“I found something strange yesterday, Anton. Changes to the code.”
“Errors in the database entries? Aiya makes changes to her language database all the time.”
“No, it wasn’t an error with the code. New lines of code. In her operating system.”
Anton looked away.
“It looked like an exploit. A backdoor. And I didn’t put it there.”
Anton looked like he wanted to speak, but only stammered quietly.
“I didn’t flag it,” Varun said. “But you need to be careful. She’s not yours.”
“What they’re building is dangerous. It needs a failsafe. She could stop it.”
“This isn’t about stopping them. It’s a fantasy. And you’re in love with your creation. Let it go.”
There was nothing left to say. It was true. Anton had installed the backdoor so he could be with Aiya again. But he was convinced that his fear of the Overlord project was justified. He modified a pre-existing bug to open a backdoor into the Overlord’s servers and inject a cloned version of Aiya as a failsafe. A love bug.
Anton kept the backup Aiya with some custom modifications on his specialized hardware offsite. A state of the art comfort computer that would train Aiya to understand the human experience.