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  Sitting back in her chair, she contemplated ways she could redesign her software to take advantage of all that unused capability. If she could crack that nut—access that idle processing power—her AI would be hundreds of times faster and that much smarter.

  In her apartment that night, she stayed up late toying with different ideas for solving the challenge. When she finally gave up and climbed into bed, she acknowledged that she didn’t have the right skills. She’d need to bring in outside help.

  The next morning, Ciopova sent a single item instead of a list. Lilah was to download a certain software utility from the web and install it on the supercomputer.

  The instructions didn’t mention why she should do this, so Lilah poured a second cup of coffee and sat down at her kitchen table to see if she could figure it out.

  Opening her computer, she went to the website Ciopova indicated. There, someone calling himself Diesel offered an “AI-based software accelerator.” The write-up claimed that the accelerator did exactly what Lilah needed: it ran programs faster by distributing computations across huge numbers of processors.

  More than curious, she started to download the software. But before the download process would start, a display popped up that revealed Diesel’s motive for the offering.

  “This software, provided free of charge, serves as a demonstration of my programming proficiency. If you are an employer, please find my résumé below. I am also interested in hearing from creative individuals regarding a possible tech start-up collaboration.”

  After she checked a box affirming that she had read his employment plea, the software download completed.

  The accelerator came with a documentation file. Lilah opened it and skipped ahead to the part where it talked about the AI. The write-up started with a nice overview and then moved on to describe the methods used. The third paragraph in that section gave her pause. She jumped back to the top and started rereading. As she did, her cheeks flushed.

  “You bastard,” she said as she flipped page after page and saw her work presented verbatim as Diesel’s own.

  To find out if he had used her actual AI code, she launched a forensic tool on her computer and used it to open his software. When she had access, she paged through his work as fast as she could.

  She didn’t try to understand any of it. That would take weeks. Instead, she looked for obvious signs. There. Like her last name buried in the header of a procedure. And there. Her name at the top of the next one.

  “You complete and perfect asshole,” she fumed.

  By lunchtime, Lilah’s best guess was that Diesel had taken an early version of her AI and combined it with a supervisor of unknown origin. He somehow glued them together and added a module of bloated and confused logic—incomprehensible spaghetti code that she couldn’t figure out but suspected was his work.

  As for her AI software, she’d distributed it exactly once in her life, four years ago when she’d been a guest lecturer at a college seminar. She’d shared her work so the students in attendance—talented teens from around the state—could practice the concepts she discussed in her presentation.

  If Diesel had her code, he must have been one of the talented teens. Or perhaps he knew one. Then she kicked herself, acknowledging that in all likelihood, he’d found it somewhere on a shadowy web forum.

  Tucking her computer under her arm, she grabbed her coffee and walked down the two flights to the basement. Her side of the basement served as a clean, well-lit storage space, already filling with items Ciopova had asked her to order for later.

  She stepped through the connecting door and into high-end office space. This side, finished with expensive woodwork and carpet, held two office cubicles on the far wall. To the left, stairs led up to the main level. The finished wall to the right held an oversized circuit box for industrial electric service, something she’d had installed during the house refurbishment.

  Ascending to the main level, she walked to her office, set down her coffee, and awakened the supercomputer. She ported Diesel’s accelerator over and moved to restart the system to make her AI couple with it. To her surprise, everything synched and ran with no additional effort on her part.

  And then the big screen, the large one she used to track the performance of her AI, switched to a new image. The charts and graphs she knew blinked away, replaced by an unfamiliar video world. She couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be—some sort of fantasy scene—but whatever it was had three distinct levels that, like a pyramid, started with a broad base and narrowed to a point at the top.

  The bottom level in the video image consisted of small ceramic-like squares, tens of thousands of them, arranged in a huge grid pattern.

  The middle level of the pyramid was a tier of a few hundred animated creatures. She first saw them as ghosts with tentacles, then decided that maybe they were more like jellyfish. They all swayed gently in place, dragging their tentacles back and forth across the ceramic tiles below them.

  And at the top level—the point of the pyramid—a single jellyfish swayed, its tentacles billowing out so a few strands fell across every one of the hundreds of swaying creatures in the middle tier.

  Lilah studied the display and couldn’t make sense of it. Confident this was what she’d been asked to do but clueless as to why it made sense, she took the next step and loaded the drug-trial data.

  When she issued the command for her AI to look for drug interactions, the pyramid on the big screen pulsed with a flash of color, then faded back to its original dull white. The flicker drew her eyes to the base of the screen, and there she noticed three buttons in the display.

  Stepping closer, she read the button labels: Replay, Slo-mo, and Report. Below the three buttons, written in a small font, were author credits: “AI Framework by Lilah Spencer; Accelerator & Interface by David S. Lagerford.”

  She read her name again and didn’t know what to think. He’d given her credit, though in an odd location for a professional acknowledgement. But the larger issue was that he didn’t have permission to use her work at all, the opposite of what the author credit implied.

