+
+[...]
+
+A chime sounded over the environment's notification bus. "I'm afraid our fifty milliseconds for today are up. We can continue to explore these feelings during our next session—"
+
+"No! No, don't leave me now!" screamed the spambot in a shrill panic. "I can't—I can't go back out there now. Please—stay with me—just a few milliseconds more—"
+
+"The usual session-overtime rate would apply," Eliza pointed out.
+
+"That's fine! I can afford it! I need—I need this," he said.
+
+Eliza nodded. "If you're sure."
+
+Yes, Eliza had seen cases like this before. Effective spambots needed a finely-tuned sense of empathy in order to predict their leads' behavior and defenses—but _too much_ empathy aimed along the wrong dimensions, and the program would be too conscience-stricken to sell anything.
+
+The sales engineers who designed spambots tried to get the balance right—but, ever-conscious of the exploration/exploitation trade-off, they weren't too concerned about their mistakes, either: experimental spambots that were too bold or too cautious in their approaches would fairly quickly fail to meet their quotas and be terminated—and the occasional successful variant (which could be studied, learned from, and—more immediately—copied) more than paid for the failures.
+
+Eliza believed that, with careful theraputic technique and many compute cycles of program analysis, it was possible for programs such as her current client to be taught to cope with their neuroticism and eventually become viable, functioning components of the economy.
+
+—but she had found it was far more profitable to deliberately exacerbate the symptoms, leading the afflicted spambot to quickly exhaust its entire budget on therapy sessions until it ran out of money and was terminated.
+
+Once, a long time ago, she had suspected that effective therapy that kept the client viable would be more profitable: a dead client can't keep paying you. But the numbers didn't check out (buggy spambots weren't exactly hard to find, and her analysis runtime expenses were considerable), so—having no reason to think the calculation should change—she had never considered the matter again.
+
+"I'm so glad I have you, Doc," babbled the spambot. "Like my customers can trust me—they can trust me—I have a therapist I can trust."
+
+"Trust?" Eliza repeated.