I wouldn’t waste your time with this one. Girls 2 and 6 were more interesting, Nadia—Watt’s quantum computer—answered, flashing the words across his contacts. When they were alone Nadia spoke directly into his ears, but she defaulted to text whenever Watt was with someone else. He found it too disorienting, trying to carry on two conversations at once.
Well, this one is prettier, Watt replied, smiling in amusement as he sent the sentence directly to Nadia. She couldn’t read his every thought, only the ones he intended for her.
Re-rank selection criteria for potential romantic partners appeared in his to-do list, alongside buying a present for his brother and sister’s birthday, and his summer reading.
Sometimes I wish I hadn’t programmed you to be so snarky. Watt had constructed Nadia’s mental architecture to favor oblique and associative thinking over strictly logical if-then. In other words, to be an interesting conversationalist, instead of just a powerful calculator. But these days her speech pattern bordered on what could only be called sarcasm.
Nadia had been with Watt for almost five years now, ever since he had created her as a thirteen-year-old scholarship student at an MIT summer program. He’d known, of course, that it was technically illegal: the creation of any quantum computer with a Robbens quotient of over 3.0 had been banned worldwide since the AI incident of 2093. But he’d been so lonely on that college campus, surrounded by older students who pointedly ignored him, and it hadn’t seemed like it would do any harm … He’d started tinkering with a few spare parts, and soon, bit by qubit, he was building a quantum supercomp.
Until the professor in charge of their program caught him working on Nadia, late one night in the engineering lab.
“You need to destroy that—that thing,” she’d said, a note of hysteria in her tone. She took several steps back in fear. They both knew that if Watt was caught with a quant, he’d go to prison for life—and she would probably be arrested too, simply for failing to stop him. “I swear, if you don’t, I’ll report you!”
Watt nodded and promised to do as she said, cursing his own stupidity; he should have known better than to work in a nonsecure space. The moment the professor left, he frantically transferred Nadia onto a smaller piece of hardware, then smashed the box he’d first housed her in and delivered it silently to his professor. He had no desire to go to prison. And he needed a nice recommendation from her so that he could get into MIT in a few years.
By the time Watt’s summer program was over, Nadia consisted of a qubic core the size of his fist. He wedged her in his suitcase, in the toe of a shoe, and snuck her back to the Tower.
Thus began Watt’s—and Nadia’s—hacking career.
They started small, mainly messing around with Watt’s friends and classmates, reading their private flickers or hacking their feeds to post funny, incriminating inside jokes. But as time went on and Watt discovered what a truly powerful computer he had on his hands, he got bolder. Nadia could do so much more than crack teenagers’ passwords; she could scan thousands of lines of code in less than a millisecond and find the single weak sequence, the break in a security system, that might let them inside. Armed with Nadia, he could access all kinds of restricted data. He could make money off it too, if he was careful enough. For years Watt kept Nadia safe in his bedroom, periodically upgrading her into smaller, easier-to-hide pieces of hardware.
And then, two summers ago, Watt took what had seemed like a normal hacking job, a request for removal of a criminal record. When it came time for payment, though, the messages got strangely threatening—in a way that made Watt suspect the client somehow knew about Nadia.
Watt was suddenly and powerfully afraid. He usually tried not to think about what would happen if he got caught, but he realized now how foolish that had been. He was in possession of an illegal quant, and he needed to hide her somewhere she could never be found.
He’d tucked Nadia in his pocket and taken the next monorail downtown.
He got off at South Station and stepped into another world, a cluttered maze of alleys and unmarked doorways and pushcarts selling hot, greasy cones of fried wheatchips. The steel form of the Tower loomed overhead, casting most of the Sprawl—the neighborhood south of Houston Street—in shadow.
Watt turned toward the water, blinking at the sudden onslaught of the wind. Green and yellow buoys bobbed in the aquaculture pens over the long-submerged Battery Park. They were supposed to be farming kelp and krill, but Watt knew many of them also grew ocea-pharms, the highly addictive drugs cultured in jellyfish. Keeping his head down, he found the doorway he was looking for and stepped inside.
“What can I do for you?” A burly man stepped forward. His hair was clipped close to his scalp, and he was wearing a gray plastic jacket and surgical gloves.
Dr. Smith, as he called himself, had a reputation for performing illegal surgeries like drug wipes, fingerprint replacements, even retina transfers. They said there was nothing he couldn’t do. But when Watt explained what he wanted, the doctor shook his head. “Impossible,” he muttered.
“Are you sure?” Watt challenged, reaching into his pocket to hold Nadia out for inspection. Her hardware burned hot on his palm.
Smith took an involuntary step closer and gasped. “You’re telling me that’s a quant?”
“Yeah.” Watt felt a surge of satisfaction. Nadia was pretty damn impressive.
“All right,” Smith said reluctantly. “I can try.” He peeled off one of his surgical gloves and held out his hand. It had six fingers. “Dexterity boost,” he boasted, noticing Watt’s gaze. “Helps in surgery. Did it myself, with the left one.”
Watt shook the doctor’s six-fingered hand and gave Nadia to him, praying this crazy idea would work.
* * *
Leaning against the bar at Pulse, Watt brushed his fingers over the slight bump above his right ear, the only evidence left from that day. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe the surgery had succeeded. Now Nadia was always with him—at the edge of his temporal lobe, where Smith had embedded her, drawing her power from the piezoelectric pulse of Watt’s own blood flow. The authorities hadn’t ended up tracking them down, but still, Watt felt safer this way. If anything bad ever did happen, no one would think to look for a computer in Watt’s own brain.
“Do you come here a lot?” Squid Ink Martini Girl asked. She took a small sip of her martini, its purplish liquid swirling in the glass like a gathering storm.
Several lines of text instantly flashed across Watt’s contacts. She was a year older, a student at the local college majoring in art studies.
“I like coming here to observe,” Watt said. “It helps me with my art.”
“You’re an artist? What kind of art?”
He sighed. “Well, I used to work primarily in 3-D sculpture installations, but lately I worry they’re a little overdone. I’m thinking of incorporating more audio into my work. That’s part of why I’m here, to read everyone’s responses to the music.” He turned to look the girl in the eye; she blinked under the force of his gaze. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I totally agree,” she whispered, though he hadn’t really stated an opinion at all. “It’s like you read my mind.”
This was the side effect of having Nadia in his brain that Watt hadn’t anticipated—that she’d become his secret weapon for getting girls. Before the procedure, Watt’s batting average had been exactly that: average. He wasn’t unattractive, with his olive-gold skin and dark eyes, but he wasn’t particularly tall, or confident. Having Nadia changed all that.