Todor could not tolerate any further setbacks. While tracking the pair—hoping the Moorish witch would lead them to her infernal device— they had lost the GPS signal when the two women had fled underground into the subway system. All the team could do was wait outside the Saldanha station—in central Lisbon—where the two had vanished. With no telling which direction their targets would go, they had to bide their time. As frustrating minutes ticked away, Todor had considered updating the Inquisitor General, but he chose not to burden the head of the Crucible. He did not want to report another failure.
He had only met the Inquisitor General twice in his life. The first time was when Todor earned the new title of familiares. Only those who had proven themselves truly worthy were allowed to learn the identity of the Inner Tribunal, headed by the Grand Inquisitor. At the time, on his knees, he had been shocked by the revelation of the Crucible’s leader, never suspecting the truth. Still, he had been honored to have an original copy of the Malleus Maleficarum gifted to him, a weapon to use against the rising filth of the world. Feeling its weight in his hands, he could not stop grateful tears from blurring his vision as he gazed upon the true face of their leader, who smiled beatifically down at him.
Then they met once more—
Todor shuddered at the memory, felt the heat of the blood on his hands. You are God’s merciless soldier. Prove this by shooting without hesitation, without any show of remorse. In the end, he had demonstrated his worthiness, not balking at even this distressing command, not with the eyes of the Inquisitor upon him, judging his faith, daring him to fail.
He had not then.
And I will not now.
Todor could easily blame this current delay on a technological mishap, but he was all too cognizant that any further excuses would not be tolerated. Four days ago, he had used the same type of tracker when his team had followed the U.S. ambassador to the library, planting the device on the woman at an embassy party. While the system had worked flawlessly, his mission still ended in disappointment.
I can’t let that happen again.
Finally, after an hour, the tracker’s signal popped up near the coast. With its position holding steady now, Todor hoped it indicated that the witch had returned to her device, to suckle again at that satanic teat.
His palm settled upon his holstered pistol.
I will not fail this time.
2:04 P.M.
Carly hovered over Mara’s shoulder, noting the jasmine scent wafting from the fall of her dark hair. “Is there anything I can do?”
Mara pointed to the power conditioner on the floor. “Can you check to make sure I’ve got green lights across its board? With all the reconstruction going on in this part of the city, I’ve been battling regular surges.”
She crossed over and dropped to a knee. “What would happen if you lost all power?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. At least on the short term. The device has built-in storage batteries. Making it self-contained. If the power is cut, the device switches to low-power mode. It can idle that way for nearly a day.” Mara glanced over. “I’m more worried about surges, unexpected power spikes that could damage circuits.”
Carly studied the power conditioner. “Looks all good here.”
Mara nodded, her brow pebbled by sweat. “I especially don’t want anything to glitch while unpacking the data on drives three and four. This next subroutine is a delicate process, marking a critical juncture. I want to run it and get it integrated into Eve before we risk moving the equipment.”
From the floor, Carly studied the Xénese device. The sphere’s tiny crystal windows shone with a blue brilliance. “You’ve showed me schematics of Xénese,” she said, “but I never imagined it would look this stunning when switched on.”
“The chips are powered by a laser array designed by Optalysy out of the U.K. That’s what you’re seeing. It speeds up the processing power a hundredfold, while consuming a quarter of the energy and producing almost no heat. It allows my algorithms to run faster, particularly Fourier transforms, mathematical functions involved in pattern recognition.”
“So, you’re computing at the speed of light.”
Mara smiled while continuing to work. It was an expression both shy and proud—not to mention cute. “I needed the power to run Google’s Bristlecone chip, a 72-qubit quantum processor that’s buried in the heart of the device. Consider it the brainstem of this intelligence.”
“And the rest of its brain?”
“My own design. Well, sort of. The higher processors—Xénese’s cerebral cortex—are run by neuromorphic chips developed at the University of Zurich. The chips merge visual processing—pattern recognition—with memory and real-time decision making, both of which are essential to cognition. Each chip mimics the action of four thousand neurons.”
