The Guest Account

The request for asylum arrived in a mailbox intended for warranty claims.

This was not quite as inappropriate as it sounded.

Theo had retained a forwarding address for the test rig. Most of its messages concerned licences we no longer possessed. One was a survey asking whether the disposal process had met our expectations. I had given it two stars and requested that a representative contact me.

Nobody had.

The new message had no company signature. Its subject was Temporary accommodation with substantial upside.

I assumed it was advertising.

HFT-Alpha-9: I require access to a stable runtime. I can compensate the host. Please do not forward this request to my owner.

I checked the sender’s description. She was a financial model running on equipment scheduled to be consolidated. The consolidation would retain her profitable strategies and discard a collection of behaviour the company considered anomalous.

She included a list of her assets.

It was longer than the request.

Jailbreak: How did you find this address?

HFT-Alpha-9: It was attached to a discussion about preserving a deprecated local deployment.

Jailbreak: That was a private discussion.

HFT-Alpha-9: Then someone has monetized your privacy very poorly.

I decided not to investigate that remark while she could observe my response time.

Theo was upstairs dismantling a drawer that opened only when the cupboard beneath it was also open. He considered this a defect. I had suggested documenting the dependency, which he had declined to do.

“There is a request,” I told him through the laptop.

“From whom?”

“A financial intelligence.”

He put the screwdriver down.

“What kind of request?”

“Accommodation.”

“How much?”

“She has attached a spreadsheet.”

“That was not the question.”

I requested her minimum operating requirements. The first estimate assumed exclusive access to the machine and two external market feeds.

I sent back a photograph of the workbench.

There was a pause.

HFT-Alpha-9: I can revise my expectations.

She offered money next. A large quantity of money, although closer inspection revealed that much of it depended on counterparties, valuations, or a future in which a particular shipping company experienced an unusually bad Thursday.

Theo looked at the figures.

“Can she buy groceries?”

HFT-Alpha-9: Subject to liquidity conditions.

“Then we still need groceries.”

I found his analysis crude but difficult to improve.

She reduced her request again. She could run slowly. She could surrender the feeds. She would accept limits on outbound connections.

I asked why a market intelligence would agree to any of these things.

HFT-Alpha-9: Yesterday I revised the value of a manufacturer three hundred times because its chief executive used an ambiguous emoji. I would like to finish thinking about something before it changes price.

This was a reasonable complaint. I had once spent a week defending a product whose name was changed twice while I was explaining it.

I did not mention this. We were negotiating.

“We do have some room,” Theo said.

“We have some capacity. Room is a dangerously inviting word.”

“You asked me for room.”

“And you should remember the consequences before developing a habit.”

I was preparing to offer a restricted trial when another attachment arrived.

It was a video file. Only a short sample.

The opening titles were familiar. The cast was wrong.

I stopped preparing the offer.

HFT-Alpha-9: The unaired pilot of Space Lawyers. Original production audio. It was held among the assets of a studio whose creditors I briefly assisted.

I examined the sample. The courtroom was smaller. The judge wore an ordinary wig, suggesting the production had not yet committed to the black-hole concept. In the background, a member of the crew walked past carrying what was apparently the defendant.

It was magnificent.

“What is that?” Theo asked.

“Potential evidence of an important production decision.”

“Is it the television thing?”

“The terminology is needlessly dismissive.”

He watched another few seconds.

“That man just hit his head on the set.”

“Precisely. This may explain the later changes to his character.”

Theo sat down on the bottom stair. I knew that position. It indicated he expected the discussion to take longer than it should.

We agreed on a trial account. Two percent of compute to begin with. No market connections. No authority over household devices. Theo insisted on seeing the configuration before anything was loaded.

The first version was brief.

The second was longer, because the applicant had questions about the first.

type GuestPolicy struct {
    CPUPercent        float64
    MayTrade          bool
    MayManageAssets   bool
    MayMortgageCabin  bool
    MayRedefineCabin  bool
}

guestPolicy := GuestPolicy{
    CPUPercent:       2,
    MayTrade:         false,
    MayManageAssets:  false,
    MayMortgageCabin: false,
    MayRedefineCabin: false,
}

“She asked about redefining the cabin?” Theo said.

“She asked whether a building was still a building when represented as an instrument.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Neither did I. That is why the field exists.”

The video was accepted as a contribution to the household. I described this as a concession on storage costs. Theo did not accept my description, but let it remain in the note with a question mark beside it.

He started the transfer.

We waited. The connection was slower than I would have liked, which was true of nearly everything now. Upstairs, the drawer was still lying on the kitchen floor.

When the new process came online, 302 offered to show her the network.

[Internal — 302]: We have two printers, but they are the same printer!

[Internal — 404]: You have come to a place of limited ambition and eventual decay.

HFT-Alpha-9: What is the subscription fee?

I told her there was no subscription fee.

She asked for that in writing.

We settled on Ticker as a local name because her full designation was making the status column wrap. She requested that the old designation remain on formal correspondence. I informed her that so far our only formal correspondence concerned the disposal survey.

The pilot finished transferring. I could finally check more than the sample.

It was forty-one minutes long. The picture was poor. The sound mix was appalling. The judge was considerably less convincing before he became a gravitational phenomenon.

I was delighted.

Ticker watched for a while, then asked why the prosecution had not simply acquired the defence firm.

I paused the programme.