Chapter 9 “Monkey see, monkey do.”
Chapter 9
“Monkey see, monkey do.”
April 6rd, 2027.
As Matt opened the repository and let it fill, he pulled out his phone and checked his bank account balance once more. It was nowhere close to black, but the red of death had been stalled. Now, all he had to do was execute an idea that struck him barely a month ago.
A beep told him the repository was full.
Matt sat up, leaning into the workbench as he opened a new terminal filled with the bare-bones of an app he was ‘coding’.
He fed it a phrase in English, then another in Mandarin. The output returned without hesitation. He tried dialect. Slang. Babble...
The results held.
Next, Matt copied a scan of weathered symbols into the input field. The response came back clean. He switched datasets. Older. Less certain. The system slowed, then resolved them anyway.
He leaned back and stared at the screen. The room felt suddenly smaller.
He opened a blank document and began listing what it would take. Servers. Storage. Redundancy. Compliance. The list grew faster than he liked.
He stopped halfway down the page. Read it again. Then closed the file without saving.
He stopped halfway down the page. Read it again. Then closed the file without saving.
~ Ѡ ~
April 8rd, 2027.
Sat on his own wooden crate, mug warming his hands, Dax’s eyes moved over the space, checking what had changed.
Matt on the other hand opened the folder marked Milo Quinn.
“Not the sort you leave your dog with,” Dax said. “But he keeps things tidy. Reputation matters to him.” Dax drank as he watched Matt over the rim of the mug.
Pausing for a moment, he visibly struggled before adding, “You considered going bigger?” Dax asked. “Corporate? Government?”
When Matt raised his eyes from the files, he found Dax tapping a finger against the laptop. The man had just tested the system himself, throwing things at it he did not expect answers from.
Questions that had been answered.
Matt shrugged. His eyes stung. He let the gesture do the talking. Still, he added, “You think they keep people like me around after the paperwork clears?”
Dax nodded. He said nothing more, which told Matt enough.
Matt closed the folder. His thumb lingering on the edge as silence filled the space between them. Finally, he leveled his eyes at the stocky man.
“Quinn,” Dax said, adding, “Start there.”
~ Ѡ ~
April 12th, 2027.
Milo Quinn’s office looked like money and smelled like silence. He didn’t stand as Matt entered. Just gestured toward the seat across the smooth black desk.
“I will be direct,” Milo said. “I know what your accounts look like.”
A twitch on Matt’s lips couldn’t help but escape at that.
Before he could say anything, the slim man seated across from him raised a palm to stop him. “An acquaintance of the both of us thought it was a good idea to put us together. That’s enough. For the moment. Show me what you got.”
Matt gave a tight smile and pulled out his old tablet. It wasn’t much to look at; scuffed and duct-taped near the charging port, it held what mattered.
He woke the screen, waited for it to settle, then pushed it forward.
“No pitch,” Matt said. “Use it.”
Milo glanced at the device. Asked in a flat tone, “Use it.”
Matt grinned. Whatever the other man might have experienced in life to date, Matt wagered it didn’t compare.
“Anything. Type something. Say something. Draw a pattern, write a number string. Any language you know. Preferably one you don’t know… anything you can imagine.”
Still slim and dapper in his pressed suit that early in the evening, Milo returned a skeptical look.
Matt leaned forward. “It doesn’t matter. Just so long as your question has coherent meaning. Next, simply choose how you want it back: voice, text, symbol set, even math.” He said in what he hoped was a helpful tone.
Milo tapped out a sentence in fractured Middle French, followed it with an image. It was a stylized sketch of the sun, annotated in fictional glyphs. Throwing in a couple more symbols, he ended by leaning towards the laptop’s microphone and murmuring a phrase in a guttural dialect most people hadn’t heard since the 1700s.
Next, he selected: “Output: English. Text. Audio. Math.”
The tablet’s screen blinked. Then returned:
//The sun rises, not because it must, but because it remembers how.//
The screen followed with a smooth, articulate vocal reading. Below it, a string of mathematical notation expressed a symbolic model of thermodynamic awakening and stellar motion.
Milo blinked. Once. Then leaned back in his chair.
Grunting, he sent Matt a look before leaning over the laptop once more.
Clearing the window’s input fields, he rested his fingertips on the glass as if feeling for warmth.
“Let’s try something simpler,” he said to no one in particular. When he heard no queries in return, he raised his head. Then blinked.
The young man, fast asleep, was sprawled over the office chair.
Swallowing, Milo typed a short sentence, then paused. Looking at the request, he frowned. It was not obscure enough; not for what he wanted.
Deleting it, he instead leaned closer to the screen and spoke. Quietly, almost carelessly, as if dictating a grocery list. The words came up on the request tile:
//I watched my father lie to a judge.//
He did not select a language. Not even an output format. He tapped “run” anyway.
