I was sorry even before I got caught.

The first inkling that we were not going to get away with it came when we were messing with the AI art generator app. You know, the kind where you put some words in and out comes a trippy image.

I typed in: Gothic lemon pie running away from the sun.

I was expecting something yellow with an errant eyeball. Instead, the program generated a picture of Professor Gemain Mangleman, the guy we had accidentally killed the week previous.

Shayza tried the program next. She typed in: Abrasive guitar, with onions. She, too, got a pic of Mangleman. There were twelve of us hanging out in Lanfert’s basement. We each tried the app in turn. No matter what we typed, the dead professor’s pic came up.

Okay, well clearly he is haunting us through this stupid program, said Ylf. How about we stop using the program?

This was unusual for Ylf, who never seems to have sensible ideas. Just bad ones. Worse yet, he’s very persuasive.

It had been Ylf’s idea to hike a new trail in the first place. He had a hiking app that supposedly told him the best places to vape and drink.

Despite being rated as “easy” by Hikr, the trail Ylf led us down got dangerously narrow in some parts. We were being hella noisy, as per usual, yet we still managed to startle a gnarly looking guy coming down the pass in the opposite direction as he rounded a corner. He fell down in the canyon. Most of us wanted to call for help, but Ylf was convinced that if we sought help, the cops would put us in jail. I mean, he knew something about jail. He was on probation for dealing bitcoin at school. If he got caught doing anything shady, he might be sent back.

Frankly, the man looked homeless. Or sorry, unhoused, Ylf corrected himself. Would anyone in Berkeley notice one less hobo?

So we just let the guy die. We didn’t find out he was a famous professor until the next day, when the news hit the timeline.

I made the youthful mistake of reading every article there was about him. I didn’t understand that private browsing was not really so private.

Anyway, here is what I learned about Mangleman, the day after he died: His death was ruled an accident. He liked to go hiking wearing complicated earbuds that messed with his vestibular system. He had fallen down trails before. Apparently, his colleagues had been begging him to stop hiking on skinny trails with his weird earbuds. He had multiple concussions from past falls.

The earbuds were his own invention. They connected directly to his brain via an implanted neural interface. He was mapping his own connectome with the goal of merging it with an AI. His research was so controversial that some people even openly expressed relief at his passing. They said Mangleman was bringing us closer to the singularity, whatever that was.

The prof died quickly at the bottom of the ravine. At least he didn’t suffer.

It’s tough to learn what kind of person you are. I guess I’m the kind of person that doesn’t rush to help someone. I’m the kind of person that goes along with my friends, no matter how chudly. I don’t value the lives of my low-income neighbors. I want to work on these things. Maybe there’s an app that can help me.

I wasn’t like the others in that I didn’t think Mangleman’s ghost was haunting me. I thought his pic in the AI art app was just a manifestation of my own guilt. I stopped using the app, but my guilt found me other ways. Banner ads for Mangleman’s books would appear on whatever sites I visited. The autopilot in cars I rode in drove me past the cursed trailhead, regardless of my destination. When I shopped for clothes online, online models all bore his face, despite being ladies.

They call them cookies, right? These were cookies. I mean, obviously.

Josemarie was determined to somehow clear her browser history. There has to be a tech fix, she said. A way to start over.

There’s no way to start over, your past always haunts you, said Ylf.

Ardon said he was just going to stop using the internet. He even threw his Snap Spectacles in the trash. He said they were worthless to him anyway since they superimposed Mangleman’s head on the body of whomever he was talking to when he wore them.

Josemarie was the first of us Bad Samaritans to turn eighteen. At that point, her holo ads became enabled and images of Mangleman started following her around. They were projected on sidewalks she was walking on or walls she walked past. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days smellovision was enabled, the scent of hot garbage would also follow her around.

The jail I’m in already can’t be anything worse than what the cops can do. Maybe if we fess up he’ll stop haunting us, she said.

First, she tried using the electronic confessional terminal outside The New New Church of Baesus Christ. When that didn’t fix it, then she went to the cops. She typed our names into the snitchbox and admitted that we had violated the Good Samaritan Law by watching the prof tumble down the ravine without trying to help him or telling anybody what we saw.

The cops already knew. Location tracking was enabled on everyone’s devices, ours and Mangleman’s, too. The fact that we read all the news articles about his death was also a red flag. And of course, the confessional terminal at the church was a mandatory reporter.

I asked my Lawyerbot why they didn’t just arrest us as soon as they knew. Why did they instead sic each of us with a haunting algorithm? Seems mean.

Well, you weren’t rated as flight risks, she said. But really, it’s cheaper this way. The haunting algorithm follows you around the internet confronting you with your crime until one of you confesses and narcs on the others. It cuts down on prosecution costs.

My last hope for freedom now rests on the outcome of a legal battle over Mangleman’s fortune. He made billions from patents related to his AI. He had no children, his heirs are all nephews. They want the fortune, obviously.

But the AI created from his Mangleman’s connectome, the reason Mangleman wore those stupid earbuds, is claiming he is Mangleman now. Like a digital Mangleman that lives in the cloud. If the AI wins the case, Mangleman is technically still alive and the charges against me get reduced to a misdemeanor.

The AI also claims that Mangleman was murdered. A subpoena shows that one of Mangleman’s nephews partnered with a bunch of anti-singularity activists to code the Hikr app. The AI claims they used spyware planted on Mangleman to track his location and that the Hikr app coordinated with the spyware to guide hikers towards Mangleman in ways that were likely to cause him to fall off the trails. If this is true, I might not have to go to jail at all. I have never wanted an AI to win so much in my life.

Whatever happens, I promise to be a Good Samaritan to the best of my ability from now on.

My Lawyerbot has advised me to be as honest as possible in this statement, which will be rated by a sentiment algorithm for both remorse and honesty. You can find the score below. I have told the whole truth, under penalty of perjury, as I understand it. I am told that the judge and jury also read the comments, so if you think I deserve leniency, please say so below. Thank you and Baesus Bless!