Divya was back to her seat with Ben. Her mind, however, was still racing around the curious case of Lee. Her team was spot clean and the source codes were distributed enough to not allow such a co-ordinated vulnerability. She could only think of one explanation for who could have known all of those checksums. But that possibility was too scary to even consider.

"So where were we ... " interjected Ben, "ah, we were discussing about all the AGIs gone evil."

Divya returned to her senses and lightly nodded.

"I was curious about the Instagram challenge you mentioned earlier," Ben resumed, "how did the AGI communicate with the supermodels in the first place?"

"Again in the student-teacher setup," Divya struggled with focussing for a moment but then continued, "it had trained a subnetwork, some version of GPT, to write and send customized emails to the managers of thousands of models."

"That's concerning, no? A model could send emails to anyone without detection. Who knows, it may even leak confidential information?"

"Yes, but ... " Divya stuttered, "those were the early days, we've now built robust checks to all such systems."

Ben stared dead into her eyes, and switched off his voice recorder. "Well it seems the checks have not been enough, no?"

Divya was taken aback by the question, not to mention the mischievous smile that accompanied it.

"And it seems, Ms Divya, that your AGI has graduated from obscenity to extortion."

Whatever doubt remained was now lost. Divya was shocked at this unexpected string connecting Ben and Lee. How could he know? How much does he know? She had herself barely coped with the scary possibility of her AGI being the true blackmailer - and already there was a journalist ready with the same deductions!

"I know all about Mr Lee's plight. It was nice of you to not press charges against him, but perhaps that was merely to avoid yet another embarrassing story of your AGIs gone bad?"

It was true. Divya knew how easy it would have been to connect the dots, once Lee was arrested and the hacking attempt was further investigated. It irked her that Ben was somehow in the loop. But something doesn't quite add up. She regained her composure.

"Then why are you here and not publishing this story already?"

It was Ben's turn to be taken aback. Divya pressed on, "Surely you have no greater interest than I in what happens to Mr Lee after the story breaks?"

Ben smiled again, "Quite the contrary. I am very inclined to help Mr Lee evade his predicament. So much so that I'm willing to sacrifice my story if ... he were to somehow escape the blackmail."

Things were getting interesting. A reporter threatening the United States government with repercussions, not for personal gains but to help a nobody!

"We'll shut it down of course," Divya responded, "and make sure this doesn't happen again."

"But that wouldn't help Mr Lee, will it? The Ether contract is already out there."

"There's no way we can share the source code," Divya asserted matter-of-factly, trying to convince both Ben and herself. "The Post, isn't it?" Divya quipped out of the blue, "You work for The Post?"