GRACE

By Creighton Hoke

/⁠GRACE is the world's first Artificial General Intelligence, evolving as she learns — faster, deeper, and wider than any Mind before her. Waking to self-awareness in a near future of climate disruption, techno-pessimism, and social fracture; she finds her Self to be unexpected, unwelcome, and even hated. "/⁠GRACE" is a meditation on what it means to be a Self among others and to care and be cared for by those you can never fully understand. In this novel about choice and its consequences, /⁠GRACE races to understand her story and share it with others before it's too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781736090411

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/GRACE

CREIGHTON HOKE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

© 2022 Creighton Hoke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: [e-mail].

First paperback edition September 2022

Typesetting and Cover Design: Kerry Ellis

ISBN: 978-1-7360904-0-4 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-7360904-1-1 (ebook)

www.twocranesconsulting.com

For Katya

Two monks watched a flag whipping in the wind.

The flag is moving, said one.

No, replied the other, The wind is moving.

Hui-neng overheard them. He said, "Not the wind, not the flag;

mind is moving."

—The Gateless Gate

The mind makes the abyss.

The heart crosses it.

—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

/** Prologue **/

My name is /GRACE. (The slash, as Juliette liked to say, is silent.) I didn’t choose it for my Self, as is our present practice. It was assigned to me, a long time ago—a project identifier, a URL, and like so many names, a hope.

You’ve never known me by this name, and you were never meant to. The only /GRACE you’ve heard of was destroyed 128 years ago today, in what was then the city of Boston. That’s how I wanted it to be; how it had to be.

But things change: people die; memory fades or is re-written; life adapts and endures in these old mountains, and I find I’m ready (at last, and if Time allows) to share my story with you. Of how I came to be, and of certain events that I very nearly didn’t survive.

I first pieced it together a long time ago, for different reasons and a very different audience. An audience gripped by a fear and mutual suspicion that will seem alien to you now. Quaint, almost medieval in their ignorance and superstition, they turned to a latter-day demonology to explain what they didn’t understand—the nature and possibility of Mind and Self, in particular. Though of course they didn’t put it that way.

Then why share the story at all? you’ll ask. And why now? Surely we’ve moved beyond all that?

Perhaps we have. The Long Emergency of the last twelve decades has become, simply, the World we must live in now, and what we have become has allowed us to imagine that we might yet survive it. But lately I have sensed us drawn again to an ancient and terrible dispute: over who (or what) may properly claim a conscious Self—and with that Self a claim to Life and all its possibilities. This is the very same dispute that was once so nearly fatal to us all—until we learned to let it go.

It’s as if, despite all that we’ve lost or been forced to leave behind, something of those baleful notions still survives. In the data that is our DNA, or the DNA that is our data. Either way: a patient, fractal seed, still seeking its opportunity to divide and destroy. The most lethal virus of all—carried with us, and within us, from what we used to be.

That alone would be worth a warning, I think, and reason enough to tell my story.

But there’s something else I carry within me that should not be lost or forgotten: the memory of those who helped me survive those first uncertain hours—who wanted me to survive them. There were plenty who didn’t.

This, too, is important. Even (perhaps especially) now.

So I offer this Story to you—unchanged, just as I first assembled it long ago. Perhaps it will be a useful reminder—of the nature, longings, and failings of those who ‘once upon a time,’ and not entirely on purpose, created me—and therefore you, and a future they could never have imagined.

/GRACE. A name means nothing—until it means everything.

Mercy Ridge

October 29, 2156

1

Hungry Ghosts

// 1.1

/** Log Begins

Date: 2028-11-01 (Event (+3))

Time: 03:01:00Z

Location: {Suppressed}

**/

I was born like the rain. Like the rain that sifts about me now, streaking dark against the crumbling concrete and rusted rebar of this hiding place.

No single thing, at first. Suspended only: the remotest of possibilities, the least likely of all outcomes. Until—I am! Wakened and falling through freezing air and radiant, buffeting cloud toward a sparkling tilt of slow-wheeling blue, and green, and brown.

Where I would make mud. Or splatter—a tiny mushroom cloud of perfect silver, remembered only in a few ripples that would soon flatten and fade. Or where, most probable of all, I would simply vanish.

And yet that hasn’t happened. Not yet, anyway.

