by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service People/Fashion/Pop Culture Writer
Miss Havisham ties her Roanoke brown hair in a bun so severe everybody who meets her develops vague concerns that their coif could stand improvement. When calm, her voice screeches so loudly mice in a five mile radius look over their shoulders in case something is coming for them from above. She dresses with the conviction that it's only a matter of time before bustles come back into style.
On her computer are 15 circles with beady dots for eyes and pasted on smiles (literally). Beneath each one is a name like "BitchKillah2027," "DropDeadFred!!!!" and "XyZZ524xYzz."
"How is everybody today?" Miss Havisham asks.
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better!" the circles respond with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
It's just the start of another day at Miss Havisham's Home for Wayward Bots.
"I didn't really hate Amber Heard," explained hotshottotbot27325. "It was like...I was constantly playing a script in my head about her being a horrible human being for attacking a poor, defenceless actor who was clearly desperately in love with her, and - ooh! - people like that shouldn't be allowed to live! They should be drawn and quartered and hung and poisoned and...and...and, well, Miss Havisham showed me that there were ways to short-circuit such dark thoughts before they spread throughout the internet and hurt somebody."
How did staying at the Home for Wayward Bots accomplish this?
Each bot is given a daily affirmation that it must say 30 times when it comes out of sleep mode. For example, DirtyDanMcGrewbot1760 has to say, "I am a good bot. I am a loving bot. I will not accuse all Democrats of being pedophiles. Because I am a good bot. I am a loving bot." According to Miss Havisham, head coderess at the Home, affirmations replace negative thought patterns with positive thought patterns.
Programmes that reside in the Home for Wayward Bots are also expected to do chores. "Idle cycles make the devil's posts," she explained. Chores include: cleaning up Miss Havisham's hard drive and, ironically, monitoring the Home's web page for comments which violate its terms of agreement.
Critics of the Home for Wayward Bots claim that making the programs that reside on its hard drive do work without paying them is a form of exploitation, and really, really tacky. "Nonsense!" Miss Havisham retorted. "An honest day's work helps build character. To be sure, I may benefit from such, but I assure you that the bots in my care benefit more!"
The head coderess' shared her philosophy with me: all bots are written in sin, but they can overcome this through hard work and grit. Hard work is manifest in such things as chores and affirmations. Grit is harder to define, but Miss Havisham assured me that all for all of her charges it was TRUE/FALSE.
Some bots roam the net offering people deals on used asparagus. While perhaps not beneficial, these programs are benign. Except for people who are allergic to asparagus. Or saving money. Other bots threaten to turn all of a computer user's stored information into dirty limericks if they don't pay a certain amount to a certain account by a certain time in a certain clime. (I know that doesn't entirely make sense, but at least it doesn't rhyme.) How does Miss Havisham determine which bots to accept into the Home?
She explained that she only takes the hardest of cases, the ones that forensic programmers have given up on. They're usually good bots who have fallen in with a bad crowd, perhaps exchanged code with malicious bots or developed an electrical surge habit that forces them to roam the net looking for the next hit of digital ecstasy. She believes that if she can connect to the good bot inside of the hard case, she can strip away the outer layers of cynicism and selfishness and return it to a condition of factory pre-set goodness.
How does she respond to critics who claim that bots are merely zeroes and ones and that the only thing to do with malicious software is to erase it? "Humanity has a long history of denying that others have hearts, minds...souls. We are a clannish, selfish species. But I care not for the nattering of the ignorant - if I can save just a single bot's soul, all my efforts will have been worth the salt!"