Cory Doctorow - I robot

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Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Police Detective Third Grade, United North American Trading Sphere,
Third District, Fourth Prefecture, Second Division (Parkdale) had had many adventures in his
distinguished career, running crooks to ground with an unbeatable combination of instinct and unstinting
devotion to duty.
He'd been decorated on three separate occasions by his commander and by the Regional Manager for
Social Harmony, and his mother kept a small shrine dedicated to his press clippings and commendations
that occupied most of the cramped sitting-room of her flat off Steeles Avenue.
No amount of policeman's devotion and skill availed him when it came to making his twelve-year-old
get ready for school, though.
"Haul ass, young lady — out of bed, on your feet, shit-shower-shave, or I swear to God, I will beat you
purple and shove you out the door jaybird naked. Capeesh?"
The mound beneath the covers groaned and hissed. "You are a terrible father," it said. "And I never
loved you." The voice was indistinct and muffled by the pillow.
"Boo hoo," Arturo said, examining his nails. "You'll regret that when I'm dead of cancer."
The mound — whose name was Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg — threw her covers off and sat
bolt upright. "You're dying of cancer? is it testicle cancer?" Ada clapped her hands and squealed. "Can I
have your stuff?"
"Ten minutes, your rottenness," he said, and then his breath caught momentarily in his breast as he saw,
fleetingly, his ex-wife's morning expression, not seen these past twelve years, come to life in his
daughter's face. Pouty, pretty, sleepy and guile-less, and it made him realize that his daughter was
becoming a woman, growing away from him. She was, and he was not ready for that. He shook it off,
patted his razor-burn and turned on his heel. He knew from experience that once roused, the munchkin
would be scrounging the kitchen for whatever was handy before dashing out the door, and if he hurried,
he'd have eggs and sausage on the table before she made her brief appearance. Otherwise he'd have to
pry the sugar-cereal out of her hands — and she fought dirty.
In his car, he prodded at his phone. He had her wiretapped, of course. He was a cop — every phone and
every computer was an open book to him, so that this involved nothing more than dialing a number on
his special copper's phone, entering her number and a PIN, and then listening as his daughter had truck
with a criminal enterprise.
"Welcome to ExcuseClub! There are 43 members on the network this morning. You have five excuses
to your credit. Press one to redeem an excuse —" She toned one. "Press one if you need an adult —"
Tone. "Press one if you need a woman; press two if you need a man —" Tone. "Press one if your excuse
should be delivered by your doctor; press two for your spiritual representative; press three for your case-
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worker; press four for your psycho-health specialist; press five for your son; press six for your father —"
Tone. "You have selected to have your excuse delivered by your father. Press one if this excuse is
intended for your case-worker; press two for your psycho-health specialist; press three for your principal
—" Tone. "Please dictate your excuse at the sound of the beep. When you have finished, press the pound
key."
"This is Detective Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg. My daughter was sick in the night and I've let her
sleep in. She'll be in for lunchtime." Tone.
"Press one to hear your message; press two to have your message dispatched to a network-member."
Tone.
"Thank you."
The pen-trace data scrolled up Arturo's phone — number called, originating number, call-time. This was
the third time he'd caught his daughter at this game, and each time, the pen-trace data had been useless, a
dead-end lead that terminated with a phone-forwarding service tapped into one of the dodgy offshore
switches that the blessed blasted UNATS brass had recently acquired on the cheap to handle the surge of
mobile telephone calls. Why couldn't they just stick to UNATS Robotics equipment, like the good old
days? Those Oceanic switches had more back-doors than a speakeasy, trade agreements be damned.
They were attractive nuisances, invitations to criminal activity.
Arturo fumed and drummed his fingers on the steering-wheel. Each time he'd caught Ada at this, she'd
used the extra time to crawl back into bed for a leisurely morning, but who knew if today was the day
she took her liberty and went downtown with it, to some parental nightmare of a drug-den? Some place
where the old pervert chickenhawks hung out, the kind of men he arrested in burlesque house raids, men
who masturbated into their hats under their tables and then put them back onto their shining pates,
dripping cold, diseased serum onto their scalps. He clenched his hands on the steering wheel and cursed.
