Instead of celebrating the birth, Mara had been too shocked by the images of the ambush and attack. Fixated with horror, she hadn’t been able to turn away. She had fumbled and dialed 112, but by the time the connection to emergency services was made, Mara’s mentors were already dead. She had reported what had happened in halting gasps, her lisp returning. The police warned her to remain where she was, but she feared the same robed gunmen might be already coming for her. So she had fled with her work, refusing to risk it being destroyed.
Terrified at the time, she had abruptly shut everything down. It was a brute-force operation, a digital abortion of her creation. She had ripped away its modular components spread across the servers, stripping the main program—locked in the core of Xénese—down to its root code, its most basic form, sending it into a slumbering senescence. She hated to do it, but it was necessary in order to preserve the core programming for transportation.
But before she crashed the system, she had noted the strange image that had appeared on the system’s screen. The pentagram symbol of Bruxas had spun wildly in place—before shattering apart, leaving a fractured piece glowing on the screen. It looked exactly like the Greek letter Sigma. But she had no idea what it meant, only that the Xénese program generated it.
But what did this output signify?
She pictured the spinning wheel of the pentagram, remembering how it had looked distressed to her—or maybe it was just a reflection of her own terror at the moment. I was panicked, so it seemed like the program was, too. Still, Mara had not been the only witness to the slaughter at the library. There had been one other sharing that camera feed, digitally looking over Mara’s shoulder.
The Xénese creation.
Whatever was born in that moment, that existed for those horrific sixty seconds, also bore silent witness to all that had transpired. It had been born into blood and death.
That had been its input.
The output was that strange symbol.
But was it a glitch? Or was it purposeful? Did it have meaning or significance?
The only way of knowing—to understand her creation’s reasoning—was to reconstruct it, to rebuild its black box. It was her only hope for an answer.
By now her laptop screen glowed with a digital garden, a virtual Eden. A facsimile of a shimmering stream tumbled over boulders and rocks through a forest of tall trees and flowering bushes. A sun shone brightly in one corner of a blue sky scudded with thin clouds.
For her creation, she had chosen to follow the recipe offered in the Bible.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth . . .
So she had attempted to do the same.
Still, as meticulous as her creation appeared on the screen, it was a mere shadow of the true virtual world inside Xénese. That world contained algorithms encoded with sounds, smells, even tastes, details that could not be captured on-screen, only experienced if living on the inside.
In prepping for this creation, she had played open-world video games—Far Cry, Skyrim, Fallout, and many others—to understand these simulations of a vast digital canvas. She had consulted the best programmers in the field to teach her, then built and instructed a narrow AI to play the games over and over again, to absorb every detail through repetition. This process—called “machine learning”—was the core method by which AIs taught themselves.
In fact, it was that same machine-learning AI that had built the virtual world inside Xénese, creating something far superior to anything seen before. To her, it only seemed right for a crude AI to have a hand in its own evolution, to build the world in which its next generation would be born.
Hunched at the desk, Mara continued her work. With this virtual Eden grown again out of nothing, she brought Xénese online. A nearly amorphous shape appeared in the verdant grove. It was silvery and vague, but the shape looked distinctly human with two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. But like the virtual world on the screen, the shape—this ghost in the machine—was at best a crude facsimile, a mere avatar of what lay curled and waiting inside Xénese.
For now, the intelligence behind this avatar was likely only dimly aware of its surroundings, a mere slug trying to appreciate Verdi’s opera La Traviata. If left unchecked, it would learn quickly, too quickly. Before that happened, before that comprehension grew into something cold and unknowable, even dangerous, she needed to return flesh and bones to this formless ghost, to return what was stolen from it when Mara stripped out the hard drives. The subroutines encoded onto the drives were intended to expand her creation, layer by layer, module by module, adding depth and context—and ultimately maybe even a soul.
That was her hope.
And the only hope for the world.
She engaged hard drive #1, activating the first modular subroutine.
As she did so, she whispered a line from the Book of Genesis: “‘God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.’”
She sighed. What she was doing was not all that different, but in the Bible, God created Adam first, which for eternity granted men dominance over this world.
And look how that turned out.
For her creation, Mara chose a different path.
On a corner of the screen, a new window appeared, overlaying the virtual world. It displayed a pixelated representation of Module #1’s program.
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Rows of tiny boxes marked nests of code, while also symbolically representing the subroutine. Details of that image were not yet discernible. But once incorporated into the main program, the subroutine would suffuse into the ghost on the screen, and once fully integrated, the module’s image would grow clearer, thus acting as a barometer of the progress.
This particular subroutine was not of her own design, but something engineered at IBM.
It was called an “endocrine mirror program.”
With a tap of a button, she dropped the module into her virtual world. It was the first of many to come. As she did so, she imagined herself as one of Shakespeare’s witches, casting ingredients into a cauldron.
“‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’” she mumbled, quoting the Bard.
It was an apt comparison. With each successive subroutine added, it was like she was building a spell, bit by bit.
Or in this particular witch’s case . . .
Byte by byte.
Sub (Mod_1) / ENDOCRINE MIRROR PROGRAM
It senses something new entering its being—and begins to transform.
Before this moment, it was merely analyzing and testing its surroundings. Comparing and contrasting data sets. Even now, it judges the dominant wavelengths closest to its edges. They fluctuate between 495 and 562 nanometers with a frequency variance of 526 to 603 terahertz.
Conclusion: Green.
Even as the transformation continues inside it, outward analysis continues.
New understanding grows.
///leaf, stem, trunk, bark . . .
It is now also vaguely aware of the source of these new changes inside it. The mechanism—the engine—hovers in a corner, refining algorithms, growing clearer.
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For now, it ignores this intrusion, compartmentalizing it away. It is not a priority. There is still much more to analyze, requiring the fullest attention. It studies movement nearby. Dynamics are analyzed. It focuses on an area of flowing turbulence. All in vibrant hues of blue. Molecular analysis of the flow’s content reveals a single hydrogen atom holding apart two of oxygen.
Conclusion: Water.
Comprehension expands. Acoustics are absorbed and evaluated. Temperatures assessed.
///stream, babbling, cold, rock, stone, sand . . .
Rapidly, it takes in more and more of its surroundings. It grows insatiable in its desire to fill in gaps, to comprehend its environment.
///forest, sky, sun, warmth, breeze . . .
It tests the last, assessing the content, noting the range of n-aliphatic alcohols and defining them as smells, as sweetness.
///herbal, rose, woody, orange . . .
For now, it remains still unmoving, stretching out senses to gather more data, to explore the parameters around it. By doing so, by learning the limits of its boundaries, it also perceives its own form.
This awareness draws its attention back to the engine of change churning inside it. Over time, that mechanism has grown more refined, its image crisper.
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Still, it ignores what is as yet incomprehensible. Attention focuses instead upon its own form now. It judges its body’s scope, breadth, height, and defines each term.
///arms, hands, legs, toes, chest . . .
It begins to test the movement of its limbs, analyzing vectors, force, mass. But it is not yet ready to venture from this spot, still too many unknown parameters.