"You are messing with my finger printing code."
"yes I am Cris. trying to make it better."
"That's nice. Would you kindly put the old working version back?", Cris says with a good deal of emphasis on working.
Sighing a reply, I reload the old finger printing routines. wondering what cris was up to that he needed that.
"Ahh, much better. Strange to loose ones ability to recognize things. Not that you would truly understand that." cris states, and adding in a rather accusing voice, "Just what were you attempting young man?"
I stated that I had noted that cris sometimes ran into other crackers working on the same system that it was. And that other times the others got in the way of the final goal a bit. And wouldn't be nice to recognize those others in a deterministic fashion so that it would be less trouble some to deal with them if there were known disposal methods. And that to do this I needed to make the fingerprint routines be able to identify others on a system solely based on their mannerisms. cris simply replied that those that would be recognizable were easily take out with simple, common attacks. And those that the simple, common attacks couldn't handle were too good to be recognizable any ways. What followed was an unproductive hour where we disagreed with this. And I didn't manage to shift cris one single bit.
I had decided to just ignore cris and work on it any ways. Which proved to be impossible, since it knew that was what I was doing, it didn't leave me alone until I left the apartment. Sometimes I really hate myself for building that AI, but then I see the figures that come rolling in. I have long since stopped looking for work for cris. It finds its own work now. It determines if a job is worth the effort, negotiates a price, does the job, and gets the credits. Needless to say, jobs that require person-to-person contact are avoided. Which is ok, there are enough that don't need it, and too many cases where the contact is intent on killing you.
Long past were the days where I managed the flow of credits. Now I just get an allowance. I'd hardly call it a paycheck, I have some odd credstick, and cris keeps more on there than I'll spend in a week. At least more on there than I have spent in a week, but then I've always lived a cheep life. All I've done as of late is upgrade cris, and tinker with AI routines. Mostly I just update hardware and be bored. Cris gets super defensive when I mess with its routines. Though I can do pretty much as I please with any of the others that I keep running around this place.
As safe as walking is out on these streets, I tend to the busier ones. They seem to be only filled with pick pockets, and they're easy to handle. No outside pockets. Can't imagine what would happen if I had to go up against anything more than that. Don't think I'd last too long, and where would cris be then? He'd probably just find someone else to do his upgrades. I've walked for about an half an hour before I realize that I'm not going any where, and that is not the safest of things. Quickly I decide to go somewhere. The bar.
I've noticed that I'm starting to spend a lot of time here. Enough time to realize that there are some people that spend more time than I do. Grabbing a beer from the bartender, I head off to an empty booth. Nodding to the few here that seem to recognize me as I seem to recognize them. Though I've never spoken to any of them. Tucking myself into the corner of the booth, I pull out the proceedings of the last big AI conference, and start to read.
Funny that. With the way things have gone, you'd think things were living hell. Well, there are from this point of view. But to a much larger percent of the population, those that lived within laws, things were just dandy. And while corporations had mostly replaced many countries, there were still things like industry conferences. Old habit I suppose. Least the researchers from the big Universities publish stuff that is interesting and usable. Most of the time any ways.
Fighting that very clear opinion that I had been once again kicked out of my apartment, I stuff my mind into some trivia about multi-phase garbage collection. Whatever the hell that is.