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#Writever 10.14 — Sphinx(AI)

The old adage that it took a thief to catch one wasn't entirely wrong, except that I specialized in re-acquiring /missing/ objects and returning them to their proper home. I'd been contacted about a real /A god in the form of Sphinx/ that had been replaced by a counterfeit. An interior photoshoot had shown the mansion contained said priceless object, with the identical perfect cobra tail, falcon wings, and hieroglyphic riddles around the base. A reproduction? The brash flashy owner who always wore green suits and Elton John glasses was suspected of other thefts and boasted it was real. My contractor presented me evidence the police were on the take, so likely real...

Ancient Egyptian buildings looked like this: blocky sandstone, rows of columns. Thanks to only sparse trees and sand, my handler guided me past the surveillance cams, easy when I scrambled along at the roof line. What the edifice lacked was windows.

Which is why I attempted a rear entrance. A door clicked shut behind. An all-over glow lit lines and lines of Egyptian wall paintings. Pharaohs with head-dresses, princesses, gods with cobra and black jackal heads, warriors and chariots.

Lots of spears.

Lots.

I crouched, looking for spears—you never knew with this guy's rep—or cams. I whispered into my mic, "Hacker? Did I upset the anthill?"

Static filled my ear. /Shoot./ Thick walls—cement on mesh construction, like a Faraday cage...

When a door opened, I'd have to charge, fight my way through—

The eye of the sphinx hieroglyphic glowed red. /Here it comes.../

A calm voice spoke. It intoned a riddle. It went on half a minute, finishing with, "Answer my riddle and pass."

It resembled the Riddle of the Sphinx, but was so grandiloquent that I /knew/ I was missing something. I wished Hacker were listening. He could guess, run it through a DB, AI, or something. Translating the stacked hieroglyphs might provide a clue. With this guy, they might...

I approached the sphinx and realized one set of pharaohs wasn't reflecting the diffuse light, but glowed instead. I reached out and tapped what turned out to be a matte screen.

It brightened, showing a command-line interface like Hacker often used; some form of *nix. During my years of training, I'd had to hack computers myself, but hadn't excelled at it—and was out-of-practice. I patted around the wall. No set of hieroglyphs reacted when touched. No keyboard. Looking the sphinx in its red eye, I said, "Grant root."

I cringed. The screen advanced a line. And... The sphinx read the long hairy riddle again. "Answer my riddle and pass."

I sighed, then said, "List processes."

Fifteen lines of program names and stats filled the screen. As the sphinx re-riddled me, I spotted "SphinxAI" on the third line.

Could it be this easy? /No f'ing way./ When it finished speaking, I crossed my fingers and added, "Signal terminate to SphinxAI."

"Access denied."

It re-riddled me.

/Shoot!/ I muttered, "Wonder what AI stack it's based on..."

"SphinxAI is based—"

Heart racing, I crouched reflexively, sure I was being played, looking for any changes in the walls or a door cracking open. I heard nothing, but the walls were a foot thick.

"—on HAL implementations of SherlockDiscovery and SherlockX Query."

Of course, I got re-riddled.

"What scripting language does it support?"

A list scrolled down the screen. The cursor impatiently blinked as I got re-riddled.

I was getting a really bad feeling about this, but I thought back a few years. A minute later I asked to execute the following against object SphinxAI:

SphinxAI.riddle_answer.foreach(function tell(val) { console.log(val) })

It was preposterous... but "Man" displayed, nothing more. The blinking cursor seemed to laugh at me. I, of course, got re-riddled.

The home's owner had a rep for violent behavior and nasty riddles, and I suspected SphinxAI was one such prank. Which meant, if he wanted to allow people inside, this riddle couldn't be that easy, now could it? Of course, he might enjoy torturing guests and the occasional thief.

Riiight.

Assuming it was the Riddle of the Sphinx, what was wrong with the answer, "Man?"

To 20th century? To ancient history? The word had an accepted genderless usage until the feminist era and was inappropriate now.

/Human?/

No, The ancient Egyptians wouldn't have used it. People weren't animals that would bear a species name.

"My answer is people," I said.

The door behind the sphinx popped open; I flattened to the floor, ready to leap, heart racing, instantly sweating.

No security rushed in. I saw a vestibule inside, dimly lit. Empty.

I was being played. I just knew it.

[3 hrs work. Author retains copyright.]

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