Page 38 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Extrapolator Murders

“It soon becomes evident to the officer assigned to the case,
Inspector O’Clocker, that the killings reveal a very clear pattern,
even to intellectually-challenged public servants. All the victims are
researchers in AI, employed in various high-tech companies
clustered around a big university in that city—including Opticracy.
Their deaths are easily mistaken as accidental—until the common
occupation and temporal proximity raise the possibility of
deliberation and premeditation to a clear probability of murder. The
human investigators, looking into the milieu of these scientists and
engineers, soon uncover a hotbed of cutthroat competition and
long-standing grudges and rivalries. The list of suspects grows to a
respectable size, given the confines of a short story, and the reader
is in the familiar territory of a whodunit. Now, I ask you, fellow
members of Maxwell’s Daemons: whodunit? And why?”
“Wait a minute.” Rutger Schlager threw up his hands in dismay.
“We’re not going to figure this out based on what you’ve given us
as clues. And why should we? What is really the issue here?”
“Okay, okay. I’m new to this, so bear with me. My problem is
how many clues to dole out to the reader. Too many, and there’s no
point in it; too few, and I’m cheating them. Given that this is going
to be rather compressed—no more than 7500 words—I want to
know which bits of relevant information to reveal, and in what
order. To do this, I will, course, interleave useful facts with red
herrings and false leads, but I can’t have a lot of them. So, put
yourself in the gumshoes of Inspector O’Clocker and tell me what
you want to know first.”
“Ah, I see.” Leith Mauker was certain of his line of attack. “You
have only hinted at the circumstances of the murders. Why should
anyone figure out that these weren’t death by misadventure or acts
of God? If you’ve got a sophisticated killer who isn’t on an ego trip,
he or she wouldn’t leave any obvious indication of their
malevolence.”
“Good point. And that should precede anything to do with
specific suspects. I know that. So I will reveal the one tiny mistake
all criminals are supposed to make that will give them away. In this
case it will be the crash of a self-driving car: the manufacturer looks

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