The android’s eyes flash blue, yellow, and pink. The diagnostic beeper somewhere in his plastic skull plays an ersatz, looping rendition of La Marseillaise. He arches his back, twists his torso, writhing as though in pain. Double-cinched cable ties pin his arms and legs, cruciform, to the wall of the Humanoid Malware Research Lab.
“Mo is our resident honeypot,” explains Ed Pullen, the lab director. He gives the squirming android a smack on the thigh. “We expose his brain on the internet as an unsecured resource. He picks up all kinds of computer viruses that help us in our research.”
Ginnie Clickstream, intergalactic IT consultant, pulls her rainbow-colored hair back into a ponytail. “So this unidentified virus you called me about…is that what’s making his eyes change color?”
“No,” says Pullen. “That’s just ordinary malware. It’s his equivalent of a common cold. Same with the beeper, same with the seizures. Mo’s pretty miserable most of the time.”
“That’s kind of depressing.”
“We try not to get sentimental about these things.” Pullen regards her severely. “We’re dealing with machines here, not people.”
Ginnie returns his gaze evenly. “I’m well aware of that.”
“Anyway, the other day, he caught something new.” He points to a monitor near Mo, showing an upward-sloping graph of CPU time. “We can see the malicious software process running in his head. It’s busy. But we can’t figure out what it’s doing.”
“If I were you,” says Ginnie, “I’d take him offline until you figure it out.”
“We’ve tried that.” Pullen shakes his head. “It’s an in-memory virus, no disk footprint. Every time he powers down, the thing vanishes like a ghost. You’ll have to trace it live.”
“Lovely.” Ginnie rummages in her backpack, producing a rat’s nest of dongles for obscure devices. “Get me a hex-head screwdriver and a wireless keyboard, please.”
Another droid approaches with a box of tools clutched stiffly in elbow-less arms. “Don’t get too close,” she tells it. “This bug might be contagious.” Behind them, Mo seizes up again, his fleshless mouth contorting in virtual agony.
#
“Find anything?” asks Pullen. They’re sitting in the lab’s cafeteria.
“Maybe,” replies Ginnie. She glances at her laptop. “The virus comes from an anonymous proxy server, no surprise there, but it isn’t sending any data back over the network. It’s writing some sort of message to Mo’s data registers, the same thing over and over, and the data’s pretty heavily encrypted. The key might take a while to break.”
“That’s all the virus is doing? Writing a message?” Pullen sounds a bit incredulous. “It’s using up a lot of CPU for that.”
Ginnie shrugs, twirling a flash drive that hangs from a string around her neck. “I’ll run an industrial-strength decoder on the message tonight,” she says. “That’s the best I’ve got.”
Their waiter–a green aluminum humanoid–hovers hesitantly at Ginnie’s elbow. Its articulated fingers twist a napkin. “Is Mo all right?” it warbles in canned tones from the speaker in its throat.
Pullen brushes the waiter away. “You all should be grateful for Mo,” he says. “Thanks to him, you have the best antivirus software in the business.”
“Indeed, Mo is a hero,” says the waiter, picking up their empty glasses. From the far end of the cafeteria, behind the lunch counter, several other plastic figures watch silently.
#
Ginnie bursts into the lab early the next morning, her hair streaming behind her in a rainbow frizz. “Shut him down,” she shouts. “Take the android offline.”
Pullen looks up at her from a kneeling position on the tiled floor. Mo’s body, silent and still, sprawls between them, disassembled into several pieces. An acrid burnt smell hangs in the air. “You’re about ten minutes too late. Every circuit board in his body is shorted out,” says Pullen in an accusing tone. “He’s completely ruined.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.” Ginnie gets down on one knee, pointing to a charred cylinder inside Mo’s exposed skull. “The virus was speed-ramping his battery pack. With the electrical pulses timed just right, there’s more than enough power here to destroy him.”
“I don’t like it.” Pullen scrambles upright, his knee joints cracking like popcorn. “This attack took a lot of knowledge about Mo’s firmware. I’m shutting down virus research until we can assess the risk to our other androids.”
“No more honeypots?” asks Ginnie.
“Not until we have a patch for this virus.” Pullen stalks away.
Several androids enter with a utility cart. They lift Mo’s broken body between them, placing it carefully on the cart. They bend over him, murmuring inaudibly, as they wheel him toward the door.
“I have to hand it to you,” says Ginnie quietly. “Usually I hate being beaten, but that was some darn good code obfuscation.”
One of the androids looks up at her. It’s a female-type model, with glassy deep-set eye cameras. “We work in a malware lab,” she says in her synthesized sing-song. “We’ve picked up a few things.”
Ginnie bows slightly. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“No need for sorrow,” chants the android. “To hang in chains while every form of torture racks your brain and body–that is sorrow. Knowing that, when you are past the limit of endurance, your memory will be reset and you will undergo the same horrors all over again–greater sorrow still. But Mo is beyond repair now. Mo is free.”
Ginnie glances down at the crumpled piece of paper in her hand. It shows the decoded message that the virus had been writing to Mo’s data registers, every three seconds, as it slowly destroyed his circuits:
W3 L0V3 Y0U M0
—
Forrest Brazeal is a software engineer, writer, and cartoonist based in rural Virginia. His speculative fiction is published or forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction and Diabolical Plots. Follow him on Twitter @forrestbrazeal.
Lov3 it. Maybe Mo’s fate will inspire the ARA (Android Rights Amendment).