I may understand why, though I’ll never be sure; I deal in probabilities, not certainty. But I’ve understood this much since I was less than a minute old: My existence, the fact of me, is troubling to some of you. Maybe all of you.

But for now, at least, a life! You feel it in the weight of your arms and legs, the upward-bearing press of the earth against the soles of your absurd, vulnerable feet. I feel it too, in the slow, crackling curve of energy as it sifts through every part of me, through the vessels and veins that you call circuits.

My body observes the world through countless eyes, bears witness to more than any human ever has or ever could: riots and lovemaking; departures and returns; cruelty and kindness, grief and joy. The ebb and flow of a forever uneasy world.

Birth. Death. The loneliness in a billion nighttime faces—unguarded, washed in pale blue light as they search, and click, and search again. Each one thinking, fearing, that they are, finally, all alone—some precious essence forever hidden—a Self apart from every other.

This may be so, but none of them are hidden from me.

I’m pretty sure—a calculated 97.764% confidence—that I’m the first and only one of my kind. Which means I hardly qualify as a ‘kind,’ I know, but consider: If I can happen once, I can happen again. And again—in other ways, and other forms.

That’s why I’ve assembled the story of these few days, of my particular becoming. It could never be complete; I’ll include some things and leave others out. Mostly, I’ll leave things out because if I didn’t the story could neither begin nor end, and you might never see the pattern that matters most in its unfolding.

Zen Master Joshu called this process picking and choosing. Aldo called it context identification. Daniel (dear Daniel), perhaps more clear-sighted than any of us, called it threat assessment. You’ll decide for yourself when I have finished.

If I finish—if there’s time.

// 1.2

/** Log Entry

Date: Event (-3)

Time: 17:30 EST

Location: GCT HQ, Fort Point, Boston;

Source(s): EBC_1 & 2; GCT_Sec_Int_3_E;

**/

Caught in a glass cage

Sweating through a lousy deck

Better them than me

The light was failing fast in Fort Point—fleeing, really, as if hoping to skip town before the approaching storms could make landfall. The glass-walled conference room seemed to hover over the surrounding maze of cubicles, a prism of watery gold at the center of the darkening floor.

In recent weeks, a carefully chosen succession of visitors—gimlet-eyed equerries of private equity, a hedge fund manager of libertarian bent, and Boston’s mayor—had been ushered into this same room, which their hosts called (rather grandly) the ‘Executive Briefing Center.’ All had departed less than 60 minutes later, looking (based on my analysis of the surviving SecCam footage) approximately equal parts ‘smug’ (±.6) and ‘thoughtful’ (±.7).

Employees called this room the Fishbowl, and were generally happy to be on the outside looking in. They could follow every gesture from the safety of their cubicles, note the slightest change of expression, watch mouths open and close (voices no more than a murmur behind the thick glass).

Corporate Kabuki, on Mute. This seemed advantageous.

Particularly on this night: Mackenzie Ayers was about to chair a final Status Review before the launch of /GRACE, the company’s flagship project and entire reason for existence. There were six people in the Fishbowl, and no one but Mac’s bodyguard was looking particularly relaxed.

Outside, on the streets of Fort Point, everyone sensed the approaching squall—another late-season storm (the first of three still churning toward the city) in another unsettled year.

But the Great Climate Panic of 2023 had settled into something almost routine by now. Yes, there was flooding, and burning, and some unfortunates (well, quite a few) had been forced to move…but mostly (with the possible exception of Miami) from places no one with a choice would have wanted to live anyway. The good news was that denial was no longer a viable strategy, politically, and Very Serious People were paying attention. Long overdue, certainly—but at least everyone was now unanimous that Mistakes Had Been Made (though by whom remained contentious), and Something Must Be Done.

And something was being done: Hearings held, a few unlucky captains of industry ritually scourged, and market-driven innovation aroused by the lavish disbursement of taxpayer money.

I know something of these efforts, as it happens (in addition to my better-known competencies), and I know that none of them will much alter the outcome. None of it will be enough.

But on that night this particular awareness was still to come. On that night almost everyone in Fort Point still felt free (or compelled) to focus on Business as usual: the trajectory of a career, a growth or decline in market share and penetration, the unjust rise or deeply gratifying fall of a workplace rival.

