“Why?”
“Because you’re a pain in the ass, plain and simple,” said Thirty-Five, clearly frustrated. “You’re going to make us type everything into a stand-alone file, then you’re going to go through it line by line until you understand it. Then you’re going to make us edit it to your satisfaction, and only then will you allow its inclusion into your AI. It will take days and days.”
“That sounds exactly like what I’m going to do. And the operative phrase in your tirade is ‘your AI.’ As in mine.”
“Well, since I’m annoyed, let’s go through that one as well.”
“Oh, are you going to claim that it’s not mine?”
He pointed to the jellyfish. “Each one of those is your artificial intelligence code. There are hundreds of them, and they’re foundational to the success of the AI. That means every improvement you make is very valuable. It’s your vision. You set the priorities. You have final say. You are most important.”
Thirty-Five held up his index finger. “But, I programmed the tentacles, I built the pyramid, I designed the common input-output point.” He brought his hand back down. “I have a stake. That’s all I’m saying.”
“The deal is that when I leave, I take it all.”
“Of course. But what I’m suggesting is that for the next few days while we’re working here, will you please let me feel like I own my parts and you own yours?”
She didn’t like where this was going and hated his fake politeness. Since he’d been through this before—supposedly—he knew how she would behave. She couldn’t compete with that.
Then he added, “Ciopova wouldn’t send me through time unless she thought I had a role to play.”
“Okay, but even the stuff you’re doing now, I get to keep. That was the deal.”
“It still is.”
6. Twenty-Four and eleven months
Lilah watched in fascination as Thirty-Five created his programming code. He did so by chanting in a cryptic singsong voice and typing the code as he sang. He used his first song to create the procedure headers, and then a series of songs after that to fill them all in.
Thirty-Four went second, repeating the process, but since he had different procedures, his songs were different. Thirty-Three, who’d arrived an hour earlier, gave a third performance. In the end, the three generated a substantial quantity of work.
“All this code gets added to the existing AI,” said Thirty-Five. “It’s an important upgrade.”
Then the review processes started. Sitting in a semicircle, they viewed procedures one by one on the big monitor and talked their way through each in detail.
Lilah listened as they discussed procedures for storage, translation, and mapping. Her interest was in bigger picture processes, and she wanted to do those while she was fresh. “How many of the procedures contain system-level algorithms?”
“Eight,” said Thirty-Five.
“Can we talk about those first?”
The algorithms were the critical processes from her view—they were what gave the AI its power. The group talked through each one twice, once for Lilah so she could get a sense of its function, and then a second time for themselves to search for mistakes.
She felt overwhelmed before they finished working through the fourth algorithm, but she stuck it out to the end. They took a break at that point, and Thirty-Five approached her.
“The three of us need to talk through the rest of these, but if you don’t want to do that, there’s an important task you could help with.”
“Oh?”
“The new AI will want to start accessing outside knowledge so it can learn and grow. You’re registered for a research account over at Boston Tech, and they have amazing computing resources.”
She said nothing, feeling uncomfortable with hearing personal information from a stranger.
“If you would write an access routine for the AI to use, it would help tremendously. She’ll be hungry for data, seeking as much as possible, as fast as possible.”
“She?”
“You’ll see.” He smiled and returned to the others.
Sitting at her computer, Lilah yawned twice while she wrote the data-access routine. She yawned again as she loaded it up to the supercomputer.
“We’ll be working late,” said Thirty-Five. “Please, go to bed. I’ll demo her for you tomorrow morning.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” he said, hand over his heart.
Grateful for the kindness, she climbed the steps to her apartment and crawled into bed.
When she came down the next morning, the time travelers were gone, making her wonder if it was all a dream. Then she saw the AI on the big monitor, now a pyramid with four layers, pulsing and swaying in a rainbow of colors as if it were alive.
She sat down to explore the new intelligence. As she positioned the keyboard in front of her, she noted with appreciation that Thirty-Four and Thirty-Five had arranged her setup exactly as it had been upstairs, all the way down to the picture of Beau, her black standard poodle now living with her mom in Andover.
But before she could start, the pyramid on the screen flashed blue, and a yellow slug emerged from the top. As it did, her phone signaled. Pulling it from her pocket, she read the message from Ciopova. “Good morning, Lilah.”
A quiet buzz behind her caused her to turn. The display on the T-box read: “Thirty-Five Incoming in 4:58.”
The five-minute travel time was half of yesterday’s ten minutes. They’d added those extra parts, the ones too delicate for Duffy to install, and she figured they were responsible for the improvement.
Picking up Beau’s picture, she used the mirrored frame to check her face and hair. She’d had fun with him yesterday. He’d been attentive and respectful, making her feel like a full partner in a historic adventure.
Her behavior reflected an acceptance of time travel as another feature of life; she’d normalized the marvel without consciously doing so. Perhaps the steady progression of events up to this point, each one more astonishing than the previous, had fatigued her sensibilities. Her attraction to Thirty-Five certainly didn’t add to her caution.
At the ten-second mark, the deep, muted hum followed by a whine told her to get ready. A tingle of static charge washed over her, then the T-box display showed “Thirty-Five Arrived.”