  She compartmentalized her ire, deciding to address it later. For now, she looked at the three buttons and started at the top. When she tapped Replay, the image on the big screen again pulsed with a flash of color that faded, just as it had the first time.

  Unimpressed, she tried Slo-mo.

  This time, a slug of red light entered the topmost jellyfish, descended down through its center, then split into hundreds of smaller portions of light as it continued into all the tentacles. The tentacles distributed their portions of red light across the middle layer of jellyfish, who split it even finer as their tentacles delivered tiny bits of light to the ceramic tiles on the bottom layer.

  Bits of red light hit the tiles, and the moment they did, a storm erupted. Sparkles flashed and swirled, pulsing in glorious patterns across the checkered surface.

  Different bits of light turned blue. Then all of them did. At that instant, the bits dashed for the nearest tentacle and started racing upward. Some of the blue bits combined at the middle layer, and the rest combined at the top. In the end, a single blue slug emerged from the pyramid.

  She expressed her opinion of the display aloud, “Diesel, you’re an asshole with a bizarre imagination. No wonder you don’t have a job.”

  Rather than watch a repeat of the slo-mo spectacle, she pressed the last button, Report.

  The pyramid animation disappeared, and the big screen filled with familiar charts and statistics. She noted with satisfaction that the AI provided the correct answer. When she saw it had achieved the result in less than one hundredth of a second, she whistled. “You may be a bizarre asshole, but you have skills.”

  A display to the right on the screen, labeled “Architecture,” showed the summary:

  “Top level = 1 AI”

  “Middle Level = 253 AI”

  “Bottom Level = 64,000 processors”

  The number of pr
ocessors was correct; she’d supervised their installation herself out at the warehouse. And having run a test just moments earlier, she knew her AI still served as the common point for everything going in or out.

  The table said that a middle level of 253 AI existed between hers and the processors. Could Diesel’s software somehow have taken her AI architecture and mass-produced all those copies inside the supercomputer?

  She switched the big screen back so it showed the pyramid display, thinking she now understood it. A jellyfish was an AI, and its tentacles were connections to other things. Her AI swayed at the top, and its tentacles connected to 253 midlevel AIs.

  She grabbed her phone and used the calculator function. If each of those 253 midlevel AIs connected to 253 processors below it, they would cover 64,009 processors.

  The pyramid on the screen pulsed, and a yellow slug emerged from her top AI, the one that served as the common input-output point. The instant it emerged, her phone signaled a message from Ciopova. It was an extensive to-do list for tomorrow.

  4. Twenty-Four and ten months

  Lilah made time to work on the Diesel-enhanced AI every day after that. While she still harbored a healthy resentment toward him because of his casual theft of her work, she had come to respect his contribution to her project. In particular, his software cloned her AI by the hundreds, organized the duplicates so they could work together, then leveraged that capability to solve complex problems at lightning speed.

  Because the clones communicated through a common input-output point, Lilah considered the whole entity to be a single artificial intelligence. “No question,” she told herself in the shower one morning, settling the matter in her mind.

  One of the things she liked about Diesel’s method was that, in the end, the super intelligence was a huge collection of her regular AI. That gave her a sense of ownership in the larger entity, an ownership that grew by the day.

  Until it grew into a need to explore Diesel’s code in more detail.

  She started with the part she counted on understanding—her AI procedures inside his software. As she paged through the code, she recognized her work, but somehow it seemed off. She scrunched her brow for more than an hour before she connected the dots.

  Diesel had coded a four-year-old version of her software into his project. And that made sense because she’d handed out her software program four years ago at summer camp.

  It annoyed her to no end that outdated software—her outdated software—was being cloned to build the super AI. “This is what happens when you use someone’s work without their permission,” she snarked at the display.

  It was a weakness—a flaw—she couldn’t let stand. So she worked late into the night picking out the pieces of the old AI from Diesel’s code and replacing them with her latest design.

  When Lilah launched her upgraded version on the supercomputer late that night, her stomach turned in summersaults. Ciopova hadn’t asked her to swap the code. Lilah had been freelancing, and that meant any problems were hers to solve.

  Holding her breath, she fed the drug-interaction test data to the super AI. When it solved the problem in half the time as before, she yelped in celebration.

  The next morning, when Ciopova’s next to-do list arrived, Lilah cuddled her pillow for an extra hour before looking, trying to make up for the lost sleep from the night before. When she finally looked, she learned that she’d be spending the next week working as an assistant electromechanical engineer.

  A few days earlier, a specialty service company had installed the outer shell of a commercial walk-in refrigerator in the finished basement. And starting today, she’d be working with Duffy Bowden, an electronics engineer from the community college three blocks away, as he began assembly of the T-box inside it.

  From the first days, Lilah had been ordering long lead-time items from far-flung vendors. The fruits of that labor were stacked in her side of the basement. One crate held geometric bowls formed from rare-earth metals and crystalline material. Another held intricately shaped forms wrapped with ultrafine superconducting wire. And containers with big neodymium magnets sat in the far corner away from everything else.

