Crossroads—2026-07-29 (Patreon)

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OI, MATE by Rebecca Charm

I have mixed feelings about how things are going for Paul and me here in South Padre Island. On one hand, we’re staying in a luxury condo overlooking the Gulf. On the other hand, the work I’m supposed to be doing here has yielded no results.

Until a few minutes ago.

I left my laptop on the table and went back to the condo briefly. When I got back, Paul looked like a kid who had broken his mom’s prized orchid.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He pointed at my screen. “It’s thinking.”

I looked at the shell application Evelyn had created to communicate with all the AI systems associated with Alderwick’s charity projects. For the first time since I arrived, there was an indication that one of the systems had received the prompt.

The word “Thinking…” blinked where the response should have appeared.

“What happened?” I asked Paul.

“Your cron job had finished. The computer was just sitting idle.”

I had written an automation to send authenticated prompts to the AI systems through Evelyn’s shell. I looked at the prompts sent to the systems. Of the last ten on the screen, nine were from my automation.

“You wrote the last one by hand…” I said.

Just then, the blinking “Thinking…” stopped.

“Sorry if I broke something,” Paul replied. “I was just having a little fun.”

I read Paul’s prompt out loud. “Oi, mate… stop bloody hallucinating. We need you to help run the project.”

Paul seemed both proud and embarrassed. “I figured it would ignore me like it ignored everything else, and you'd get a laugh when you came back.”

“It would have been funny,” I said, “if it hadn’t gone through. Now we need to figure out what part of your message it listened to.”

“Probably just a coincidence,” Paul replied. “I bet it’s your automated queries starting to change things.”

I nodded. “Perhaps. But I’m definitely telling Evelyn.”

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