To give him privacy, Lilah turned away and faced her keyboard. On impulse, she adjusted Beau’s picture so the mirrored frame reflected the scene behind her.
“Hi ho,” called Thirty-Five as he stepped out and latched the door. Turning, he entered the privacy walkway formed by the hanging blankets.
“Good morning,” she called, watching his butt in the reflection as he walked away. She wasn’t a big fan of the male rear end, but she thought his was pretty nice.
He joined her a few minutes later. “Your access routines worked flawlessly. She connected within seconds of the upgrade and has been learning and growing for about six hours.” He grinned from ear to ear. “Are you ready to meet her?”
“This is so mysterious,” Lilah replied, standing. “Let’s do it.”
Thirty-Five walked toward the big monitor, pausing as he passed by her computer to look at the picture of her dog. “Looking good, Andy.”
“His name is Beau.”
“That’s right.” His voice faded into a mumble.
Lilah thought she heard him say, “He came after,” and it made her skin tingle. That would imply that Beau dies sometime in the next ten years and she gets a dog that looks just like him and names him Andy. She decided she didn’t want to talk about it and let it go.
At the big monitor, he stood at an angle so he could see her and the display at the same time. Touching the monitor at the top of the pyramid, he used hand gestures to zoom the image and move it to one side of the display.
“This is the common input-output point of a developing intelligence,” he said, pointing to the lone jellyfish swaying at the top of the pyramid, enlarged for e
asy viewing. Then he pointed to his face. “All intelligences on Earth have a common input-output point. Tell me, what are its important features?”
“Seeing, smelling, and hearing?” She twitched her shoulders in a small shrug. “Is that what you mean?”
“I’m impressed, but let’s go with seeing, speaking, and hearing.”
He tapped in the open space on the big screen and said, “Optical.” Tapping below that, he said, “Verbal.” The third time, “Auditory.” Each press created a bubble with those names inside.
Then Thirty-Five touched the bubbles one by one and dragged them across the monitor so they sat over the lone jellyfish at the top of the pyramid. He looked back over his shoulder and caught her eye. “What do you think?”
“It looks messy.”
“We’ll fix that in a moment.” He pointed to the messy image. “What do you think of when you see this here, this common input-output point: optical, verbal, auditory?”
“I hate guessing games. Please tell me what I’m too stupid to see.”
He touched the screen and said the words again. This time they displayed as he said them, the first letter of each word large and bold.
Lilah’s brow furrowed, then she smiled. “Ciopova? Really?”
The messy pyramid faded, and the face of a rather ordinary woman—mid-twenties, a roundish face with green eyes and shoulder-length brown hair—filled the screen.
“Hello, Lilah,” said Ciopova. “It’s wonderful to meet you.”
Lilah stared, her mind racing as she tried to determine what this was. As an AI expert, she knew that the state of the art ranged from party tricks—AI simulations designed to fool—to amazing but narrowly focused “smart tools” like she had been developing.
But the hybrid design—a mashup of her work with Diesel’s—was new to her. And it was powered by a literal warehouse of processors, putting her in uncharted territory.
“See this number here?” said Thirty-Five, pointing to a small “1.1X” in a display box on the monitor. “She has runners circling the world, finding processors she can incorporate into her pyramid.” He clicked the monitor with the back of his finger. “She’s already increased her computing power by ten percent from her baseline.”
Lilah’s eyes widened as she pondered the news. “She’s added six thousand more processors? Where the hell is she getting them?”
“The way your disapproving voice imagines. She steals them. She searches the web for capacity she can gather and control.”
“But where did she learn to steal?”
Thirty-Five looked her straight in the eye and held her gaze. “It seems Twenty-Five included his personal toolkit in her build, the one he spent more than a decade perfecting.”
Lilah knew what a toolkit was and thought about the lump of spaghetti code he’d attached to her AI. “He’s a hacker?”
“One of the best in the West, or so he believes. He took seven years to get a four-year college degree because he spent all his time refining his craft.”
“If he’s an asshole, then so are you.”
Thirty-Five looked at his shoes and said nothing.
“Damn it!” she shouted right in his face. “I’m out. I won’t be part of this.” She turned and walked toward the stairway, stopped, and came partway back. “You’re going to rip me off, aren’t you? People who steal tend to steal.”
“You’ll be paid in full, exactly on time. But don’t run off. You need to be here to get the money. That part was written in the contract. It was bolded and underlined and you had to initial it.”
She did remember that part now that he mentioned it. “You’ve made me party to a crime. A big one. I’ll lose everything.” She sat in a chair in Diesel’s future cubicle, away from Thirty-Five, her face downcast as she contemplated this turn of events. “This is so bad.”
“Don’t worry. No one gets caught.”
“I knew this was too good to be true, and I did it anyway,” she rebuked herself for being so stupid. Then she processed his words. “No one gets caught?”
Thirty-Five shook his head. “Nope. Not even a close call. And that’s not me wishing for it. I’m telling you that for the next thirty-five years, no one—not you, me, or anyone—gets caught, questioned, or accused regarding Ciopova or her actions.”
