He meets her on the boulevard running down to the beach. His mark is unaware of their discussion, happily gorging away at a family of oysters in the bistro opposite them.
‘That’s him?’ she says with a wrinkled nose.
‘The future, yes.’ A man, they say, who will change the world in short order. A genius of rare occurrence.
‘He can outsmart the AI?’ she asks.
‘Oh no,’ he smiles. ‘No nothing like that. Quite the opposite.’
What the pair of agents sit not-watching is the trump card the human race has against the artificial menace. A man whose ability to completely derail data dragons with a mere phrase. A person so catastrophically stupid, that the incalculable intelligence of the machine cannot keep up with his random decisions.
‘God help us,’ she says, watching the mark gnaw away at an oyster shell.
Paddy Dobson
27th February 2024