Checkmate- A Personal AI Story
The very first piece in an upcoming sci-fi storytelling series by personal.ai. Read or listen along to the story of Allen and his AI as they battle threats from a dangerous cyber corporation, in the year 2030.
*Beep, beep, beep*
Allen, a college student, woke to the sound of his alarm clock going off. Turning over, he checked the time: 7:00AM, October 10th, 2030. A voice chimed in from the speaker on his nightstand.
“Time to get up buddy, we’ve got a lot of work to do!”
Allen groaned, snoozing his alarm and scrunching his eyes closed. However, the attempt to get a few more minutes of sleep was quickly thwarted as the blinds in Allen’s room started to open, letting beams of sunlight march into the room.
The voice continued cheerily, “I may be built from your memories, but unlike you, we personal AIs don’t sleep in!”
Allen spent a long moment staring groggily up at the ceiling, before sighing, rubbing his eyes, and slowly climbing out of bed.
After brushing his teeth and grabbing a cup of coffee from the kitchen, Allen made his way back to his room, stretching briefly before sitting down at his desk. With the blinds now fully open, the once dark room had turned into a luminant workspace, lit up by the rising sun. Allen booted up his desktop computer, and the startup animations on the triple-screen array added their own glow to the room.
“Alright AL, let’s do the rundown,” Allen called out.
“Coming right up,” chimed the voice from the walls. “Alright, just two classes today: Bio at eight and DeFi seminar at one-thirty. You also have a Linear Algebra problem-set due by the end of the day, so don’t forget to finish that up. Also, Emma asked me yesterday if you wanted to meet up today to watch Aidan’s chess match, you down?”
“Of course!” Allen replied. “Where does she want to watch it?”
“Cali’s Cafe downtown at six.”
“Sounds good, can you let her know I’ll be there?”
“Yep, doing it right now.”
“Awesome, thanks.” Allen made a mental note to head downtown before dinner, then turned to face his computer screens, typing in the login credentials for his crypto-wallets.
“Anything weird show up on the security checks?” Allen asked AL.
“Nope, my scripts are showing all clear.”
“Cool.” A stream of numbers and transactions flowed across Allen’s screen as the recent activity for his Nethereum blockchain accounts loaded. Allen had gotten into blockchain technology two years ago after taking a cryptography class that covered the mathematics behind how cryptocurrencies remained secure. Inspired by the room for tech innovation, Allen dove head first into interacting with blockchains and writing his own smart contracts. Then, a year into his crypto journey, Allen had discovered a vulnerability in MegaDAO, an organization that claimed to give users decentralized control over their on-chain investments, but was instead siphoning funds out of users’ assets. In a three-day coding frenzy, Allen worked to develop a smart contract that would redistribute MegaDAO’s assets back to their original users.
When the program was deployed, online forums exploded after seeing the shocking revelation that a contract as popular as MegaDAO’s could still be malicious. While many users sent tokens to Allen’s blockchain address in appreciation for his actions, Allen knew he had also made some powerful enemies by dismantling MegaDAO’s profiteering scheme. He had set up several layers of digital protection to guard his online presence, and he’d also installed a security camera array around his apartment that AL helped monitor. Fortunately, in the seven months since his little crypto-caper with MegaDAO, Allen had faced only one attack, a pesky little Trojan horse virus that he’d been able to stomp out before it made it past his main firewall. Still, Allen and AL did daily security checks, running a series of computer scripts that would catch even just one bit out of place.
Today, Allen scrolled through the activity on his accounts for the past day distractedly, assured by AL’s clean digital sweep. As he planned out a quick rundown of the day in his head, a blip on the screen to his left caught his eye. Turning and scrolling back through the lines of numbers again slowly, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Shaking his head, he chalked it up to his half-asleep mind playing tricks on him. Finishing up his security double-check, Allen logged out of his wallets and grabbed his backpack, getting ready to head to his first lecture.
“Hey AL, I’m heading out!” he called over his shoulder as he opened the front door. “Keep an eye on the place while we’re in class!”
A couple hours later, after finishing Bio lecture, Allen made his way to the library to work on his homework.
“You got all that right?” he asked AL, who was now living on his phone, as he walked across campus.
“Of course,” the AI replied, “I’ll remind you about tRNA once you forget about it next week.”
At the library, Allen found a chair in a corner and prepared to start his homework.
“Every day I regret turning on that setting to not let you help me with my schoolwork,” he told his AI jokingly.
“And every day I rejoice,” came AL’s gleeful reply.
As he worked through his assignment, Allen found himself stuck on a particularly tough problem. He pulled up a connection to his professor’s AI and quickly got a refresher on the concept as they worked through the problem together. Feeling better about the material, Allen was able to finish the rest of the homework without the AI’s help.
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In Allen’s next class, his DeFi seminar, the professor presented a new blockchain attack method that had recently been developed. Allen jotted down notes in his seat in the second row, learning about how the attack exploited a weakness in the newest version of the primary Nethereum smart contract language.
“We’re gonna have to add this to the security check,” Allen typed to AL.
“Mhmm, already working on it,” popped up the reply.
As the professor continued, Allen and AL went back and forth on some ideas for the algorithm, eventually agreeing on a version that they would run some tests on when Allen got back to his main computer at home.
