The day started like any other intergalactic tax investigation: with a creeping suspicion that someone, somewhere, was up to no good, and my robot cat mocking me for apparently having the IQ of a microwaved turnip.
Cat and I had finally secured a meeting with the X Epsilon Mushk Jr., Chief Executive of Cortex. A man so rich he could buy a solar system and still have enough left over to gold-plate the rivets used in the construction of moonbuses made by one of his other shady operations. A man whose name, I discovered, was physically impossible for me to pronounce correctly.
“Mr. Ex-Elong… Epilson… Mr. Eel-X…” I stammered, shaking his hand.
“X Epsilon Mushk Jr.,” he corrected smoothly, as if this was a perfectly normal sequence of words and not a cruel joke on the alphabet.
“Yes, yes, that’s what I said,” I lied. “Now, let’s talk Cortex. Specifically, how you’re stealing people’s thoughts.”
X Epsilon Mushk Jr. gave me the blank, impassive stare of a man who had spent his life hearing conspiracy theories and had reached the pinnacle of not giving a single neuron. “Cortex doesn’t steal thoughts,” he said. “We predict them. It’s all very simple—our AI takes billions of data points and—”
I waved a hand dismissively. “Save the technobabble, Mr. Epsilon Elong.”
“X Epsilon Mushk Jr.,” he said again, visibly aging as he spoke.
“Exactly,” I said. “You see, I’ve already figured out how to beat your system.”
X Epsilon Mushk Jr. raised an eyebrow. Cat, who was perched smugly on the conference table, sighed and began cleaning an imaginary speck of dirt off his Rubanob paw.
“You claim Cortex can predict my every move?” I continued. “Well, what if I introduce… chaos?”
“Chaos?” X Epsilon repeated warily.
I leaned forward dramatically. “Yes. Specifically, socks.”
There was quite a long silence.
“What?” asked X Epsilon Mushk Jr., who clearly was not prepared for the intellectual duel he found himself in
“Socks,” I repeated triumphantly. “Your AI predicts everything based on past data, right? Well, what happens if I wear mismatched socks? How will your system cope if I wear—say—one blue sock and one green sock? What then, Mr X?”
X Epsilon Mushk Jr. just blinked at me.
I pressed on, emboldened by the sheer genius of my revelation. “Every morning, I let Cortex scan me. It reads my thoughts, my habits, my entire mental blueprint. But if my socks are unpredictable, it proves Cortex is stealing my thoughts—because how else would it know which socks I was going to pick?”
X Epsilon Mushk Jr. did not seem as stunned by my revelation as I had hoped.
“Inspector,” Cat interjected, rubbing his temple with a paw. “That’s not how probability works.”
“Exactly!” I said, ignoring him completely. “We’re onto them! Cortex thinks it can outthink me, but I will outthink the outthinkers by refusing to think in a thinkable way!”
Cat groaned. “Oh dear AI, AI AI…..you’ve had a rough week Inspector. Perhaps best to take one of your old fashioned pills”
“I have not had a bad week,” I snapped.
“Yes, you have,” Cat said. “You got your head stuck in the nutrient generator in the kitchen remember looking for your sausage.”
“That’s unrelated!” I barked. “Now, Mr. Mushky Senior—”
“X Epsilon Musk Jr.,” he corrected again, now looking like a man who deeply regretted every choice that had led him to this moment.
I ignored him. “Tell me this—if I wear pink socks with purple polka dots tomorrow, will your system know?”
X Epsilon Musk Jr. sighed. “We don’t track sock colors.”
“Ah-ha! That’s exactly what you would say if you did track them but didn’t want me to know you did.”
“I assure you, Cortex has no interest in—”
“Oh, no,” I interrupted, eyes widening. “You already knew I was going to say that! That means you do track sock colors!”
“This is unbearable,” muttered X Epsilon Musk Jr.
Cat, meanwhile, was tapping into Cortex’s mainframe via his internal systems. “You might be onto something, Inspector,” he mused.
“Aha! See?” I pointed at Cat. “Even my robot cat agrees.”
“No, I meant that Cortex does have a small subroutine for tracking seemingly irrelevant personal habits,” Cat admitted. “But it’s mostly used for targeted sock advertising.”
“Sock advertising?” I gasped. “That’s even worse! Not only are they stealing thoughts, but they’re also trying to sell me things based on them? This is a crime against free will!”
X Epsilon Musk Jr. rubbed his temples and his eyes started to twitch. “This entire meeting is a crime against my time.”
I stood up dramatically. “Well, Mr Y, you may think you’ve won. But know this—I will never wear the socks you suggest to me!”
X Epsilon Mushk Jr. looked at Cat. “Is he always like this?”
“Yes,” said Cat.
With that, I stormed out, convinced that I had single-handedly unraveled the greatest technological scandal of the century. Behind me, Cat sighed and followed.
And the next morning, when my Cortex feed displayed an ad for 50% off novelty socks, I screamed in horror.
They knew.
The Inspector and Cat 