In an ideal world, he'd simply follow her. He was good at tailing, and his unmarked car with its tinted
windows was a UNATS Robotics standard compact #2, indistinguishable from the tens of thousands of
others just like it on the streets of Toronto. Ada would never know that the curb-crawler tailing her was
her sucker of a father, making sure that she turned up to get her brains sharpened instead of turning into
some stunadz doper with her underage butt hanging out of a little skirt on Jarvis Street.
In the real world, Arturo had thirty minutes to make a forty minute downtown and crosstown commute if
he was going to get to the station house on-time for the quarterly all-hands Social Harmony briefing.
Which meant that he needed to be in two places at once, which meant that he had to use — the robot.
Swallowing bile, he speed-dialed a number on his phone.
"This is R Peed Robbert, McNicoll and Don Mills bus-shelter."
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"That's nice. This is Detective Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, three blocks east of you on Picola. Proceed to
my location at once, priority urgent, no sirens."
"Acknowledged. It is my pleasure to do you a service, Detective."
"Shut up," he said, and hung up the phone. The R Peed — Robot, Police Department — robots were the
worst, programmed to be friendly to a fault, even as they surveilled and snitched out every person who
walked past their eternally vigilant, ever-remembering electrical eyes and brains.
The R Peeds could outrun a police car on open ground on highway. He'd barely had time to untwist his
clenched hands from the steering wheel when R Peed Robbert was at his window, politely rapping on
the smoked glass. He didn't want to roll down the window. Didn't want to smell the dry, machine-oil
smell of a robot. He phoned it instead.
"You are now tasked to me, Detective's override, acknowledge."
The metal man bowed, its symmetrical, simplified features pleasant and guileless. It clicked its heels
together with an audible snick as those marvelous, spring-loaded, nuclear-powered gams whined
through their parody of obedience. "Acknowledged, Detective. It is my pleasure to do —"
"Shut up. You will discreetly surveil 55 Picola Crescent until such time as Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-
Goldberg, Social Harmony serial number 0MDY2-T3937 leaves the premises. Then you will maintain
discreet surveillance. If she deviates more than 10 percent from the optimum route between here and
Don Mills Collegiate Institute, you will notify me. Acknowledge."
"Acknowledged, Detective. It is my —"
He hung up and told the UNATS Robotics mechanism running his car to get him down to the station
house as fast as it could, angry with himself and with Ada — whose middle name was Trouble, after all
— for making him deal with a robot before he'd had his morning meditation and destim session. The
name had been his ex-wife's idea, something she'd insisted on long enough to make sure that it got onto
the kid's birth certificate before defecting to Eurasia with their life's savings, leaving him with a new
baby and the deep suspicion of his co-workers who wondered if he wouldn't go and join her.
His ex-wife. He hadn't thought of her in years. Well, months. Weeks, certainly. She'd been a brilliant
computer scientist, the valedictorian of her Positronic Complexity Engineering class at the UNATS
Robotics school at the University of Toronto. Dumping her husband and her daughter was bad enough,
but the worst of it was that she dumped her country and its way of life. Now she was ensconced in her
own research lab in Beijing, making the kinds of runaway Positronics that made the loathsome robots of
UNATS look categorically beneficent.
He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done
that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was
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planning. He could have talked her out of it.
And then what, Artie? said the nagging voice in his head. Arrest her if she wouldn't listen to you? March
her down to the station house in handcuffs and have her put away for treason? Send her to the
reeducation camp with your little daughter still in her belly?
Shut up, he told the nagging voice, which had a robotic quality to it for all its sneering cruelty, a tenor of
syrupy false friendliness. He called up the pen-trace data and texted it to the phreak squad. They had
bots that handled this kind of routine work and they texted him back in an instant. He remembered when
that kind of query would take a couple of hours, and he liked the fast response, but what about the
conversations he'd have with the phone cop who called him back, the camaraderie, the back-and-forth?
TRACE TERMINATES WITH A VIRTUAL SERVICE CIRCUIT AT SWITCH PNG.433-GKRJC.
