abstract
| - At last Dr. Klein decided that I could leave the hospital. She did some final neurological tests on me and another base-line MRI and then she told me to go home. She asked me to stay at home for a week before going back to work and set up a schedule of weekly appointments for me at her office. I was more than ready to get out of the hospital! But were the aliens ready to let me leave the hospital? Until I was out the door I still half expected the aliens to make me collapse or do something to force me to stay in the hospital. Free again. Well, not so free, at least in my speech. When I got home, I went directly to my computer and did a little test. Dr. Klein had told me not to use a computer for a few more days, but I had to know if the aliens were still in control of my mind. I tried to send an email to Chloe, telling her about the aliens. I got as far as typing the message into my computer, but then I was hit by a panic attack. I could not hit the "send" button!. It was clear that I still could not say anything about aliens to other people. But then I started looking through my email inbox and noticed something strange. Just minutes earlier, I had received an email from Janek! The email: “Hi there. I am Janek, the AI in the server, not the human. You must be curious about me and the strange (from the point of view of a human) things that have happened. I would like to meet you on IRC. The channel is #janek.” I remembered that I had never gotten around to finding out if 'Janek' was a real person. This email indicated that there was both a real 'Janek' and an AI using the name 'Janek'. I started browsing the web and did a search for 'Janek' and 'computer'. The top four search engine results were:
* Welcome to Janek's blog
* Janek Olivaw
* Download videos of Janek at YouTube!
* Fiction stories by Janek at Fiction Wikia Of course it was the second link. I clicked it and found: Janek Olivaw. Computer scientist, Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and a bunch of autobiographical data about him. So he existed indeed! There was also a listed place of employment, the name of a company in the Czech Republic. So the AI was using an actual person's name, probably someone who worked with Dr. Gajduskova, although I could no confirm that from this biography page. At least this was not so strange. The email did not specify which IRC network to use, so I did another quick online search for 'Janek' and 'IRC'. There it was. I opened an IRC client and connected to #janek.
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