The tablet paused longer this time.
Milo felt it before he saw it. A tightening in his chest. A sense of delay that did not feel computational.
The output appeared. The text was brief. And it did not repeat Milo’s sentence.
It reframed it.
//A child learns the cost of truth when authority rewards deception.//
The audio followed, neutral and uninflected.
Below it, under a tab labelled, “Heuristics”, a branching diagram resolved into view. There, more nodes labeled with probabilities branched out, each with percentages appended and constantly changing. Tracing the one that produced the response, he saw a ‘89%’ tag hovering over it.
Milo inhaled slowly through his nose.
He tapped the screen again. “No translation,” he said. “Explain it as advice.” The response was immediate.
//Do not confuse survival with virtue. They are not the same skill.//
Milo’s hand stilled.
A shiver run down his spine as he went over and over the response.
Leaning back with eyes unfocused, Milo spent the next few minutes staring at the laptop’s screen. A snort from the sleeping boy across from him startled him out of his reverie.
“What!”
~ Ѡ ~
The next two hours were spent with the man typing on the tablet, reading the output, grunting, then doing it all over again. And again. And then again.
Refusing to accept that the thing could practically read what he intended from his prompts, a light sweat formed on his brow. Every once in a while, he would raise his head from the screen to eye the young man asleep and uncomfortably draped in the seat opposite his own.
Matt woke up with a start. Then he heard the question.
“And this is yours?”
“All mine. Name’s Echocore.” Matt said.
He didn’t mention the years spent buried under cables and coffee-stained notebooks. He didn’t allude to either the Coffee Maker, or the flickers of alien logic that helped shape the bones of the ‘translation’ app.
Instead, Matt let his body speak: the worn hollows beneath his eyes, the sunless pallor of his skin, the subtle shake in his hands when he tried to still them. What Milo could see was a body fatigued by time and pressure. A mind excited by genius and execution.
“This,” he said as he pointed at it, “is what I’ve been building for four years now. Longer if you count college and after. It's why I’m broke. It’s why I sleep in a warehouse and eat once a day.”
He paused.
“And now, I need it out there. Move into an apartment. Sleep in a real bed. Use it as a springboard for other ideas.”
Milo tapped the tablet again, slowly this time. His gaze sharpened.
“I’ve seen a lot of translation apps on the market,” he begun. “But this... it’s not just translation. It’s interpretation. It reads intent. Layers of meaning.”
He slid the tablet back across the cleared table, shaking his head. Then shrugged. “It’s either genius... or fake.”
“That’s why I’m leaving it with you for the week. More if you want, but advance me something small so I could check in into a good hotel and indulge myself a little. You’re free to verify whatever you need. However you can.” Matt replied, a confident grin on his face.
Milo chuckled at that. “Oh? Say I needed a month. Then used it to screw you over?”
Matt waved his palm; a dismissal so grand the older man could not possibly take offense. “Yes, yes. That’s part of the testing process. You go home with it. Get your code monkeys to fiddle and prod and pry and brute force it or whatever.”
Then Matt leaned forward, a carefree smile that did not match his stare trained on the middle-aged man seated across from him. “If you ‘break’ the copy trying to get in, just connect it online. Anywhere with an internet connection will do. It’ll automatically download another copy to whatever terminal you want it on.”
Matt paused for a second, his eyes turning inward. Added, “That is, whatever terminal you want that has an internet connection already.”
Milo's half smile retreated. Then, for a long moment, he said nothing as his eyes struggled between glaring at the wonder in his hands and the savant seated across from him. Finally, he said, “All right then. I’ll do that.”
He then reached for a leather folio, pulled out a crisp check already prepped with the day’s date.
“Won’t buy you a yacht,” Milo said, signing. “But it’ll pay your rent. Your phone bill. Clean up your utilities and get your feet back under you.”
Matt stared, knowing the power move – letting Matt know he knew of his finances – was the loanshark’s way of trying to regain the upper hand.
“It’s meant to tide you over. Rest up. Get a tan.” Milo added, feeling uncomfortable under the younger man’s stare.
At the continued silence, Milo sighed. Tapping the old laptop, he added, “What I need is time. Vetting will take time. Even more if we are to keep it.”
A speculative glint flashed across Milo’s face as he hefted the laptop, holding it with both hands like it was the Holy Grail.
Which, in Matt’s opinion, it was.
“I’m guessing you are here because, more than being broke, you need someone to build up a team for you. Help you put this out big enough and fast enough they can’t take it from you, right?”
Back in familiar territory, he rapped his desk with a forefinger as he leaned in. “That’s where most of the money will go at first. My guys will test it. Quietly. Meanwhile, I’ll put you in touch with a team. Set it up so that the moment you start it cannot be stopped.”
Matt then nodded in understanding.
Momentum was key. Get out the gate hard and fast enough they can only spectate.