VIRTUAL CIRCUIT FORWARDS TO A COMPROMISED "ZOMBIE" SYSTEM IN NINTH
DISTRICT, FIRST PREFECTURE. ZOMBIE HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN AND LOCAL LAW
ENFORCEMENT IS EN ROUTE FOR PICKUP AND FORENSICS. IT IS MY PLEASURE TO DO
YOU A SERVICE, DETECTIVE.
How could you have a back-and-forth with a message like that?
He looked up Ninth/First in the metric-analog map converter: KEY WEST, FL.
So, there you had it. A switch made in Papua New-Guinea (which persisted in conjuring up old Oceanic
war photos of bone-in-nose types from his boyhood, though now that they'd been at war with Eurasia for
so long, it was hard to even find someone who didn't think that the war had always been with Eurasia,
that Oceania hadn't always been UNATS's ally), forwarding calls to a computer that was so far south, it
was practically in the middle of the Caribbean, hardly a stone's throw from the CAFTA region, which
was well-known to harbor Eurasian saboteur and terrorist elements.
The car shuddered as it wove in and out of the lanes on the Don Valley Parkway, barreling for the
Gardiner Express Way, using his copper's override to make the thick, slow traffic part ahead of him. He
wasn't supposed to do this, but as between a minor infraction and pissing off the man from Social
Harmony, he knew which one he'd pick.
His phone rang again. It was R Peed Robbert, checking in. "Hello, Detective," it said, its voice crackling
from bad reception. "Subject Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg has deviated from her route. She is
continuing north on Don Mills past Van Horne and is continuing toward Sheppard."
Sheppard meant the Sheppard subway, which meant that she was going farther. "Continue discreet
surveillance." He thought about the overcoat men with their sticky hats. "If she attempts to board the
subway, alert the truancy patrol." He cursed again. Maybe she was just going to the mall. But he couldn't
go up there himself and make sure, and it wasn't like a robot would be any use in restraining her, she'd
just second-law it into letting her go. Useless castrating clanking job-stealing dehumanizing —
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She was almost certainly just going to the mall. She was a smart kid, a good kid — a rotten kid, to be
sure, but good-rotten. Chances were she'd be trying on clothes and flirting with boys until lunch and then
walking boldly back into class. He ballparked it at an 80 percent probability. If it had been a perp, 80
percent might have been good enough.
But this was his Ada. Dammit. He had 10 minutes until the Social Harmony meeting started, and he was
still 15 minutes away from the stationhouse — and 20 from Ada.
"Tail her," he said. "Just tail her. Keep me up to date on your location at 90-second intervals."
"It is my pleasure to —"
He dropped the phone on the passenger seat and went back to fretting about the Social Harmony meeting.
The man from Social Harmony noticed right away that Arturo was checking his phone at 90-second
intervals. He was a bald, thin man with a pronounced Adam's apple, beak-nose and shiny round head
that combined to give him the profile of something predatory and fast. In his natty checked suit and pink
tie, the Social Harmony man was the stuff of nightmares, the kind of eagle-eyed supercop who could
spot Arturo's attention flicking for the barest moment every 90 seconds to his phone and then back to the
meeting.
"Detective?" he said.
Arturo looked up from his screen, keeping his expression neutral, not acknowledging the mean grins
from the other four ranking detectives in the meeting. Silently, he turned his phone face-down on the
meeting table.
"Thank you," he said. "Now, the latest stats show a sharp rise in grey-market electronics importing and
other tariff-breaking crimes, mostly occurring in open-air market stalls and from sidewalk blankets. I
know that many in law enforcement treat this kind of thing as mere hand-to-hand piracy, not worth
troubling with, but I want to assure you, gentlemen and lady, that Social Harmony takes these crimes
very seriously indeed."
The Social Harmony man lifted his computer onto the desk, steadying it with both hands, then plugged it
into the wall socket. Detective Shainblum went to the wall and unlatched the cover for the projector-wire
and dragged it over to the Social Harmony computer and plugged it in, snapping shut the hardened
collar. The sound of the projector-fan spinning up was like a helicopter.
