Witches and Ray-Guns

Jackson and Teresa Martins, father and daughter, and Fox’s friends.

Jackson is modelling the current fashion for the gentleman businessman, an Edwardian-style, high-collared suit with waistcoat and mock-watch fob. Not his usual style, but sometimes you have to fit in at meetings, do the corporate thing, you know? Born in 2006, Jackson was 24 when he founded MarTech Technologies in 2030 and he has been the backbone of its development into the huge conglomerate it is in 2060. He still has a majority shareholding.

The greatest event in his life was the birth of his daughter, Teresa in 2038, and the worst was the death of his wife, Lysandra in 2048. Teresa became the brightest spark in his life and he had some trouble letting her go when she grew up and started taking an interest in the business. He still gets depressed when they have to be apart, and she still lives in her own wing of the huge suite of rooms they share in the MarTech New York arcology.

Teresa, Terri to her friends, takes after her mother, much to Jackson’s relief. She has her mother’s aptitude for psychology, but chose to use it differently. Terri claims her father’s brains got in there too so her career in artificial intelligence seemed to come naturally and Jackson believes she will surpass him in that area of expertise soon enough. Terri scoffs at the suggestion.

I’m not sure about that expression Kit’s wearing. Maybe she’s put pepper in Fox’s coffee or something. Not that she would ever do something like that, of course.

So, Kit is a late beta iteration of the MarTech Kitsune-592 personal assistant AI and she is unique. Teresa Martins had her avatar specifically designed, primarily to wind Fox up. The later versions are essentially the same, but a little different, and less cute. Aside from her clearly obvious talents, including the ability to look totally innocent while spiking coffee, Kit is programmed to act as a very effective secretary and is learning to be a detective. She can also create functional copies of herself to operate simultaneously on different processors. She’s limited to three running copies by the way her code handles synchronisation, but it’s a very useful talent and she makes good use of it.

Of course, what we perceive of Kit is just an avatar. She’s an image projected onto a screen or into the visual cortex of someone with a VR implant. With a VR implant you can also touch her, but the experience is limited since there’s no solid object there to touch.

As an aside, here we see Fox in more casual attire and, of course, with coffee in hand. Cops run on coffee and donuts after all.