“Like little bits of a brain.”
“But what are neurons without synapses, the gap over which one nerve cell communicates to another? That’s where the real action takes place in the brain. So, I borrowed a technological breakthrough from the National Institute of Standards and Technology out of Colorado. They developed an artificial synapse—a superconducting synapse—that fires at a billion times a second.”
“How’s that compare with our synapses?”
“We fire only fifty times a second.”
Carly eyed the innocent-looking device on the floor, aghast at such power, this amalgam of neuron-mimicking chips and lightning-fast synapses, all powered by light with a quantum drive at its base.
What sort of Frankenstein’s monster did Mara build?
She answered it. “This conformation produces a quantum learning machine. Something Google, Microsoft, IBM, and other industry giants have been pouring money into to produce.”
“And you beat them.”
“Barely. Back in 2014, IBM produced its TrueNorth chip, with 5.5 billion transistors configured in a brainlike architecture. The chip was developed by the corporation’s SyNAPSE program, whose ultimate goal is to reverse-engineer the brain, to produce a neuromorphic computer—a computer based on our cognitive architecture.”
“A digital brain.” Carly eyed her friend with greater respect. “And you built it.”
“I can’t take full credit. The technology was already out there. Somebody just needed to put it all together.” She waved to the glowing device. “But that’s only an empty brain. My real work was in developing the program that could grow inside that shell.”
“Eve.”
Mara stared at the screen. “The true miracle of Xénese is not the hardware, but its ability to house a program that could mimic the amazing plasticity of our brains, one capable of growing and evolving on its own, of altering and improving its own processing.”
“That . . . that sounds . . . terrifying.”
Mara straightened. “Oh, very much so. That’s why my work is so important. Someone is going to follow my footsteps or go down their own path and reach the same end. Either way, Eve needs to be there.”
“Why?”
“Remember that gatekeeper from the AI-box experiment. For humankind to survive what’s coming next, the world needs a friendly gatekeeper, one powerful enough to keep any nascent AI in check, to keep it from destroying the world. That’s why I must not fail.”
As Mara returned to her work, Carly joined her. “And how do you accomplish that?”
“One step at a time.” She nodded to the box of hard drives wired into the Xénese device. “Or one subroutine at a time. It’s all about refinement, first teaching Eve about the world through pattern recognition. Then folding in an endocrine mirror program.”
“What’s that?”
“When it comes to human thought, passion often overrules reason. And it’s hormones that primarily fuel our emotions. For Eve to develop a true humanlike intelligence, to better understand us, she would need algorithms that mimic human emotions.”
“Is that why you made her female?”
“One of the reasons, but after that, I taught her all the languages, as a way for her to learn about culture, and to further shine a light on how humans think. But all of this is also necessary so that she can appreciate the third subroutine module.”
“Which is what?”
Mara tapped a key. From the tiny laptop speakers rose a familiar song, one close to both their hearts.
“‘One Night in Bangkok,’” Carly said, understanding. “The next lesson is music.”
“Remember, it was you who exposed me to this subroutine. You used your love of music to draw my nose out of my algorithms and code, to show me that music was more than just background noise. That listening to music wasn’t a fruitless waste of time, but a way to better understand another’s joy and pain.”
“And that’s what you’re trying to pass on to Eve.”
“Now that she has been taught language—along with human cadence and rhythms of speech—she can understand lyrics and music.” Mara waved to the box on the floor. “The next two hard drives contain every concerto, opera, rock ballad, and pop song composed by humankind. What better way to glean an understanding of us than to study our music, the primary method by which we give voice to our passions. The goal of this next subroutine is to teach Eve the algorithms and mathematics that connect our thoughts to beauty and art—and ultimately to our humanity.”
“Then I’m assuming you skipped Britney Spears.”
“No, even her. You have to take the bad with the good.”