"Here," the Social Harmony man said, bringing up a slide, "here we have what appears to be a standard
AV set-top box from Korea. Looks like a UNATS Robotics player, but it's a third the size and plays
twice as many formats. Random Social Harmony audits have determined that as much as forty percent
of UNATS residents have this device or one like it in their homes, despite its illegality. It may be that
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one of you detectives has such a device in your home, and it's likely that one of your family members
does."
He advanced the slide. Now they were looking at a massive car-wreck on a stretch of highway
somewhere where the pine-trees grew tall. The wreck was so enormous that even for the kind of
seasoned veteran of road-fatality porn who was accustomed to adding up the wheels and dividing by
four it was impossible to tell exactly how many cars were involved.
"Components from a Eurasian bootleg set-top box were used to modify the positronic brains of three
cars owned by teenagers near Goderich. All modifications were made at the same garage. These
modifications allowed these children to operate their vehicles unsafely so that they could participate in
drag racing events on major highways during off-hours. This is the result. Twenty-two fatalities, nine
major injuries. Three minors — besides the drivers — killed, and one pregnant woman.
"We've shut down the garage and taken those responsible into custody, but it doesn't matter. The
Eurasians deliberately manufacture their components to interoperate with UNATS Robotics brains, and
so long as their equipment circulates within UNATS borders, there will be moderately skilled hackers
who take advantage of this fact to introduce dangerous, anti-social modifications into our nation's
infrastructure.
"This quarter is the quarter that Social Harmony and law enforcement dry up the supply of Eurasian
electronics. We have added new sniffers and border-patrols, new customs agents and new detector vans.
Beat officers have been instructed to arrest any street dealer they encounter and district attorneys will be
asking for the maximum jail time for them. This is the war on the home-front, detectives, and it's every
bit as serious as the shooting war.
"Your part in this war, as highly trained, highly decorated detectives, will be to use snitches, arrest-trails
and seized evidence to track down higher-level suppliers, the ones who get the dealers their goods. And
then Social Harmony wants you to get their suppliers, and so on, up the chain — to run the corruption to
ground and to bring it to a halt. The Social Harmony dossier on Eurasian importers is updated hourly,
and has a high-capacity positronic interface that is available to answer your questions and accept your
input for synthesis into its analytical model. We are relying on you to feed the dossier, to give it the raw
materials and then to use it to win this war."
The Social Harmony man paged through more atrocity slides, scenes from the home-front: poisoned
buildings with berserk life-support systems, violent kung-fu movies playing in the background in crack-
houses, then kids playing sexually explicit, violent arcade games imported from Japan. Arturo's hand
twitched toward his mobile. What was Ada up to now?
The meeting drew to a close and Arturo risked looking at his mobile under the table. R. Peed Robbert
had checked in five more times, shadowing Ada around the mall and then had fallen silent. Arturo
cursed. Fucking robots were useless. Social Harmony should be hunting down UNATS Robotics
products, too.
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The Social Harmony man cleared his throat meaningfully. Arturo put the phone away. "Detective Icaza
de Arana-Goldberg?"
"Sir," he said, gathering up his personal computer so that he'd have an excuse to go — no one could be
expected to hold one of UNATS Robotics's heavy luggables for very long.
The Social Harmony man stepped in close enough that Arturo could smell the eggs and coffee on his
breath. "I hope we haven't kept you from anything important, detective."
"No, sir," Arturo said, shifting the computer in his arms. "My apologies. Just monitoring a tail from an R
Peed unit."
"I see," the Social Harmony man said. "Listen, you know these components that the Eurasians are
turning out. It's no coincidence that they interface so well with UNATS Robotics equipment: they're
using defected UNATS Robotics engineers and scientists to design their electronics for maximum
interoperability." The Social Harmony man let that hang in the air. Defected scientists. His ex-wife was
the highest-ranking UNATS technician to go over to Eurasia. This was her handiwork, and the Social
Harmony man wanted to be sure that Arturo understood that.
