Ed had got up in the midst of a recalcitrant sentence, that he was trying to beat into submission. If it wouldn’t give in, he’d have to resort to two — twice the originality. In the age of endless iterations, slice after slice of different AI mixture of the same, originality had value. Saying things differently about maintaining pre-electric vehicles was his trade. People still paid for originality that wasn’t just a melange of previous works: and his were certified as that. They still had to be good and readable, not just original. Coffee might help.

The trouble was, with the Large Language Models dredging their way through and using – and re-using, everything it was difficult not to sound like them. At least people still paid for art. It could have been worse. His brother — a programmer — had found the market was perfectly happy to pay for spliced-together previous work. Sometimes, his brother said, they were dredging up bits which had a thousand other intents and legacy elements just to get the bit they needed. It worked. They didn’t care, and they didn’t need him.

That was why Lee had — after his last redundancy, simply packed his life up and moved to his cabin in the mountains, tossing his entire electronic life out with it. Ed had taken his wife and the kids to visit last winter… Marina had lasted a whole day. I mean they were relative recluses, but that was ridiculous. You couldn’t call a cab. There was no robot to do the dishes or clean the floors.

He was still thinking about that, not his need for originality, when he got back to his desk. It took him a few seconds to realize it wasn’t his familiar home screen.

LOG IN REQUIRED read the screen.

Log in? He hadn’t logged in for… years. It must be some update. The system knew him. Knew his biometrics.

He growled and clicked on the input rectangle.

TYPE USERNAME

It offered him half a dozen variants of his own name. He blinked. Some of those must go back to before the AI age! He had no idea which one was current… so he worked through them. Each produced a next screen, with asterixed out passwords.

And none of them got him back into the system.

At this point Marina came in from the garden looking very angry. “My vizzy cut off. I bent my head forward to pull out a weed and it is demanding I log in. I tried calling the service-number but it is not answering. What do I do now?”

Ed took a deep breath.

“Legacy code.”

“What?”

“Get the kids. The nanny-bot will be demanding log in. We have to go, and go fast.”

“Where?”

“My brother’s place. It’ll take a while for panic to set in, and a lot longer to fix this.” ‘If ever’ a part of his mind said.

“What? There? It’s horrid, cut off from everything. Why…?

“Just do it, Marina. Please. I’ll explain as soon as we’re safe. Please. For the kids. For us.”

“Why can’t you do it? I just…”

“Because I am getting my gun, what food I can, and getting gramps’s old truck going. We need to move. Fast! NOW!”

She looked at him, suddenly afraid, but she did go. And she had the two girls when he pulled the hiccuping F-100 Dentside to a stop at the door. It was running a little unevenly, but he knew it would be fine once it warmed up.

“Must we go in that old thing?” demanded his wife.

“Yes. Because it will go. The E-7000 won’t. It’ll ask you to log in.”

She got the girls into the bench seat. “I hate this old banger.”

“It goes. That’ll be good, soon.”

She was silenced by his tone. Eventually, as they began nosing their way towards the mountains — he hoped he could remember the way, without auto-drive — she asked: “Is it a war?”

He was concentrating – steering around stopped vehicles, and a handful gesticulating people on highway. It would be good to be off that, soon.

“No.”

The offramp was blocked with stopped cars. Fortunately, the old F-100 had plenty of clearance and grunt for the berm. From here on it would be smaller roads and fewer people.

“What has happened, Ed? Tell me?” she begged. “And must you drive so fast. We’re going to get such a fine for you going off the road like that. You chewed up the berm. They probably won’t let you self-drive again.”

“We probably won’t anyway. No one will.”

“What’s happening?” she asked again. The kids, thank heavens, were still too awestruck and terrified, to be more than wide-eyed and silent.

“Lee told me. But I just didn’t get it.”

“Is it a Carrington Event? Or ChiComs?” she asked.

“No. It’s just borrowed code. Everything runs off old code, spliced together by AI-coding systems. They’d take whole chunks to do one function they needed. And then others borrowed that chunk. There’d be lots of junk-code no knew what did and nobody cared. But the bit that did something was useful, so it got spliced into the next and the next, mixed in. AI shares code.”

“And that means what?”

“Something activated the ‘junk’. It wants you to log in. Now they all want it.”

(guess who had WordPress do this to him, after ?10 years this morning. I still had the password in my password book – not on computer — which did not)