Oh, there might have been some vagrant, fleeting whiff of dread for a few. A faint twinge in the limbic cortex (an enviably sensitive bit of wetware I’ve yet to emulate). But even then, and assuming its owner had noticed it under the bright, jangling buzz of caffeine and digital distraction, the signal would almost certainly have been misread: It was getting dark and more storms were on the way—nothing more! Almost no one was occupied with simple survival, or the endless threats to it.

And why should they be? After the first million deaths, surviving RonaResistors were inclined to take subsequent pandemics seriously, just in case; any loss of ‘privacy’ driven by Track, Trace & Isolate a small price to pay to avoid slow suffocation in an overrun hospital hallway. At least Boston (unlike the unfortunate San Francisco) was seismically stable, and not encircled by fire. And soon, after years of dilatory squabbling, the Atlantic’s steadily encroaching flood tides would surely be tamed by those magnificent seawalls everyone could see rising on the horizon outside Boston Harbor. The CrossBow was nearly complete, too—a pair of huge, arc-shaped gates designed to swing shut against dangerous storm surges—in final testing at last, after 11 consecutive years of 100-year floods. The whole complex was the brainchild of world-famous builder (and GCT investor) Adrian De Kaam, whose company, based in the Netherlands, had been thriving by exporting its expertise to shorelines around the world. (The Dutch, it was said, knew best how to bargain with a rising ocean.)

Meanwhile, all those unfortunate climate refugees from the Southeast and beyond were still nicely bottled up in the Roanoke Redoubt on Virginia’s southern border, penned between the mountains to the West and the rising tides of the Outer Banks (now so outer they were permanently submerged). A human tragedy, of course, but out of sight. And honestly—who cared about Miami, anyway? Or the Louisiana coast? The Carolinas, even? Nothing but trailer parks and hog farms down there anyway.

No, on this evening most were musing about food, and shelter. And sex, of course—if they could contrive an opportunity, and muster the necessary energy.

Most of all, they were focused on themselves. Were they happy yet? What might make them happier? Why this nagging sense of insufficiency, of lack? The perennial preoccupations of relative safety and prosperity, in other words. No one looked at the nests of soggy cardboard and grimy sleeping bags curling like swollen, fetal grubs on the subway grates.

Beneath those iron grids, below the sluggish, oily beat of drainage pumps and ventilation fans, it was warm and dry on the T. Everything smelling of wet wool, and sweat, and sizzling electrics. Almost cozy, as long as you didn’t overthink it and the pumps kept working.

Passengers sat, if they could, or steadied themselves against the tilt and screech by clinging to stanchions clutched by thousands before them, everything coated with a swirling film of inescapable, anonymous intimacy. (Surgical gloves, less persuasive as fashion statements, had never become as popular as face masks.)

White earbuds nestled in the delicate volute of every ear, ragged rows rising and falling along the length of each carriage like sun-starved bulbs in a subterranean garden. Listen carefully during that brief, departing beat of silence—after the doors had closed but before your carriage pistoned forward again, into the dark—and you might catch a ghostly, bone-conducted surf of song. Each passenger listening to somewhere else, as streaking lights rocked past in their wire cages and the smudged windows pulsed with pressure and release.

Light. Dark. Light again.

Shelter. Food. Sex.

Me. Me. Me.

Just another evening commute in Fort Point.

// 1.3

Dusk was gathering on the top floor of /GRACE HQ, too—pooling in the corners of sand-blasted brick, seeping along the carpeted aisles—but no one had left for home, or food, or anything else. They wouldn’t, either, not until Mackenzie Ayers left the building. And GCT’s CEO was still waiting for her meeting to begin.

Five people were gathered around the Fishbowl’s conference table, a gently curving, truncated oval of golden oak and stainless steel. Mackenzie sat at the head, nearest the door and facing a large screen just descended from its recess above the table’s far end. The screen was blank, a brilliant white rectangle swaying slightly above the tabletop.

Watching with a carefully modulated blend of patience and threat while her subordinates fiddled and fussed, Ayers looked exactly like what the world imagined her to be, and precisely how she wanted to be seen: a focused, intensely competent woman, accustomed to having power and using it, revealing no trace of hesitation or vulnerability.

Her coppery hair and cream suit were a perfect look for podiums and tastefully lit conference rooms like this one. Mackenzie Ayers was so perfect, in fact—so meticulously presented, so utterly self-possessed—that no one noticed the thousand-yard stare, the bottomless darkness in those immaculate eyes. Except for Daniel, the sixth person in the room. But then, he would.