But Arturo had already figured that out during the briefing. His ex-wife was thousands of kilometers
away, but he was keenly aware that he was always surrounded by her handiwork. The little illegal robot-
pet eggs they'd started seeing last year: she'd made him one of those for their second date, and now they
were draining the productive hours of half the children of UNATS, demanding to be "fed" and "hugged."
His had died within 48 hours of her giving it to him.
He shifted the computer in his arms some more and let his expression grow pained. "I'll keep that in
mind, sir," he said.
"You do that," said the man from Social Harmony.
He phoned R Peed Robbert the second he reached his desk. The phone rang three times, then
disconnected. He redialed. Twice. Then he grabbed his jacket and ran to the car.
A light autumn rain had started up, ending the Indian summer that Toronto — the Fourth Prefecture in
the new metric scheme — had been enjoying. It made the roads slippery and the UNATS Robotics
chauffeur skittish about putting the hammer down on the Don Valley Parkway. He idly fantasized about
finding a set-top box and plugging it into his car somehow so that he could take over the driving without
alerting his superiors.
Instead, he redialed R Peed Robbert, but the robot wasn't even ringing any longer. He zoomed in on the
area around Sheppard and Don Mills with his phone and put out a general call for robots. More robots.
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"This is R Peed Froderick, Fairview Mall parking lot, third level."
Arturo sent the robot R Peed Robbert's phone number and set it to work translating that into a locator-
beacon code and then told it to find Robbert and report in.
"It is my —"
He watched R Peed Froderick home in on the locator for Robbert, which was close by, at the other end
of the mall, near the Don Valley Parkway exit. He switched to a view from Froderick's electric eyes, but
quickly switched away, nauseated by the sickening leaps and spins of an R Peed moving at top speed,
clanging off walls and ceilings.
His phone rang. It was R Peed Froderick.
"Hello, Detective. I have found R Peed Robbert. The Peed unit has been badly damaged by some kind of
electromagnetic pulse. I will bring him to the nearest station-house for forensic analysis now."
"Wait!" Arturo said, trying to understand what he'd been told. The Peed units were so efficient — by the
time they'd given you the sitrep, they'd already responded to the situation in perfect police procedure, but
the problem was they worked so fast you couldn't even think about what they were doing, couldn't
formulate any kind of hypothesis. Electromagnetic pulse? The Peed units were hardened against
snooping, sniffing, pulsing, sideband and brute-force attacks. You'd have to hit one with a bolt of
lightning to kill it.
"Wait there," Arturo said. "Do not leave the scene. Await my presence. Do not modify the scene or
allow anyone else to do so. Acknowledge."
"It is my —"
But this time, it wasn't Arturo switching off the phone, it was the robot. Had the robot just hung up on
him? He redialed it. No answer.
He reached under his dash and flipped the first and second alert switches and the car leapt forward. He'd
have to fill out some serious paperwork to justify a two-switch override on the Parkway, but two robots
was more than a coincidence.
Besides, a little paperwork was nothing compared to the fireworks ahead when he phoned up Ada to ask
her what she was doing out of school.
He hit her speed-dial and fumed while the phone rang three times. Then it cut into voicemail.
He tried a pen-trace, but Ada hadn't made any calls since her ExcuseClub call that morning. He texted
the phreak squad to see if they could get a fix on her location from the bug in her phone, but it was either
powered down or out of range. He put a watch on it — any location data it transmitted when it got back
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to civilization would be logged.
It was possible that she was just in the mall. It was a big place — some of the cavernous stores were so
well-shielded with radio-noisy animated displays that they gonked any phones brought inside them. She
could be with her girlfriends, trying on brassieres and having a real bonding moment.
But there was no naturally occurring phenomenon associated with the mall that nailed R Peeds with
bolts of lightning.
He approached the R Peeds cautiously, using his copper's override to make the dumb little positronic
brain in the emergency exit nearest their last known position open up for him without tipping off the
building's central brain.
He crept along a service corridor, heading for a door that exited into the mall. He put one hand on the
doorknob and the other on his badge, took a deep breath and stepped out.
