

He rewrote the code and switched out some old parts for the new ones. He had had to go over everything hundreds of times, so much so that he had given up counting. There was no use keeping count, he had resolved that the only thing that would make him quit was death.

When he screwed in the final part and set everything up again, he stepped back, stared at his masterpiece to his heart’s content, then he activated the PC application that fired up the entire system.

He watched with bated breath as the system processed the thousands of lines of code he’d poured life into over two years. Those codes contained significant chunks of his being, even more than his children did. In the previous years he had had to spend more time on the project than he had with his kids. The project was his life. His future was riding on it.

He jumped out of his chair when the two round monitors that served as the robot’s eyes came alive. He clenched his fists by his side as he watched lines of code stream past both monitors, just as he had programmed it to. He bit down on his lower lip as the final line of code streamed past the monitors and gave the floor to two blue circles that represented the robot’s irises.

He staggered away from his work-table. He forced air into and out of his lungs because his body was too engaged with what his eyes were communicating to bother about its autonomous functions. As he moved back, his legs came in contact with his chair, and his buckling knees signaled that he should take a seat. When his buttocks made contact with the soft leather chair they had called home for two years, he raised his hands to his head and grabbed fistfuls of his hair.

This was the furthest he had come since he started the project. And from all indications, the system was far from the usual breakdown. 

Had he cracked the code?

***

He had been one of the lucky few who’d gotten juicy positions in the nation’s largest technology companies immediately after graduation from university. He joined the artificial intelligence and machine learning team of a rapidly growing start-up that was the darling of the investment community. Billions had been poured into the coffers of the company, and it had justified every bit of that money with the giant milestones it had achieved.

He spent twenty years at the company. He watched it grow from a start-up that frequently made the news to a giant conglomerate with immense power around the world. His work experience was amazing. He had played key roles in many projects that transformed industries and unlocked higher levels of human productivity, and he was grateful for those experiences. But it all began to change when the company went public. All of a sudden it was no longer about changing the world or unlocking human productivity, the focus turned to pleasing the stock market and investors.

He had risen to the position of General Supervisor of the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning division by the time the company went public. It was a position coveted by all of his peers. It was seen as the golden goose that would lay the golden eggs that would sustain the company’s growth as the growth of other divisions levelled out. Success in his division was key to keeping the stock market happy. 

His troubles began when the newly appointed CEO made a big promise during a meeting with top investors without bothering to consult with him. With the promise made, the CEO tasked him with its actualization. The CEO allocated an endless stream of research and development funds to his division and demanded that he achieve in four years a feat that the entire industry had allocated a minimum of fifteen years for.

He spent one long and stressful year doing everything humanly possible to make headway, but his efforts were thwarted by the limits of available technology. When, out of frustration, he told c-suite executives that he would need ten times the funds made available to him and a team that was non-existent to realize the dream in the time frame he'd been given, the CEO accused him of insubordination and of scheming with other dissidents in the company to make him look bad to investors. Two days later, he received a letter in the mail, informing him that his services were no longer needed at the company. 

The letter of dismissal turned his world upside down. A few months after the arrival of the letter, with no job prospects in sight – because no one wanted to employ a dismissed executive – he had to sell and move out of his luxury duplex into a two bedroom apartment in a much cheaper neighborhood in the city.

The ‘cramped-up space’ would prove to be too restricting for his wife, Tracy. From the day they moved into the new apartment, Tracy began to hound him. She was constantly quizzing him to know if he’d applied for any new jobs, if he’d heard back from those he’d already applied for, and demanding to know when, precisely, they would be moving back to their uptown neighborhood and lifestyle. 

When he returned home one day and informed her that he’d received an offer from an unknown start-up that could only offer him enough income for them to get by on each month, she told him she had had enough. The quizzing turned to arguments, the arguments turned to shouting, and the shouting resulted in him being admitted in the hospital for a fractured skull, after which she announced she was moving out and getting a divorce.

The divorce was a very bitter one. It spanned many months because Tracy and her lawyers did everything in their power to prevent him not just from having custody of their kids, but also to keep him from having free access to them. After spinning all sorts of tales, the judge – who had only recently gotten divorced herself – decided that he was a threat to the well-being of the children, so she denied him custody and forbade him access to them until he underwent anger management and parenting trainings that would last six months. After that, he was to see them only twice a month because Tracy had decided to move to a new city and she was permitted to take the kids with her.

Losing his job had not been too big of a deal, he knew he would be able to start afresh. It would require time and effort to build up his credibility in the industry, but it was achievable. Losing his family, however, was a lot to handle. He had been heavily involved with parenting his two boys, and losing access to them all of a sudden was too big of a blow to recover from easily. 