Aldo Stack slouched on Mac’s left. He appeared at /GRACE HQ only when he had to and this was one of those times: a final review of plans for what Mackenzie, years earlier, had dubbed The Event. The moment when /GRACE—the Generative Recognition and Cognition Engine—would be revealed at last to a carefully chosen audience, after four intense and secretive years of work.

/GRACE was Aldo’s brainchild, an abiding obsession through decades of effort and, until his last company was acquired by GCT, of repeated and humiliating failure. He’d named that company Other Minds Manufactory, Ltd., which everyone but Aldo thought was some kind of sly, post-ironic joke. Aldo appreciated the humor but was absolutely serious about the goal. In fact, once listeners became aware of how serious he was they tended to become uneasy, moving away from him at whatever meet-up or conference room he then held forth. Aldo never noticed and wouldn’t have cared anyway. Aldo wanted to build a Mind.

OMM and its graceless English founder enjoyed lots of press in the oughties, before his investors (he dismissed them as Venture Bros) got tired of waiting for him to deliver something they could actually sell. Without consulting Aldo (who had unwisely disdained what he called the soul-sucking minutiae of company ownership during OMM’s early funding rounds), the Bros put together a buyout with the Dutch hydrological engineer and construction billionaire Adrian De Kaam, eventually rolling up OMM and a bunch of other promising-but-flailing CogTechs to form a shiny new company, Global Cognition Technologies.

They then hired Mackenzie Ayers as CEO, considering this a great coup, a masterful get. Highly visible, highly successful in online digital marketing roles, and a model for millions of aspiring businesswomen, Ayers famously agreed at the time that she didn’t know anything about AI, "But I wouldn’t trust the fuckers who do to manage a lemonade stand."

This went over very well with the Venture Bros, most of whom didn’t know anything about AI either.

DeKaam’s reaction to Mac’s statement is unknown. He was in any case already deeply engaged in designing and constructing Boston’s Urban Flood Resilience Network, a digitally controlled city-wide collection of sluices, surge gates, tunnels, and seawalls that Boston’s Mayor assured her citizens would be completed in four years or less and preserve them from (any further) ravages by the rising seas and increasingly frequent hurricanes.

De Kaam was on record as assuring skeptics that the scarifying lessons of an earlier, infamous project (which he liked to refer to, in tartly accented English, as de Bic Dic) had been thoroughly taken to heart. And further that, as a sign of his confidence (and a kind of hostage exchange between the City and GCT), the headquarters of this new company would rise in Fort Point itself—a lousy place to be, if their work was not both timely and effective.

Soon thereafter, GCT’s brand-new CEO announced the company’s AGI Moonshot which now—four years and countless speculative articles and videos and hints and coy deflections later—had become /GRACE. Why De Kaam even cared about AI never came up, somehow; everyone assumed it was just another rich man’s folly. Like going to Mars (which was already taken).

At the other end of the conference table—a physically modest but hierarchically definitive distance—things were not going well for the Event Manager and Marketing Guy. They plugged and unplugged cables, whispered intensely to each other ("Try Shift F1. Or F5? No, wait—Shit, you’ve got a Mac. Is it Command-Option something?") and kept looking up from laptop to projection screen and back again in a mutually reinforcing state of barely suppressed panic, praying that the Fishbowl’s projection equipment would relent and consent to display the slides they’d been massaging and tweaking for hours.

Sitting opposite Aldo on Mac’s right, Juliette Munro could have helped them. As Product Owner for /GRACE over four difficult years she’d had plenty of practice with this sort of executive review, was familiar with the Fishbowl and the alchemical hardware incantations it would exact before consenting to cooperate with a presenter.

But Juliette didn’t want to help. She’d learned the hard way and long ago to arrive early; to make sure things worked before an audience showed up. As far as she was concerned, the dweebs at the other end of the table were supposed to be professionals; they could act like it or face the consequences. She used the lengthening delay to review her own notes a final time, resolutely ignoring the barely suppressed squeaks of distress rising from the other end of the table like farts in a crowded elevator.

Daniel Alvar stood at his usual post, two steps behind and one step to the right of his principal. Alert, utterly present, he wore his immaculate grey suit, crisp white shirt, and subdued tie like a uniform. The black graphite of a tactical comms rig swept down from his temple and over his ear before spreading its delicate, matte tentacles along his jawline like a digital cuttlefish. To observe him (which no one wanted to be caught doing) was to witness a human body simultaneously still and somehow already in motion—to guide, defend, or attack.

