As they both crouched over her laptop, Mara understood her friend’s sentiment. Part of her own motivation to do her best work was to make Dr. Carson proud, to prove that the woman’s investment in a young farm girl from O Cebreiro hadn’t been misplaced. Having lost her own mother at a young age, Mara knew Dr. Carson had become more than a mentor to her.
From a corner of her eye, she studied Carly.
While Mara couldn’t show her work to Dr. Carson, at least the woman’s daughter could bear witness. After the ambush at the airport, the two had changed taxis three times, then took the metro to reach her hotel here in the Cais do Sodre district. Hopefully the circuitous route had shaken loose anyone trying to tail them. Once here, Carly turned her phone back on and texted her sister, Laura. It was only one word—SAFE—then she turned the phone off and pulled the battery.
While en route to the hotel, they had both agreed to secure the Xénese device before reaching out for help.
“She’s so beautiful,” Carly whispered, her gaze fixed to the laptop screen. She absently ran a palm along one hip. “I wish I had her curves.”
Mara glanced sidelong at her. “You have nothing to be envious of.”
Sunlight glinted off Carly’s blond curls, turning them a honey golden hue, an angelic glowing halo. Her friend might not be as voluptuous as the naked Eve, but her gray blouse and slim-fit black slacks accentuated a trim body, lean and muscular from Carly’s years of self-defense training and marathon running.
Carly flashed her a smile. “Of course, you put Eve to shame.”
Mara blushed and crossed her arms across her chest. She changed the subject. “It’s only a program.”
She returned her attention to the screen, hiding not only the reddening of her cheeks but also any hint of what stirred deeper inside her, something she had not really acknowledged to herself.
Instead she watched the avatar of Eve move slowly through her virtual Eden. Her arms no longer reached outward, inquisitively absorbing the data locked into every petal, branch, and water droplet in the garden. The figure simply stood on a rocky outcropping, overlooking a cerulean sea. A thunderstorm built on the digital horizon. The dark clouds seemed to mirror Eve’s expression and posture: the stiff back, the pinched brow. Her eyes reflected the flashes of lightning.
Worry set in. Could Eve already be altering her surroundings to match the mood of her processing? If so, that was far quicker than before, again raising the specter that some remnant of the original programming might have survived the purge back at the lab, a ghost of the first iteration.
Carly reached a finger toward the screen. “It’s all so realistic. Look at the waves crashing against the rock.” She leaned closer. “Why did you put such detail into all of this?”
“A couple reasons. First, to teach Eve about the world through pattern recognition. Most neuroscientists theorize that pattern recognition was our first step to becoming intelligent. Recognizing patterns gave our early ancestors an evolutionary edge, along with most of our abilities today. Creativity and invention, language and decision making, even imagination and magical thinking . . . all can be attributed to the fact that we’re really just superior pattern-recognition machines.”
Carly nodded. “Like how a toddler learns to talk, by repetition, by hearing speech patterns over and over again.”
“Or how IBM taught a program all the chess moves and had the machine play matches over and over again in a virtual setting—until eventually it was able to beat a grandmaster at his own game, seemingly becoming smarter than a human.” Mara pointed to the screen. “That’s what I’m doing here, having Eve move throughout this virtual world, gathering data and learning patterns. It’s the first step to exposing her to the full breadth of the human experience. It’s a daunting task.”
“And cheaper.”
Mara glanced over, more surprised by this understanding than she should have been. Over at NYU, Carly was studying engineering, with an emphasis on mechanical design.
“To build a robot,” Carly said, “with actuators to allow it to explore the real world, along with finely attuned sensors to analyze everything, it would be astronomically expensive. If even possible.”
Mara waved to the laptop. “This was far easier . . . and possible.”
“Still, you said this was only the first reason for building this virtual world. What’s the second?”
Mara watched the storm grow wilder on the screen’s horizon. Her voice lowered, as if she were worried about being overheard. “It also serves as a prison.”
“Prison?”
“A gilded cage. For safety’s sake, I thought it best to grow an AI in a digital sandbox where it could go through this learning phase, this infancy, both insulated and—”
“And unable to escape into the larger world.”
She nodded. “Where it risks transforming into something dangerous and wreaking havoc. So, before cracking open that cage door, I wanted to make sure it grasped and appreciated the human condition, that it had some version of a digital soul.”
“A sound precaution, I suppose.”
“But not necessarily foolproof.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever heard of the AI-box experiment?”
Carly merely frowned.
“Back some years ago, the head of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in San Francisco conducted a test to see if an AI that was boxed up and sequestered like Eve could escape. So, MIRI’s director posed as an artificial intelligence—using his own human-level intelligence to mimic some future AGI—and locked himself into an online chat room, a virtual box. He pitted himself against a slew of dot-com geniuses, whose goal was to keep this human AGI from escaping into the greater world. The prize if the gatekeepers could keep the AGI boxed up was thousands of dollars. Still, in the end, the director managed to talk his way out of the box every time.”
“How did he do it? By lying, cheating, threatening?”
“Don’t know. They never said. But this was simply a human-level intelligence.” Mara looked to her laptop. “What if something were hundreds, if not millions, of times smarter?”
Carly studied the screen, her face less enamored and more worried. “Hopefully, you’ll prove to be a better gatekeeper.”
“I did all I could. Back at the university, I had additional safeguards in place. When the Xénese device was locked into the Milipeia Cluster, I ringed it with hardware engineered with apoptotic components.”
“Apoptotic?”
“Death codes.”
Carly stared at the glowing device on the floor. “In other words, you circled Xénese with a deadly moat, further entrapping what was growing inside it.”
“But no longer.” Mara looked to her friend for support on her decision. “I had to remove the device from that circle of protection. I had no choice. I couldn’t risk my program falling into the wrong hands.”
Carly nodded. “And you’ve given us a chance to learn what it had been trying to communicate at the end.”
Mara stared over at her friend. Tears threatened. “I . . . I owed it to your mother—to the others—to at least try.”
The five women of Bruxas, who granted Mara her scholarship and forever changed her life, each held a special place in her heart. Dr. Hannah Fest’s stern Teutonic practicality. Professor Sato’s gentle manners. Dr. Ruiz’s ribald humor. And of course, Mara’s local confidante and confessor, Eliza Guerra, the head of Joanina Library at the university in Coimbra. Mara spent countless hours—often deep into the night—with the librarian, talking, sharing, laughing.
All of that love gone.
“I had to take the risk,” she repeated. “For all of them.”
Carly took her hand, the warmth of her palm reassuring her. “I would’ve done the same. My mom would’ve, too.”
Tears finally broke.
Carly pulled her into a hug. Mara trembled—and not just from the solace found in those strong arms.
“I needed to know the truth,” she whispered to her friend. “About who murdered them. And why?”
2:01 P.M.
“We’re not far,” the technician said from the back of the Mercedes van. “Signal remains strong.”
Todor Y?igo swiveled the front passenger seat around to glare at Mendoza, the team’s electronics expert. The thin, mustached Castilian balanced an iPad on his knee. It displayed a colored map of Lisbon.
Mendoza leaned forward and held out the device. A small red blip shone on the screen. “Wherever they are, it looks like they’re staying put this time.”
Todor studied the map. “They’re holed up in the Cais do Sodre district.” He turned to the driver. “How long to get there?”
“Twenty-five minutes.”
He tossed the iPad back at the tech. “Let me know if they move.”
“Sí, Familiares.”