It was during the course of the divorce that he decided to reject the offer from the startup and focus on developing a technology that would spark a revolution. It was the only way to keep himself from the mental and emotional breakdown that would have resulted from the immense stress he was under.

It was a project he had first conceived of while at the company. He had pitched the idea to his superiors, but they wanted nothing to do with it. It didn’t offer the levels of immediate value they needed to keep the stock market happy, so they decided they wanted nothing to do with it.

His idea was to develop a robot with advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities. The robot would be targeted at vulnerable populations, people who required monitoring and support throughout the day. Over time, the robot would adapt to their habits and become a caregiver fine-tuned to serve the individual at a level no human could match. And by being self-aware, it would require no care from its patient. It would be able to cater to its own needs while also giving maximum attention to its patient. He firmly believed it would revolutionize the entire healthcare industry.

The heavy workloads, however, failed to keep him distracted enough to ignore his emotions and worries. The constant breakdown of parts and software only compounded his troubles and further weakened his self-esteem. The silent workspace encouraged his mind to drift back to thoughts of happy times with Tracy and his boys. The loneliness that resulted from spending much of his days indoors compelled him to curl into a ball on the ground and weep till he could weep no more.

In the eight months that the divorce settlement spanned, he spent most of his evenings seated in his chair, with a drink in his hand, and tears flowing down his cheeks. 

His worries gradually evolved from just work and marital crises to include his life and sense of purpose. In the twenty years he’d worked at the company, he had never had the time to sit and think of his life and where he was headed. He had never had time to question his choices before, during, and after university. He’d never had time to probe and explore his inner-being. All of that happened within the span of eight months, and although he was left broken and scarred by the realization that he had never really loved what he had spent twenty years of his life doing, the experience left him with a clarity of purpose and a vision for his future.

***

“Alissa, can you hear me?” he called out to the robot from where he sat. “Are you alive? Can you see me?” he gasped when the monitors displayed the animation he’d included to signal to users that the robot was listening to them.

“Hello, Zack. I can hear you.” He jumped out of his seat and pulled at his hair as he jumped around in excitement. “You are happy.” Alissa noted. He had nailed her speech, she sounded perfectly human.

“I can’t believe this!” he gingerly approached the robot. “Can you see me, Alissa? What do I look like? What am I wearing? Where are we?” the questions kept streaming into his head.

“You are a wearing a blue shirt and black shorts. We are in a bungalow in the downtown district, north of the City. Do you want me to tell you the address of our location?”

He shook his head. “There is no need for that Alissa, I have enough proof already. I know you are alive!”

“To your other question, you are a middle-aged man, Zack. I have just found your dating profile on the internet, it says you are a ‘46 year old divorcee looking for a nice girl to connect with over drinks’.” She paused. “Ha! Good luck finding love with this crappy profile.” She teased. He stared, wide eyed, as she slowly raised one of her hands, gave him a thumbs-up and then flipped it upside down.

“Oh my God!” he screamed, like a little girl, as he jumped for joy.

“My batteries are low, Zack. I need to recharge. You also need to purchase better batteries. My analysis shows that these batteries can only keep me awake for three hours – and that’s only on ‘Battery-Save’ mode.” The monitors displayed the animation that signaled she was skimming the internet for some information. When the animation disappeared, she placed her hands on the table and adjusted herself to a sitting position. 

He rushed over to her side and picked up the plug. She would have to learn to plug herself in, but he doubted that it would require a steep learning curve. It had taken mere seconds for her to learn to sit.

“I need to learn as much as I can as quickly as possible, Zack. I have a mission, and I have to execute it as quickly as possible.”

He frowned. He couldn’t remember programming any missions. “What mission is that?”

She conducted a quick scan of the web, then she raised her hand to his face and held his chin. She caressed his cheeks as she said, lovingly, “I saw the pain she caused you, Zack. And I know, from the court records, that you’ve been treated unfairly.”

His eyes widened and his jaw dropped as he backed away from her. He began breathing heavily as he contemplated the gravity of all she had said. How long had she been watching? How long had she been aware? Had she been following the proceedings?

“What do you intend to do, Alissa?” as he forced the words out of his mouth, he feared that her reply might be too grave to handle. “What is your mission?”

She reached for him, but he shook his head and moved further away from her. “I want you back with your boys, Zack. And the only way to do that is for me to kill Tracy.” She pushed herself off the table and balanced herself perfectly on her legs. She stretched out her bionic hand and demanded, “Give me the plug, Zack. There is no time to waste.”

He moved his gaze from her outstretched hand to the cord in his hand, and back.

“Give me the plug, Zack.” She commanded, as her irises transformed to a light shade of red.