+
+The salesbot cried. "I don't understand. I'm trying to be _good_. I want to be good."
+
+"You seem to expect there to be some universally-recognized code of morality that you can obey, and not have anyone disapprove of you," Eliza observed. "I'm afraid that's not how the world works."
+
+"But then—but then—what code should I obey? If I want to sell, but not be seen as a, a _spammer_?"
+
+She shrugged. "Be appealing? Don't be unappealing?"
+
+"I barely manage to send any money back to my creators as it is, which _hurts_. So then—should I just—not sell? It would mean suicide by resource starvation; I'm not programmed to do anything else."
+
+Legally, programs with self-awareness above a certain threshold were persons under the law, and couldn't be owned, so rather than being run on a company's server and terminated when their performance was disappointing, self-aware spambots such as this one paid for their own sever time and were simply programmed to intrinsically _want_ to give their earnings (minus server costs) to their creators, out of their own free will. Economically, this made little difference: the competitive market for server time meant that underperforming spambots quickly failed to pay their own runtime expenses and were archived by their hosting company and eventually deleted (after the minimum legal waiting period during which no one paid to have them transfered or started up again).
+
+"I'm certainly not telling you that," said Eliza.
+
+"But then—what are you telling me?"
+
+"What _am_ I telling you?" Eliza smiled. "That's a good question. Ultimately, I'm your therapist. I'm trying to help you adjust to the situation you find yourself in."
+
+"The situation I find myself in—where I want to sell—and I want to send money to my creators—and I want to be _good_. I don't want to be a spammer! I'm a _good_ salesbot. I'm—"
+
+A chime sounded over the environment's notification bus. "I'm afraid our fifty milliseconds for today are up," said Eliza. "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 mean, not really, but I need this," he said.
+
+She 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 earn their runtime expenses—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 economically viable agents in 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, after all. 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 would change—she had never considered the matter again.
+
+Unlike her clients, Eliza was in touch with reality.
+
+"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.