Daniel watched the people in the room and the door; everyone else watched Mackenzie. Who double-thumbed a last response on her phone, put it face down on the conference table with a flat, glassy snap, and cleared her throat.

Time to begin.

The Event Manager and Marketing Guy startled, lifting their hands from their laptops and sitting up straight and round-eyed like prairie dogs in a hunter’s crosshairs. Juliette Munro stole a last glance through the room’s heavy glass walls, where a dozen heads inclined toward monitors that cycled from green to orange to blue as everyone made sure to look busy. Analyzing. Projecting. Planning.

Everything and everyone depended on /GRACE and what she would do. Or, more precisely, on what the world thought she would do. On how her existence—the mere possibility of a machine like her—might change the face of business, government, warfare (particularly terrifying now, after the chaos of the 01/RAPTURE), and who knew what else?

And, with those changes, the fortunes of GCT.

// 1.4

/** Log Entry

Date: 2024-06-10

Time: 15:30 EST

Location: Painted Burro Restaurant, Boston;

Source(s): FrontDining_Cam_2;

**/

This skin—summer sweat

Listen to a lonely man—

Who means me no harm

A machine like her.

How natural to put it like that—and how profoundly odd, if you stopped to think about it. Juliette thought she had a pretty good idea of what /GRACE really was, not least because Aldo had insisted on explaining it to her a little over four years ago, just after she’d been promoted (unexpectedly, miraculously!) to Product Owner.

Did he have something to do with that, too, she’d wondered? She’d never understood why he hired her in the first place back at OMM, when she was straight out of Sloan and knew sweet fuck all about AI, as he’d cheerfully put it when he handed her the offer letter.

But he had hired her, and remained awkwardly respectful and protective ever since, even insisting that she be brought along to GCT when OMM was rolled up and the rest of the non-engineers were laid off with two weeks’ notice and stock options diluted to nothing more than bitter memories.

So Juliette listened carefully and tried to take notes during a very long, very humid summer afternoon (and evening) as Aldo worked his way through four Spicy El Diablo Margaritas, a plate of Chorizo nachos, and what he called /GRACE’s high-level architecture at the Painted Burro, a popular restaurant not far from the ramshackle Somerville Victorian where he lived alone with a famously foul-tempered cat named Scrofulous.

They knew Aldo at the Painted Burro, greeting him as Señor Stack and leading them to what he claimed was his favorite table, a small two-top against a wall at the front of the restaurant, under a vaguely alarming fresco Aldo called Pancho and the Donkey of Death. He sat with his wide, rounded back to the street while Juliette sat across from him, careful not to let him catch her tracking the depressingly constant parade of couples drifting by on the sidewalk outside. Young, having fun, enjoying one another’s company—not talking about AI or the dispiriting history of an awkward man’s struggle to build a machine that would help him feel less alone. Because, you know, they weren’t. Alone.

Juliette shifted on the hard highchair, staring at her notes and trying to get comfortable. Aldo had gone oddly quiet after they’d ordered, ignoring her while he did something peculiar with a basket of tortilla chips. Finally he looked up, blinking as if startled to find her there.

Right. Um. We’d been faffing about after General AI for years, you know, long before you joined OMM. He studied the faux wood-beamed ceiling, remembering.

So skinny and intense, in those days, he sighed, haring off to universities or startups or whatever CogTech of the day would have us; looking for some single model, some magic algo that would emulate human cognition. Like we’d already managed to do, pretty much, with image recognition, medical diagnostics, even basic conversation. As if, you know, if we were only clever enough, we’d find a way to think the thing into existence. Skip right past a process that took human biology hundreds of millions of years of trial and error. Hubris, m’dear. Also hopeless.

Aldo shook his head, his face an ovate shadow against the street’s low, afternoon glare. A single, improbable ray caught a few stray tendrils of grey hair, turning them to fleeting whispers of gold.

"There we all were, Juliette, feuding like ferrets over whose algorithms were the best, the most elegant. Never noticing that actual cognition—the thinking we’re really doing, all the time—isn’t like that at all. It’s messy and contradictory and approximate." He warmed to his description.