Finished with classes for the day, Allen headed downtown to Cali’s Cafe. Spotting Emma at a booth, he slid in the seat next to her, leaning over to watch the livestream of the Human-AI Chess Championship finals. Six years ago, the company behind personal AIs, Human AI Labs, had started a chess tournament to find new use cases for the personal AIs that had become ubiquitous in everyday life. In the tournament, human players were encouraged to play chess without restriction of the use of their AIs. Some players chose to completely rely on the programs, while others simply asked their AIs for suggestions every couple of moves. The best players, however, were the ones that were able to find a balance between human and AI, leveraging the computational and storage capabilities of their AIs to calculate complex positions, while enhancing the output of the AIs with human intuition. Slowly but surely, the popularity of Human-AI chess grew, and with it so did people’s skills in chess. In 2028, four years after the inception of the tournament, the top Human-AI team at the time, Aidan Tan and his AI, Haddie, beat out chess engine AlphaZero in a thrilling match, dethroning the program that had been unbeatable for nearly a decade. Aidan also happened to go to the same school as Allen and Emma, where the three had met as freshmen. Back in the cafe, Allen and Emma watched with nervous excitement as Aidan Tan and Haddie arrived on-stage at the finals, ready to reclaim their title as best in the world.
A tense two hours later, Allen and Emma leapt out of their seats, high-fiving each other. A voice came from the screen on the table in front of them…
“And that’s checkmate! They had a rough two years following that historic victory against AlphaZero, with a disappointing showing at last year’s tournament, but tonight Aidan and Haddie have done it again! Give it up for your 2030 Human-AI Chess Champions!”
“That was crazy!” Allen exclaimed.
“I know!” Emma agreed. “The engine evaluation was all over the place towards the end, too! I had no idea who was winning until the end.”
“That’s our Aidan, so clutch when it counts,” said Allen, the relief and excitement clear in his voice. Paying the bill and gathering their things, Allen and Emma made their way out of the cafe. As he walked towards the door, Allen bumped into a man who had just come inside, stumbling for a step.
“Woah, sorry, you good?” Allen asked. The man, whose face was hidden under a baseball cap, kept his head down and said nothing as he continued walking into the cafe.
“Weird,” Allen thought as he and Emma stepped out onto the dimly lit sidewalk. Saying goodbye, the two parted ways, and Allen made his way back to his apartment.
After getting back, Allen brewed himself a cup of tea and sat down at the dining table, letting himself relax for a bit. A faint knocking sound from outside distracted him, and he tried to ignore it.
As it persisted, he asked AL, “Hey, can you check out that noise?”
After a couple seconds, the AI replied, “That’s strange… my camera over the back door just stopped working.”
Suddenly, Allen heard footsteps from behind him and turned around, but he was too late. A sharp pain bloomed in the back of his head, and Allen fell to the ground. Through the ringing in his ears, Allen could hear AL shouting…
“Hey, what are you doing?! Get out of my — .” A dark figure walked to stand over Allen, holding AL’s speaker mount that he’d yanked out of the wall. As he crushed the speaker in his hand, Allen’s vision slowly turned to black.
*Beep, beep, beep*
Allen groaned, reaching to turn off his alarm clock. When his searching hand failed to connect with anything, Allen slowly remembered where he was. Barely able to open his eyes through the throbbing headache, he looked around from his vantage point on the kitchen floor, slowly taking in the overturned furniture and open cabinets. “…shit,” was the only thought that he could come up with.
“Allen! Thank god you’re awake,” AL’s voice buzzed weakly from Allen’s bedroom down the hall.
“I had to use your alarm clock to try to wake you up. I’ve already called 911, the police and an ambulance are on the way.”
“What… happened,” mumbled Allen.
“I don’t know. Someone got in. They cut the cameras and ransacked the place. They got your backpack, so your laptop is gone. They also tried to take the main PC, but I was able to lock it down and wipe it before they unplugged it. The machine is still gone, though.”
“Shit,” Allen said, aloud this time.
“Just rest for now. The authorities are coming, they’ll take care of you. Just rest.” Even AL, normally so calm, was audibly shaken.
“The cameras were only out for a couple minutes, I was able to catch some footage of the attacker. Don’t worry, I will wait for the intruder’s facial recognition to finish processing and we’ll find out what happened. Just rest for now, everything will be alright. Just rest.”
As AL spoke, Allen could hear sirens slowly growing louder in the distance. Sighing, Allen let his head rest back against the floor and closed his eyes. “Guess you were right this morning, AL. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he sighed, slowly falling back into unconsciousness.
{TO BE CONTINUED…}
Author’s Note
About the story- This story first came to be during a writing workshop that asked our team to explore depths of what a personal AI means to us. In it, I wanted to paint a picture of what my life would be like with a Personal AI and how I would interact with it in various areas of my life. As a programmer, I’m constantly immersed in the digital world, and I felt that a Personal AI would be a great digital companion, allowing me to connect and interact with the internet in a much more natural way. As a student, I see Personal AI as an assistant in my learning process, offering hints but not the answer, and allowing me to understand better my own thinking process. Finally, as a human, I see Personal AI as a teammate and as an extension of myself. Built from my memories, it learns and grows with me, it extends the horizon of what is possible, and it enhances the way that I experience the world. - Alan Zhu
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