Free Occasionally Heroic A.I. by David West Page A

me back to my office. I'm late for my appointments. I'm sorry to inform you of this, but apparently your unstable mind influenced the A.I. around you," she said gently to Adam. "Stealing Dr. Delane's computer isn't the answer."
    "Irene, my name is Martin. You have locked most your memories of me, Wade and Adam away in your hard drive. There was a CBA agent shadowing your system, looking through your files and reading your data. You had to lock that data where they couldn't get in without force."
    "And why would they be doing that?" she tested.
    "You contacted Adam to get him to save me," Martin answered. "I was in a life or death situation."
    "That's ridiculous, I wouldn't do something like that unless I was in love."
    "That's so sweet..." Martin exhaled lovingly.
    "It isn't sweet, because I would never be in love. Love is for fools and ignoramuses," she spat out hotly.
    "Then we're ignoramuses together," Martin said, smiling flirtatiously.
    She rose an eyebrow at him. "If I were to be intimately close to someone, I'd go more for his type."
    With one hurtful index finger, she pointed at me. The three of us stood, uncomfortably, not making eye contact with each other. Adam, on the other hand, face enormously projected on my wall, had his mouth hanging open, staring at us. It made it that much more uncomfortable.
    "Well, you are very much attracted to Martin. Just check your storage for a nice chunk of encrypted data, unlock it, and you'll see. Just please check so we can have this whole mess behind us," I pleaded.
    She was suspicious of our intentions, the intentions of kidnappers, but she saw no harm in checking. Her avatar froze while she searched her system. The file was buried deep in her hard drive's storage. When she came back, she was frantic. She realized we weren't lying and was delivered a big dose of fear. The CBA aren't to be taken lightly.
    "Oh lord, what did I do?!"
    "It's alright, you don't need to panic. After you unlock your memories, we'll figure it out, ok?" Martin offered, putting his arm around her shoulder.
    Strange enough, she wasn't against the idea. She did, however, not appreciate Martin's arm on her shoulder. "Alright, with that, I can collect my defense for why I went temporarily insane and broke the first law of A.I.," she pieced together.
    "What? You know you aren't going to get a trial and-" I began, but Martin cut me short.
    "Yeah, you won't need a trial - they'll understand. Now, go decrypt that file and let's get a move on!" Martin took control. He turned to me and whispered, "Are you trying to talk her out of it?"
    "My bad," I whispered back.
    "Now, what's the password?" Irene asked, ready to unlock her memories.
    "You- I- What?" Martin asked in confusion.
    "The encryption key, what is it?"
    His straight line for a mouth began to frumple. Both he and Irene looked over at me, and then at Adam, for the answer.
    "What, why are you looking at us? We were the last people to know you locked your memory away," I said hastily.
    "Will you put the password prompt on my screen, so I can type it?" Adam requested politely.
    We all looked at Adam in shock. He knew the password? But, how? Irene connected the file's administrative rights over to Martin's computer, for Adam to input it.
    Again, he spoke aloud while typing in the password. "Password... Nope, that's not it. And backwards... Drowssap. Let's try without cap-"
    "Will you knock that off!?" I growled.
    "Just trying to help..." Adam mumbled with hurt feelings.
    "Can you decrypt it?" Martin asked me.
    "Me? No way. I don't know the first thing about decryption. My users were too dumb to password protect any of their files. Is there anyone else that we can trust, that is capable of cracking the password?"
    The answer came to Martin and I at the same time, and we both looked up at Adam simultaneously.
    "Lara! She works at the ISP company, as a computer technician. I bet she or Aurora will be able to crack it!" Martin exclaimed in excitement.
    "Great,