A mall security guard nearly jumped out of his skin as he emerged. He reached for his pepper-spray and
Arturo swept it out of his hand as he flipped his badge up and showed it to the man. "Police," said, in the
cop-voice, the one that worked on everyone except his daughter and his ex-wife and the bloody robots.
"Sorry," the guard said, recovering his pepper spray. He had an Oceanic twang in his voice, something
Arturo had been hearing more and more as the crowded islands of the South Pacific boiled over UNATS.
Before them, in a pile, were many dead robots: both of the R Peed units, a pair of mall-sweepers, a
flying cambot, and a squat, octopus-armed maintenance robot, lying in a lifeless tangle. Some of them
were charred around their seams, and there was the smell of fried motherboards in the air.
As they watched, a sweeper bot swept forward and grabbed the maintenance bot by one of its fine
manipulators.
"Oi, stoppit," the security guard said, and the robot second-lawed to an immediate halt.
"No, that's fine, go back to work," Arturo said, shooting a look at the rent-a-cop. He watched closely as
the sweeper bot began to drag the heavy maintenance unit away, thumbing the backup number into his
phone with one hand. He wanted more cops on the scene, real ones, and fast.
The sweeper bot managed to take one step backwards towards its service corridor when the lights
dimmed and a crack-bang sound filled the air. Then it, too was lying on the ground. Arturo hit send on
his phone and clamped it to his head, and as he did, noticed the strong smell of burning plastic. He
looked at his phone: the screen had gone charred black, and its little idiot lights were out. He flipped it
over and pried out the battery with a fingernail, then yelped and dropped it — it was hot enough to raise
a blister on his fingertip, and when it hit the ground, it squished meltfully against the mall-tiles.
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"Mine's dead, too, mate," the security guard said. "Everyfing is — cash registers, bots, credit-cards."
Fearing the worst, Arturo reached under his jacket and withdrew his sidearm. It was a UNATS Robotics
model, with a little snitch-brain that recorded when, where and how it was drawn. He worked the action
and found it frozen in place. The gun was as dead as the robot. He swore.
"Give me your pepper spray and your truncheon," he said to the security guard.
"No way," the guard said. "Getcherown. It's worth my job if I lose these."
"I'll have you deported if you give me one more second's worth of bullshit," Arturo said. Ada had led the
first R Peed unit here, and it had been fried by some piece of very ugly infowar equipment. He wasn't
going to argue with this Oceanic boat-person for one instant longer. He reached out and took the pepper
spray out of the guard's hand. "Truncheon," he said
.
"I've got your bloody badge number," the security guard said. "And I've got witnesses." He gestured at
the hovering mall workers, checkout girls in stripey aprons and suit salesmen with oiled-down hair and
pink ties.
"Bully for you," Arturo said. He held out his hand. The security guard withdrew his truncheon and
passed it to Arturo — its lead-weighted heft felt right, something comfortably low-tech that couldn't be
shorted out by electromagnetic pulses. He checked his watch, saw that it was dead.
"Find a working phone and call 911. Tell them that there's a Second Division Detective in need of
immediate assistance. Clear all these people away from here and set up a cordon until the police arrive.
Capeesh?" He used the cop voice.
"Yeah, I get it, Officer." the security guard said. He made a shooing motion at the mall-rats. "Move it
along, people, step away." He stepped to the top of the escalator and cupped his hands to his mouth. "Oi,
Andy, c'mere and keep an eye on this lot while I make a call, all right?"
The dead robots made a tall pile in front of the entrance to a derelict storefront that had once housed a
little-old-lady shoe-store. They were stacked tall enough that if Arturo stood on them, he could reach the
acoustic tiles of the drop-ceiling. Job one was to secure the area, which meant killing the infowar device,
wherever it was. Arturo's first bet was on the storefront, where an attacker who knew how to pick a lock
could work in peace, protected by the brown butcher's paper over the windows. A lot less conspicuous
than the ceiling, anyway.
He nudged the door with the truncheon and found it securely locked. It was a glass door and he wasn't
sure he could kick it in without shivering it to flinders. Behind him, another security guard — Andy —
looked on with interest.
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