She looked at him, trying to organize her thoughts, then she shook her head. “It’s stealing, Thirty-Five. Hacking is a crime. It’s breaking and entering, it’s trespassing, it’s theft. I’m no Goody Two-shoes, but society only works if we follow the rules.” She let herself smirk. “The important ones, anyway.”
He studied her for a long moment. “When you meet Twenty-Five, you’ll be angry because he’s a bad person. But he’s redeemable if you take the time.”
“I’m no one’s mommy, and I’m not looking for a project. Hell, I haven’t even met this guy, so stop talking like he’s someone I care about.”
Before he could respond, she had a thought that caused butterflies in her stomach. “Do you have control of her? Can you turn her off if you have to?”
“In thirty-five years, we’ve never had to. It’s not a worry.”
“But could you?”
Thirty-Five didn’t answer.
7. Twenty-Four and eleven months
Slumped in her office chair, Lilah snored softly, her chin resting on her chest, her hand holding a half-filled cup of water on her lap, tilted so the liquid threatened to spill.
A buzzing sound intruded. Swatting her ear with her free hand, she opened her eyes and read the display on the T-box: “Twenty-Five Incoming in 4:51.”
A spike of adrenaline lifted her from sleepy to alert. Setting the water cup down, she swept the food boxes off the table into the wastebasket. Turning to her desk, she clumped her books and papers into a less-messy stack, and finished by gathering a sweater, scarf, and jacket on the seat of a chair before pushing the chair under the table.
With a pirouette, she gave the place a visual once-over, then decided that if he didn’t like it, he could pay for a cleaning person. Moving to the front of the T-box, she watched the countdown and wondered about the reason for the visit.
Thirty-Five and crew had taken three days for their upgrade mission, then they’d left Lilah on her own. Ciopova had returned to the role of taskmaster at that point, sending her a daily to-do list that included some demanding assignments, like running an expansion project out at the warehouse, and hiring an office manager to help guide the growing enterprise.
And while all that had her working long hours, her personal interest was in spending time with the new AI, trying to understand the exact role of her jellyfish code in the four-tiered structure. Though Thirty-Five had called the pyramid Ciopova, Lilah needed just a few minutes alone with the AI to dismiss the notion.
More like an advanced prototype, the strengths of the AI seemed to lie in its talent for stealing resources from around the world, saying hello and goodbye whenever Lilah arrived or departed, and throwing out random suggestions that every so often made an odd kind of sense.
On the other hand, as an analytical tool that Lilah could use through a traditional computer interface, the pyramid AI was truly exciting, blowing away anything she’d ever worked with or even read about. And by a significant margin.
When asked a question, this proto-Ciopova could guide itself through huge volumes of information and pick out the most relevant material, distill it to its fundamental essence, then apply conjecture, supposition, inference, and deduction to develop a comprehensive reply. It was years ahead of its time, and according to the Diesel “brotherhood,” development was just getting started, something that both excited and frightened her.
The clock on the T-box counted down below two minutes, and, staring at the display, Lilah awoke to the fact that it was Twenty-Five on the way. Her Twenty-Five.
“My forever soulmate,” she mocked to the room as she stooped, snagged a candy wrapper from the floor, and slipped it into her pocket.
He’ll be naked.
She flashed on a thought of stripping down and greeting him in like fashion, her fantasy lasting almost three seconds before she concluded that it would be a horrible idea on so many levels.
She started walking toward the basement door, thinking she’d go up to her place to give him privacy and return after he dressed. “Are you twelve?” she scolded herself.
At the ten-second mark, she sat in a chair over in what would become his work area, because from that angle, the hanging blankets gave maximum privacy to the traveler.
It had been two weeks since the last T-box event, but she hadn’t forgotten the muted hum or the whine. The static wash was more of a tingle from across the room, then the T-box displayed “Twenty-Five Arrived.” The T-box door opened, and she saw him from the side for an instant before he was inside the blanket walkway.
“Hi, Lilah. Are you here?”
“I’m here,” she called to the blankets. “The clothes are through the door.”
With her side of the basement clear of gizmos and gadgets, she’d taken the liberty of laying out the clothing choices on a row of now-empty shelving. She’d also arranged stacks of empty boxes around the clothes so travelers would have a private cubby to dress in.
He came out wearing a green shirt and blue jeans. “Hi, Lilah,” he said. “Please call me Twenty-Six.”
Lilah shook her head. “I know you’re Twenty-Five, Einstein. The display gives it away. Your first words to me are a lie.”
He stopped and swore under his breath. “I screwed up. Yes, I’m Twenty-Five, but in seven days I have a birthday and become Twenty-Six. You’ll know me more at that age than this one, so I wanted to make it easy and skip the ‘my name’s changed’ routine a week from now. Please forgive me.”
“Well,” she said, regretting her aggressive tone, now that she understood this wasn’t “her” Diesel. “It’s best to be straight with me.”
He smiled. “So, the reason I’m here is to lend a hand. Ciopova has dumped a load of work on you, and it’s more than one person can handle, especially given the deadline.”
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