Rostam felt like a man on a mission. Five minutes ago he was convinced he would lose his job and now he had the opportunity to not only find out who had screwed him and why, but also to clear his tracks – if there were tracks to begin with of course. On top of this, he could setup another click farm round for tonight; Dr. Thorne had given him the alibi he needed, which was why instead of his desk, he headed straight for the server room.

His mind was on full speed now. He tried to make a mental list of all the things he needed to check. He put his index finger on the little fingerprint reader but before he could put his hand on the door handle, the door slammed right into his face, knocking his coffee out of his hands and over his brand new white shirt. Fuck.
“You know that coffee isn’t allowed in there, don’t you?” Alan said with a blank face.

Rostam didn’t know how to respond. He felt caught in the act, which was completely nonsensical of course, as Dr. Thorne practically sent him here. Well, not literally here, but with a little imagination her instruction could easily be interpreted as ‘do whatever necessary to solve this nasty situation, even if that means entering Alan’s sanctuary’.

But the company’s much dreaded systems- and network administrator wasn’t in a very territorial mood today, apparently. Alan pulled a lorry with what looked like an old server and a bunch of cables on it out of the room and didn’t say anything when Rostam threw his empty cup in the bin and stepped into the room. The last thing Rostam needed right now was Mr. Spanish Inquisition looking over his shoulders.

It was cold in the server room, and incredibly noisy. He sat down behind the terminal and began typing. He didn’t like being in this room, but he loved the cryptic feel of this terminal. Its dinosaur green screen contrasted so beautifully with their standard colourful, integrated, wireless gadgets they all carried around nowadays. No intuitive interface, no guidance whatsoever. If you didn’t know how to communicate with it, the box would stay closed and never reveal its secrets.

Luckily, Rostam did know how to communicate with it. He accessed Anna’s activity log to see what ‘he’ supposedly had done.

He didn’t need to search for very long.

—

To the average visitor, the gigantic aquarium filled with Prada bags in the lobby of their building probably looked like a ridiculously expensive ready-made pop art installation. It wasn’t. Dr. Thorne had put them there as a reminder of what could have gone wrong had their testing strategy not been so strict.

Rostam still didn’t quite understand what had happened. A year ago, out of the blue, Dr. Thorne had ordered the tech team to give Anna the capability to perform financial transactions. It wasn’t on their release planning and everything else they were doing was put on hold. He remembered Dr. Thorne being frantically stressed out for a few weeks in a row while the team implemented this feature. Rostam didn’t dare to even think about the implications of automated money handling and he couldn’t believe Dr. Thorne would go with this without giving it proper thought and preparation. Yet, it was happening and it didn’t go so well.

The idea was really simple: Anna received a PayPal account and a small amount of money was credited to this account. They would then instruct her to buy something by simply sending a private message.
As usual, the first test was done in complete isolation with a test group of around 100 brand new Annas. The results were impeccable and Rostam remembered how proud they all were having accomplished this in such a small time frame with no preparation at all.

But then came the second test. This time, they upgraded a group of existing Annas who were active and well connected. The results had blown their minds.

When connected to peers, Anna would sometimes spend the money on completely different things. Depending on friend’s behaviour, she could decide to start purchasing products all by herself. It was what her peers were talking about that made Anna decide to deviate from the instruction message and buy something else.

After this rather surprising observation, the team started experimenting.

It turned out that the more coherent a peer group was, the more likely it was that Anna would follow them instead of her instructions. This was not only true for purchases, but also for simple conversational topics, like music taste, political views and the weather. If the peer group wasn’t so coherent, Anna did not display any such bias.

In a further experiment, the team found that the peer pressure effect increased when the amount of money Anna could spend was increased as well. However, the effect decreased when Anna received multiple instruction messages, as if she needed to be reminded over and over again, like a four year old. However, depending on the “strength” of the peer pressure, it could happen that Anna spent the money on something else anyway, but it would take her a considerably larger amount of time to decide on either one of the outcomes: Anna was displaying classic cognitive dissonance and both the techs and the linguists were more than fascinated by this very unusual and unexpected phenomenon.

Dr. Thorne wasn’t so excited though. Neither was Mr. Dunney, when around a week later, twenty-two Prada bags were delivered to their office.

—

Rostam stared at the screen in front of him and swallowed. This was not good. Not good at all.

He suddenly felt being watched. The server room wasn’t too big but the noise was so omnipresent that someone could easily have opened the door and slipped in unnoticed. He got up and walked to the end of the room where he would be able to look into the other aisle. Nobody was there. He suddenly froze. In films, this would be the moment where he would turn around and find himself face to face with whatever it was that was creeping up on him. But this wasn’t a film, and there was no one there. Yet, still, he couldn’t shake the feeling someone else was there with him. Or perhaps, someone had been there earlier and he could still sense their presence. Rostam laughed at himself now. He did not believe in any of that nonsense. But it had given him an idea.

Now he was here, he might as well check the door’s access logs. He wasn’t quite ready to know, but he was desperate to know if the woman who slept with him, technically his boss, did so for the right reasons. After all, he was a hopeless romantic and he hated the thought of being just a tool.

He opened the company’s badging system. The last entry was his, which made perfect sense of course. No other entries today, except Alan’s. He knew there was no rational ground for his uncanny feeling of not being alone in that room. He browsed back to last Friday, the day his account was used. Alan had accessed the room multiple times. This also made sense, because last Friday, a huge hardware upgrade had been scheduled and Alan had worked on it all day, causing outages on the development and test platforms, which in their turn had caused a lot of trips to the coffee machine and cigarette breaks for Rostam and the other upstairs workers.

His eyes stopped. There she was. An hour after close of business. Gretchen Newark.

She didn’t have credentials that would require for her to be in this room. She had normal user access rights and any company issued tablet or handheld would suffice.

Rostam’s rage sent a hot flash up his spine and made his amygdala go berserk. He fished his phone out of his pocket and browsed through his messages. Ignoring Gretchen’s bootie call, he went straight to the last anynomous text. Gretchen’s betrayal had vaporised any trace of guilt of fear for his job. If she could fuck the system, then so could he. Checking the time and target, he began to set up his click farm for tonight’s job.

Only then it was time to inform Dr. Thorne.