Page 40 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Extrapolator Murders

performs to specifications and gives him a short list of names, all
employees of Neurespionics. Now O’Clocker is almost ready to
make an arrest. He reverts to much older tactics, giving those on
the list the third degree: bullying them, taking apart their homes and
seizing their computers. One of the software engineers then kills
himself—or herself, of course! That person, an unstable oddball
with a bizarre theory about advancing surveillance through the
implantation of microchips at birth, seems to fill the bill for the
serial killer. Case closed. Or is it?”
“I’d say it is,” said Fred, “if your intrepid investigator can dig out
one little fact. That suicide’s idea is not that far removed from the
questionable path already being taken by neuroscience. What if the
suicide foresees that his crackpot idea will be taken seriously by one
of the competitors, suffers remorse for having created it—like the
atomic scientists at Alamogordo—and decides to set back that
development by eliminating those of his peers who would soon be
getting onboard with it? He doesn’t want to hurt himself or anyone
where he works, but that anomaly leads the police to his door, puts
him on the spot and then he takes the easy way out.”
“Possibly,” replied Izzy. “What about the Extrapolator’s
blindness to the whole thing?”
“You said they were all excellent hackers.”
Perversity Tinderstack raised her hand in pro forma politeness as
she said, “Even so, given the proprietary nature of software and the
pains people take to keep it secure, I think Opticracy itself would
harbor the criminal. Maybe the company is in financial trouble and
needs to keep the competition at bay while it tries to corner the
market on its next iteration of the Extrapolator. That would explain
why no one at Neurespionics was touched—they aren’t a threat.”
“No, the problem with that,” interjected Brad, “is that Opticracy
has nothing to gain and everything to lose by the very public
exposure of its inability to identify, much less predict, the serial
killer, ex post facto or in real time. Only one of their potentially
successful competitors would satisfy the age-old question, cui bono?
In that case the company with the least important victim—and the
most cold-blooded executives—is the guilty party.”

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