Even now, the memory of gunfire rang in her ears. Her breathing started to rasp. She struggled to get her fingers to seat the USB-C cord into her laptop. Tears edged her eyelids. She pictured the death of the five women who had been her mentors, who had granted her a full scholarship through their group, Bruxas International. She had been only sixteen at the time, having seen little of the world beyond her home village of O Cebreiro. The tiny Galician hamlet, nestled high in the mountains of northwest Spain, dated back to Celtic times. Its streets were cobblestoned, and most of the homes were old thatched roundhouses, called pallozas.
Still, the modern world had found its way into the ancient village via satellite feed and the Internet. It had offered a shy, lonely girl—someone who had lost her mother to cancer at the age of six and who was cared after by a grief-stricken father—a window upon the rest of the world. While growing up, she had an unfortunate lisp that kept her silent around her peers. She spent most of her time lost in books and only found her voice in chat rooms and Facebook. With the world open to her, she expanded her vocabulary to communicate with this broader landscape, first with the romance languages, then branching off into Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. Though at first glance they were all so different, she soon noted trends in speech patterns, diction, even words and phrases, a commonality hidden below all, that no one seemed to have realized but her.
She tried to explain this to her friends on social media, then to prove it to them. To do so required learning yet another slew of languages: BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, JavaScript, Python. She devoured books, took online courses. For her, these computer languages were just another means of communication, tools to process her thoughts and output them in ways others could understand.
To that end, she had created a translation application for the iPhone, naming it AllTongues. Her goal was not to engineer a utility for people to use—though it had served this function far better than most translation programs out there—but to prove her underlying thesis: that buried in the multitude of languages was a common thread that connected human thought to communication. So she used this new language, composed of zeros and ones, to show the world.
And the world noticed.
First Google offered her a job, not knowing she was only sixteen. Then Bruxas International offered to pay for her schooling. To help you reach your fullest potential, Dr. Charlotte Carson had told her, traveling to O Cebreiro to make this proposal in person.
Mara pictured Dr. Carson standing, dusty and road-worn, on the doorstep of her family palloza. This was before the woman’s diagnosis of cancer, when she still had the strength to make such sojourns. Mara knew she wasn’t the only girl Charlotte had sought out. Dr. Carson was a gatherer of talent, a nurturer of scientific intellect. Even the woman’s two daughters—Laura and Carly—followed in their mother’s footsteps, pursuing careers in the sciences.
Mara had become close friends with Carly, who was also twenty-one. Though continents apart, the two talked or texted nearly every day. While some of their chats were about science, teachers, and school, they spent most of their time trying to decipher matters of the heart, from the mysterious stupidity of young men to the insufferable banality of dating sites. Like human language, there seemed to be a universality to the horrors and humiliations of trying to make an honest love connection.
Carly also shared a passion that was at first inexplicable to Mara, namely music. Before meeting Carly, Mara gave little thrift to the latest pop idol or musical trend. But over time—listening to countless songs sent over by Carly, discovering and falling down the rabbit hole that was Pandora and Spotify—Mara became entranced. She again noted a commonality, how even one of Beethoven’s concertos bore a mathematical and quantifiable connection with the latest rap song. That led her to study music theory and its direct link to the Theory of Mind—a concept fundamental to her own study of artificial intelligence.
In fact, this unusual connection led to a breakthrough in her work.
Still, as much as she owed Carly, she had yet to contact her friend since the attack.
Mara closed her eyes, fighting against the rising tide of grief inside her, knowing if she let down her guard, it would drown her. She again heard gunshots, saw the blood and falling bodies. Saw her friends die. Afterward, she had fled blindly, fearful for her own life. She grabbed a train to Lisbon, hoping to lose herself in the crowded city. Once here, she changed hotels three times over the past four days, paying with cash, using a different fake name at each location.
She didn’t know whom to trust.
But fear of discovery hadn’t kept her from reaching out to Carly.
It was guilt.
They died because of me, because of my work.
Bearing silent witness from the computer lab, Mara had heard the alarming words of the man who led the attack: Xénese must never be. It is an abomination, born of sorcery and filth.
Breathing hard, she stared over to the second black case on the floor. It lay open, its inner padding cradling a sphere that Carly jokingly called the soccer ball. It was not a bad analogy. The device was indeed the size of a regulation ball. Similarly, hexagonal plates covered its surface. But rather than made up of stitched leather, the device consisted of alternating hexagonal plates of titanium and diamond-hard sapphire crystal.
In a moment of hubris, she had named the device Xénese, the Galician word for Genesis.
Still, the name fit, considering her goal.
To bring forth life from the cold vacuum of nothingness.
Was it any wonder such an ambition attracted the wrong attention?
She again pictured the attackers’ robes and blindfolds, heard their justification for murder, ripped from the Bible: Suffer not a witch to live.
Anger steadied her hand. Charlotte and the others died because of Mara’s work, but she would not let their deaths be in vain. Determination spread through her. Up until now, she had been running scared, overwhelmed by grief. But she was done running. Only now did she feel secure enough to check on the status of her work. Still, a final worry remained. In her panicked haste to extract Xénese and its hard drives from the university’s Milipeia Cluster, she worried she may have irreparably damaged the program.
Please. It’s Christmas morning. Grant me this one gift.
Over the next hour, she daisy-chained the drives encoded with her program modules into her laptop. She checked each one and sighed with relief when everything seemed intact. Next, she powered up what Carly called “the soccer ball.” As electricity flowed through a conditioner into the device, its tiny sapphire windows brightened with an azure glow, marking the successful ignition of the tiny lasers inside.
“Let there be light,” she whispered with a sad smile, remembering how often Dr. Carson had used that line from the Book of Genesis—and her mentor’s warning the day before their test run.
But not too much light. Don’t want you to blow up the lab.
Mara’s smile firmed with the memory. No doubt, Carly had gotten her sense of humor from her mother.
Mara spent the next hour calibrating the modules and the main device, all the while monitoring the progress on her laptop. She knew the fifteen-inch screen could never capture the breadth of the world slowly being reconstructed. It was like trying to appreciate the full expanse of the Milky Way by focusing a telescope on a handful of pale stars.
In fact, much of her work was not only unseen but also nearly incomprehensible. It was what computer engineers called an algorithmic black box. While computer instructions—called algorithms—might be definable and understandable, the exact method that an advanced system used those tools to reach answers or outcomes was becoming ever more mysterious. In some sophisticated networks, the designers simply had no way of knowing what was truly going on inside those black boxes. They could input data into a computer and read the conclusion that came out the other end. But what happened in between—what was happening inside their machines—was becoming less and less knowable.
Even their creators could not comprehend their reasoning. Famously, the IBM engineer who built Watson—the computer that beat a Jeopardy! champion on television—was once asked, Does Watson ever surprise you? His answer was simple, yet disturbing: Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely.
Nor did the surprises stop with Watson. As these AI systems grew more sophisticated, their black boxes became even more impenetrable and unfathomable.
Unfortunately, Xénese was no exception.
On the night of the winter solstice—for less than sixty seconds, long enough for five women to be murdered—Xénese was fully realized and complete, operating at full capacity, bringing forth light out of darkness, life out of nothingness.