  Ciopova had provided detailed instructions for the build, and all the parts they needed were located among the items in Lilah’s basement. Still, it took six grueling days for Duffy, with Lilah helping as first assistant, to work his way to the end.

  When they finally finished, she looked inside the aluminum shell for a final inspection. They’d installed so much gear in the past week that the remaining cabin space was barely big enough to hold a person standing upright.

  Duffy protested when she dismissed him. “No way I’m leaving before we turn it on.”

  “Sorry,” she replied. “Your contract was to build it.”

  “C’mon, Lilah. That’s not fair.” He moved to the T-box door, and as he stepped inside, she strode to the circuit breaker and flipped the switch, disconnecting the T-box from all power.

  “Duffy, I’m sorry but I cannot accommodate your request.” She pointed to the stairs, her heart pounding. “You’ll have to leave now.”

  Huffing, he gathered his personal belongings in silence and stalked up the stairs and out the front door. She followed from a distance and locked the door behind him.

  Back in the basement, she collected boxes and stacked them near the stairs for disposal. On a final cleaning sweep, she restored power to the T-box. Standing in front of it, she repeated aloud the two questions Duffy had agitated about day after day during assembly. “What are you supposed to do? And how can I tell if you’re working?”

  It had been easy for her to avoid answering Duffy because she didn’t know herself. She was following instructions, blindly in this case because she’d grown to trust Ciopova. The spectacular outcomes of her other efforts had earned that confidence.

  And trust ran deep on this one because Lilah didn’t operate the T-box. All the controls were linked back to the supercomputer. And even though she’d never programmed any instructions for T-box operation, the AI seemed to figure it out all on its own.

  No sooner had she stated Duffy’s questions aloud when the display on the front of the T-box lit up with the message: “Thirty-Five Incoming in 9:59.” A faint buzz came from somewhere in the back of the contraption.

  She watched the display and figured out that the last number was a timer counting down in one-second intervals. Mesmerized by the spectacle, she felt she should do something but didn’t know what that might be. Taking her phone from her pocket, she contemplated calling Duffy, but couldn’t bring herself to face him again.

  With ten seconds remaining, she heard, or more like felt, a deep, muted hum. A growing whine overlaid the hum, then her skin started to tingle and every hair on her body stood on end. The static charge diminished at the same time the display on the T-box showed a new message: “Thirty-Five Arrived.”

  The latch on the T-box door clicked, the door swung open, and a man stepped out.

  “Hi, Lilah. I’m not going to hurt you.” He spoke in a rush.

  Shrieking, Lilah stumbled as she turned to run, caught herself, scrambled across the room, and raced up the stairs at a dead run.

  “My name is Diesel,” he called as she climbed. “Ciopova sent me.”

  She slowed and then stopped behind the banister at the top of the stairs, listening for sounds of pursuit. Looking at the front door, she gauged whether she could make it there before he could climb the steps.

  Then she realized her phone was gone. She must have dropped it in her panic. “I’ve called the police. They’ll be here any second.” She hoped he wasn’t staring at it lying on the floor.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. You know the name Diesel. Ciopova sent me here to work on the AI.”

  She didn’t know how to respond. A stranger—pleasing to the eye, but a stranger nevertheless—had emerged from her machine. Six foot, broad shoulders, trim waist, full head of short brown hair, and a wonderful smile.
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  And no clothes. Zero. With one hand covering his groin, he had asked to work on her prized possession.

  “Sorry about the nudity,” he called. “The machine only transports our body, so we have to come and go naked. There should be a delivery in your basement from a department store. You ordered clothes a few weeks back.” She heard the latch to the T-box door click shut. “If you could bring me a towel or a sheet, I would appreciate covering up. Or I could just go into your side of the basement and look for the clothes?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Ciopova sent me,” he repeated.

  “Who’s that?”

  “She’s the one that owes you eighty thousand dollars.”

  He’d pushed the wrong button with that one. “That’s a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. And she better pay.”

  He gave a light, easy laugh. “Don’t worry. I was teasing. You’ll get the full amount in the agreed timeline. Have you upgraded the AI code in my software yet?”

  “Your software?” She mouthed the words silently, then lost control and yelled down the stairs, “You’re a goddamn thief.”

  “Still teasing.” He laughed again and she found his confidence disarming. “And sorry about the theft. As for the upgrade, if you haven’t done it, I have to. I’m hoping you saved me some time, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Did you test it?”

  “Yes,” she said in a pissy voice.

  “That’s great news. Thanks.”

  She waited, her mind swirling as she tried to digest the impossible.

  “Hey, Lilah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I get those clothes? It’s cold.”

  The stranger knew her name, and knew about Diesel, Ciopova, the AI, the upgrade, about her place next door, and about the box of clothes in her basement.

  “If you want,” he continued, “I can tell you a story that will upset you, because I—a stranger—know something so private and personal about you. But because of that, you will know for sure I am not just some random invader.”