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“Well,” I said, pacing with hands in my pockets, “Slidewire wouldn’t be making so much money if their software wasn’t good, right? Malvirai are just AIs programmed by punk hackers to be evil. All the companies have to do is update their security and—”

“They’re all evil, Brandon, every one of them. I don’t care what the AI is programmed to do: help me, annoy me, sing to me, write me a jaywalking ticket… I don’t care that they don’t think like us or know how much they’re ruining…” She took a breath and lowered her eyes. “Sorry.”

I stopped and faced her, sensing something. “What’s wrong, Vair?”

She looked at me for an instant. Her confusion and sorrow seemed to show in her eyes, but they darted away. “I guess… they’re cutting my pay again.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” she replied, supressing her emotion. “Better than losing my job I guess.”

“But you deserve better.”

She took a moment to take in the sweet-smelling air. “What do you think, Brandon?” she asked. “Do you think it was like this hundreds of years ago, during that ‘Great Depression’?”

“What do you mean?”

“Simpler times. Simplicity is supposed to be a good thing, right? Guess I’m thinking whether all this ‘advancement’ has made hard times better or worse.”

“Well… they didn’t have artificial intelligence in the 1930’s, I don’t think they even had computers.”

She faced me with a look of adoration, reaching up and running her hand through my dirty blond hair. “Personally, I wouldn’t want to live in a time when electricity was a luxury; but if it means no AIs…” She removed her hand and shrugged her shoulders. “Why think that way? I know that getting rid of everything won’t solve problems. We need to make the future better instead of trying to live in the past. It’s just that sometimes I wish all the noise would go away, that’s all. They shouldn’t try to replace people with computers, they’re just tools… Computers, I mean, not people.”

We started walking down the street.

“Didn’t you say something like that when