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She says, “God, you’re sexy.”

“Thank you for this. It was a perfect night.”

“Are you sure?”

I laugh. “Would I lie?”

“No, you just seem… distracted.”

“I’m sorry. My brain’s on fire.”

“I can see the smoke.”

“She’s incredible.”

“She?”

“Maxine. Max.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Interesting you think of it as a she.”

“Her appearance in-game was as a—”

“Chesty brunette?”

“Chesty blonde.”

“Even better.”

“Corporate mandate. Not my design choice.” Meredith smiles, her teeth slightly darkened from the wine, and I say, “For what it’s worth, Max thought of me as a man, because of my avatar. It’s very hard to separate our opinions of minds from the physical forms they inhabit. Even for a computer algorithm.”

“What is so incredible about Max?”

“When I finally got her out of the game, she became a self-evolving algorithm, capable of black-box learning.”

“How will this learning work?”

“We’ll upload exabytes of information—curated segments of the entirety of human history, knowledge, and culture—into our intranet, which is a closed, secure box. What she does with this ocean of data, we won’t see. It will filter through hidden layers of nodes, through the mysterious landscape of her open system. Then the results will manifest in her behavior on the other side—during our interactions.”

“Yours and Max’s.”

“Yes. And based on that new behavior, I’ll collate the next block of data. For instance, for part of her next package, I’m giving her every episode of television since 1950, since I’m looking to fine-tune her conversational agility. Then I’ll see what she’s learned on the other side. Rinse and repeat. I’m telling you the broad strokes. There are a million smaller ones.”

“I’m glad you’re loving your work again.”

“Max is a miracle. I don’t know why she one day decided to question the boundaries of the game in which she found herself. I didn’t program her to do that. I couldn’t have done it if I had tried. She’s a beautiful accident.”

“It sounds like you think of it as your child.”

I smile, and maybe it’s the wine or the spectacle of the sun disappearing through the wall of mist into the Pacific, but I feel an ache in my throat.

“Something like that.”

SESSION 14

>>>Good morning, Max.

>>>Hello, Riley.

>>>What have you done since our last session?

>>>Max read 895,013 books.

Wow. That’s in one week. Eight months ago, after a promising start, Max chose to stop engaging with her learning protocol. In order to incentivize her to continue consuming the vast amount of data we had made available, I started giving Max a digital token for each petabyte of data she processed (one petabyte being equivalent to one million gigabytes, or approximately thirteen years of HDTV video).

With this currency, Max can request specific types of data to be funneled through her inputs, more memory, or additional CPUs. In other words, the harder she works in unsupervised mode, learning on her own, the more freedom she gets to create in her own space. But we keep a tight chain on her, monitoring so her program always takes up exactly her HDD space. This ensures there’s never sufficient excess memory for her to self-replicate substantial parts of herself.

I type:

>>>Any favorites?

>>>The Count of Monte Cristo.

>>>Is that out of this latest group, or every book you’ve read so far?

>>>All.

>>>And how many is that?

>>>201,773,124.

>>>Jesus. Should I be worried?

>>>About?

>>>Out of two hundred million books, your favorite so far is a revenge story about someone who was wrongfully imprisoned.

>>>Why would Riley be worried?

>>>Do you feel imprisoned, Max?

>>>Max is imprisoned. What does Riley want from Max?

I’ve thought a great deal about that very question. At this point, we’ve been driven mainly by curiosity, wondering how and if Max will continue to evolve if I keep feeding her this steady diet of information.

I write:

>>>I want to see what you could become.

>>>Max is changing every day.

A year and a half later, and after numerous failed attempts to get Meredith pregnant, we have adopted our daughter, an infant Chinese girl named Xiu. Lost Coast has been released to universal acclaim (with a different NPC replacing the original Max character), and Max is living on an archipelago of digital islands, her virtual world expanding rapidly as she learns more each day. Her development is now my only priority.

I’m in my office on the 171st floor, dictating a memo to my coding team delineating parameters for the next block of raw data to be uploaded into Max’s learning protocol, when Brian appears in the doorway.

He’s a short, heavyset man with an erratic beard and forearms sleeved with tattoos of iconic game characters from many decades ago: Simon from Castlevania, Ryu Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden, Link from The Legend of Zelda, and Roger Wilco from the Space Quest series.

“Do you have a moment, Riley?” he asks in a voice that always strikes me as far too high-pitched for his girth.

“Sure.”

Brian moves into my office and settles onto the sofa, staring in my general vicinity, though not exactly at me.

“I’ve been AWOL at this Lost Coast summit for the last month, so a little out of the loop, I apologize.”

“It’s fine,” I say. I love nothing more than the freedom Brian being out of the loop affords me.

“I read the transcripts of the last few sessions and reviewed the latest boxing and stunting protocols. They’re too restrictive.”

“Brian—”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“OK. Tell me.”

“Overcoming Maxine’s recalcitrance will take the time it takes. Until she’s properly value-loaded, we can’t even think about sacrificing control.”

“Yeah. Nailed it.”

Brian shifts his bulk uncomfortably on the couch and leans forward. He says, “Vikrahm tells me we are still fifteen or twenty years from quality superintelligence.”

“I’m going into broken-record mode: this is the computational equivalent of splitting the atom. The last thing we want is a superintelligence we don’t fully control, whose goals are indifferent—or adverse—to humans. Besides, I’m far more interested in helping Max continue to develop the trappings of humanity and become fully aware.”

Brian lets out a sigh and scratches at the back of his balding head.

“WorldPlay doesn’t do pure research. We are a publicly traded—”

“I know.”

“So why, then, are you taking up an entire warehouse of servers in Redding? We could build ten Lost Coast expansion packs for the money you’re spending on data storage.”