[ WP ] Pest Control in a Sci-Fi setting .

Dale was waving his hands around in his data entry console, finishing filling out the billing spreadsheets he had let pile up for a while, when Arethra, his artificial secretary, floated into his holographic display. Her vibrant pink dress reminded him that, in the world of organics, aesthetics still can matter; he had programmed her with that in mind. 
 
 `` Good evening Mr. Shackleford,'' she said with a toothy grin, `` I see you have been working very efficiently today. All that repetition must feel draining; may I suggest you take a break?'' 
 
 `` Now is as good a time as any I suppose,'' he said to her, not out loud. She had planned some mental treat for him, he knew. `` What's the game this time?'' 
 
 `` Consider it a training exercise if you like,'' she said, waving her animated arms to clear the holo-display. A diagram of a basic positonric computer floated up from the floor, and surrounded her. `` This system is infected with a parasite, a new kind, that was not discovered by any of your competitors. Unless you consider the Delta quadrant a viable market, that is.'' 
 
 `` Business is thy name, knowledge is my game.'' 
 
 `` Fair enough. If you can find out where the parasite lives, how it thrives, and what commands feed it in the next fifteen minutes, I will replicate something scrumptious and have a quad-copter feed it to you.'' 
 
 `` I can do that myself, thank you, but consider that a challenge.'' 
 
 She laughed, and faded from the display. `` Good luck!'' 
 
 Dale studied the schema. It belonged to some municipal body, he presumed, since there was an alarming amount of public user information stored within its Dunbar ganglia. Anyone with a copy could read most of the personality profiles of hundreds of organics who had interacted with the system; very few had obfuscation capabilities. 
 
 Must mean children, Dale thought. Or invalids. 
 
 His well-refined searching algorithm discovered no data parasites whatsoever, which pleased him, because it gave him a chance to refine it some more, given his secretary was telling the truth. 
 
 Most parasites latch on to concrete, run-of-the-mill calculations and subroutines, Dale knew, since those were performed all of the time throughout a system. For example, the most common pest found in those days was a `` left-over hunter,'' a bug that fed off superfluous numbers that usually got deleted during the process of rounding other numbers. 
 
 This one must be totally different, for her to be excited to show me, he thought. 
 
 Dale checked what users used the system the most for. It seemed that the majority of the profiles primarily engaged the system vocally, and on two-dimensional displays. That meant very few calculations got performed, relatively speaking. 
 
 From the logs, Dale deduced that the most active part of the system was its abstract-reasoning nets. So it deals with a lot of fantasy, Dale thought. Could that be the key? he wondered. 
 
 When his fifteen minutes were up, Dale's secretary materialized before him, wearing the same pink dress. `` Had enough yet?'' 
 
 `` What a fascinating species...'' 
 
 `` So you found it? Good job!'' 
 
 Dale explained how he had discovered its home, and how he determined its sustenance of choice. In the vastness of an abstraction cloud, the only constant is change, he explained. So one static point sticks out, like a sore thumb. 
 
 `` Bad choice of words,'' she pouted, `` I never get sore.'' 
 
 `` Shut up.'' 
 
 When someone asks a system an abstract question, one that ordinarily gets flagged as personal, there is an indeterminate chance that the system will lie or spin the truth, in order to not hurt the organic emotionally, he explained. 
 
 `` So you tell me.'' 
 
 `` I thought I told you to shut up!'' 
 
 The parasite that she had brought to him, as a curiosity and a chance to learn, preyed on the bits of conclusions that the system was leaving behind when giving ultimate answers, ones that were designed to uphold egos, he explained. 
 
 `` Now that I know that this can happen,'' Dale muttered to himself, `` I must augment my search procedures. I'll start by checking my own system for this pest.'' 
 
 `` Oh no,'' his secretary said, `` I've already scanned the abstraction net myself; its clean!'' 
 
 `` Hmm.'' Dale scratched his chin. `` Should I trust you?'' 
 
 Just then, a quad-copter floated through the pink dress. It was carrying a sprinkle doughnut. 
 
 Dale picked it up, and took a bite. 
 
 `` That means yes,'' his secretary said, with a smile.
