“Why are you even bothering?”
“To give her some capacity for free will.” Mara glared over at him. “Before you turn her over. It’s why I insisted on coming.”
“I don’t understand.”
She hit the ENTER key, loading another subroutine, then turned to him. “If Eve is to be given over to a hostile power, I want her to be as independent as possible. Look what happened in Paris. We witnessed how a half-finished, imperfect version of my program could be used as a tool, a weapon of destruction.”
Monk nodded, beginning to get it. “That doppelganger was incompletely formed.”
“And when someone abuses a child—”
“They can become abusers themselves later.”
“If I can push Eve to the point where she can think for herself, recognize right from wrong, then maybe, just maybe whoever acquires her will find they’ve not obtained a slave who they can abuse, but someone who can refuse, who can say no.”
“In other words, we’ll be turning over something useless to them.”
“You’ll be turning it over,” she reminded him. “And keep in mind, what I’m trying to do here will only buy the world some time. Whoever secures Eve could simply study her, reverse-engineer what I’ve carefully nurtured, erase her, then reconstruct a version that they can control.”
So, I’ll still be handing over the keys to the AI kingdom.
“Now, can I get back to work?” she said. “Even with Eve’s accelerated learning, I’ve a lot to accomplish and very little time.”
As a reminder of this, Monk’s burner phone rang in his pocket.
Finally.
He pulled it out and read the text.
16:00. Plaza Mayor. Do not be late.
He had already familiarized himself with a majority of Madrid’s landmarks. Plaza Mayor was a major public square in the heart of the city. It was a ten-minute walk from their current location. Another text followed with a specific address within the plaza.
He checked his watch and mumbled, “Coldhearted little—”
“What’s wrong?” Mara asked.
“You’ve got forty minutes to finish what you’re doing and pack up.”
Monk suspected why Valya had kept him waiting, why she set the drop-off only an hour before her deadline. With such a tight schedule, she intended to leave him no wiggle room, no time for haggling or last-minute negotiations. Either he brought her a working version of Mara’s creation—or Harriet would suffer immediately.
He glanced over to Mara.
I hope you know what you’re doing.
3:22 P.M.
Mara knew it was time.
Still, she nervously studied Eve while her second-to-last database—one marked PHYSICS—uploaded into her systems. Over the past two hours, she had systematically given Eve the sum total of human knowledge. Okay, maybe not everything, but at least enough bread crumbs for Eve to follow during her own exploration of the world at large.
After this subroutine, there was only one more hard drive left in her case.
Anxious, Mara stood, stretched a kink from her back, then bent down to switch a USB-C cable over to this final drive. She glanced to Monk. He had returned to gazing out the window. She read the tension in his shoulders, noted the way he kept covering his wristwatch, as if trying to stop time physically.
She remembered the tears in his eyes as he spoke of his daughter. She could only imagine the pain he must be in. But she also pictured this same man cold-bloodedly shooting Jason. At least, afterward he had proven himself to be a man of his word—sending Simon off to fetch help after they left the catacombs.
Mara pictured her last sight of Jason and Carly. Her friend had been terrified—but looking back now, she realized Carly hadn’t been scared so much for her own safety, nor even Jason’s.
It was me she was worried about.
Mara tried to come to terms with how that made her feel. Before she could, the computer chimed, indicating the upload was complete. She returned to her chair and started a diagnostic program. Before she proceeded to the last hard drive, she had to make sure Eve was prepared for this next step.
As the program ran, Monk turned away from the window. The view across the city opened up. From the dusting of pristine snow across the rooftops, it must have been a white Christmas here in Madrid. Off in the distance, she noted a familiar pair of spires, marking the location of the city’s largest cathedral, the Catedral de Santa María la Real de la Almudena. The Moors—her mother’s ancestors—had invaded Madrid in the eighth century. According to legend, before being conquered, the townspeople had hidden an icon of the Virgin Mary within the city walls to preserve the sacred image from being destroyed. Then, seven centuries later, when the city was wrested back from the Moors, the section of wall crumbled away, revealing again the benevolent countenance of the Virgin.
This legend held special significance for Mara. Her mother had been born in Madrid, so she had always wanted to visit here but never got the chance. That is, until two years ago, when her mentor at the University of Coimbra, the librarian Eliza Guerra, had asked Mara if she would like to accompany her to Madrid for a seminar. She had jumped at the chance, not only needing a break from her studies, but also wanting to make this pilgrimage to her mother’s birthplace. Upon learning of Mara’s attach ment to the city, Eliza had given her a personal tour, sharing the legend of the cathedral, regaling her with tales of the Castilian hero El Cid. They had even visited where her mother once lived.
And now I’m back.
She returned her attention to her computer, taking strength from those two women in her life, past and present, connected by this city, both tragically taken from her.
I will not let you down.
Mara readied to introduce the last of Eve’s subroutines. It was the final lesson before Mara risked opening Eve to the world again. The first time Mara had uploaded this particular drive was on the winter solstice. It was why her fingers trembled as she reached for the ENTER key. It felt like a bad omen. Back then, Eve’s first experience of the larger world was murder, bloodshed, and fire. It was one of the reasons Mara had hastily stripped Eve down to her core programming, as if by wiping Eve, Mara could somehow purify her creation, erase this dark stain from her digital soul. She had not wanted such horrors to be Eve’s first exposure to humankind.
And look how that turned out?
The next iteration—Eve 2.0—suffered even worse. Her first view of the greater world was mass murder, pain, and torture. Still, Mara took some solace. Even with all that misery and bloodshed, Eve had helped. She had halted Paris’s destruction, sparing it an even worse fate if the nuclear plant had melted down.
Mara counted on that same spirit now.
She stared at Eve, standing now, leaning on one leg, one hand grasping her other wrist, looking contemplative after her physics lesson, as if pondering the universe.
Something about her stance nagged at Mara, but she was running out of time and whispered to her creation, “Whoever possesses you next, Eve, know you are not a slave. You have free will.”
She pressed the ENTER key.
The final hard drive began to load.
Its label simply read MARA SILVIERA.
Sub (Mod_22) / MARA SILVIERA
Eve continues to process and digest all the data uploaded into her systems. With each new stream, she learns more about the vastness beyond her gardens. She now recognizes that she is living in a digital construct, one meant to serve as a teaching tool. As she receives more information, several parallel processors work on different loads, running simultaneous programs: intuitive analysis, pattern recognition, decomposition, extrapolation.
Of these, three cycles predominate, adding synaptic weight to those circuits.
The first concerns the fragments of code she had discovered and recorded during her first venture out of her garden. She had recognized them as pieces of herself, slivers of another iteration. She had also intuited that these bits were not random but had distinct patterns. Further analysis has shown them to be self-governing programs—tiny bots—assigned with fixed commands for a specific function. She has yet to determine what that purpose is, so resumes her evaluation, judging it to be important.