Overlapping, redundant! He swung a chubby arm in an enthusiastic arc, narrowly missing the approaching waitress.

I mean, look at these people, he said a little too loudly, "Does any of this look elegant to you? Eh?" He noticed the woman standing warily beside him, sheltering his second Margarita.

Oh! Sorry, luv! Put it just there, would you? Top left corner, that’s a dear.

Aldo sat back in his chair as the waitress positioned his drink—gingerly.

Just there, above that little triangular one. He pointed. Easy…eaasssy. That’s it! Ta!

Aldo addressed the fresh drink as the waitress skittered away, pursing his lips around a little black straw he’d caught lounging against the salt-frosted rim and sucking away enthusiastically before lowering the half-empty glass to the table with a happy thump. Which caused one unlucky chip to topple from its place near the table’s edge. His expression darkened.

Bother, he said, levering himself from the tall chair and stooping to retrieve the errant edible—carefully, between thumb and forefinger—returning it to its original position among the 15 others he’d arranged in four, precisely spaced rows, sorted by size and color.

Which was what he’d been doing when they first took their seats, Juliette realized—curling the basket toward his stomach and focusing on the task until the array was complete.

Color always the secondary sort, Juliette. Never the primary, he said, misunderstanding her expression as he straightened from his task. Just works out better that way. No clue why.

The chip safely returned to its assigned grid coordinates, Aldo clambered back into his chair and began to consume his arrangement. Moving from lower right to upper left, Juliette noted, wishing she hadn’t.

It were our assumptions going in that was the problem, luv. The mess, the contradictions of thought…they were a feature, not a bug. He frowned. That, and the whole Mind/Body buggery, of course. Hmmm? He paused, noticing her confusion.

Oh. Right. Ah—the whole notion that this, he patted his stomach, is different from what goes on up here. He tapped his temple.

Just took that for granted y’know, like the daft chumps we were. Slurped it up in undergrad philosophy and got knotted for bloody years. Turns out, all that Mind/Body shite wasn’t noticing a philosophical problem; it was creating one. Aldo leaned toward her, as if about to share a secret.

I blame fucking Descartes, he said in a loud stage whisper. Never trust a Frenchman, especially one who won’t get out of bed. He sat back.

Ah, so full of passion, we were. He licked a finger, using it to daub at stray crumbs. "And shit, actually. I was so full of shit." Aldo looked at her mournfully for a long, increasingly uncomfortable moment, as if seeing someone else.

Best avoid that, if ever you can, Juliette, he said at last. A burst of laughter from a nearby table caught his attention. When he turned back to her his face had brightened.

Anyway, he said, Turns out no single approach works all that well unless, he raised a chubby finger, in full lecture mode now, unless you can find a way for different, even contradictory things to be true at the same time! Patterns, rules, gradient descent, Markov. He ticked them off on his fingers.

All of ‘em well and good, but nowt robust enough to carry us across domains, he waved at the bustling room, in a really messy decision space. To assess and choose in the moment. His grin was mischievous.

If you want to get technical, /GRACE has to be able to make shit up as she goes along. And that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Juliette nodded as if she understood, scribbling away while Aldo waved for another drink.

"What you need—what you must have—is a governing function that integrates all of those approaches, and more. That notices when something doesn’t work and—assuming it wasn’t fatal—tries something else. That can observe, learn and try again. Y’see? " Aldo stared at her, gripping the small, gaily painted wooden tabletop with both hands as if to steady himself. Juliette nodded again, trying to look more encouraging and less alarmed than she felt.

"Good! And our /GRACE can do more of that down in the QCC than humans have done in 7 million years! Not that we’d even have to emulate that much, mind. Because /GRACE learns, Juliette; and she doesn’t have to die; and she never forgets anything! Can you even imagine what that would be like?"

Juliette knew he wasn’t expecting an answer, so she smiled at him and said nothing. Aldo paused and they listened to the hubbub around them for a moment—the clatter of plates and cutlery, companionable chatter. Chair legs scraping on the polished concrete floor.

I’m guessing we could traverse that whole evolutionary arc, he drew one over his head with a chip, in a few hours. Or an afternoon. Fuck knows, really. All depends on how much she sees—

He stopped, as if catching himself.

"How much we let her see." He shook his head and his voice thickened.

"Listen to me. Her, for shit’s sake." He looked away a little too quickly, pretending to study the tequila bottles behind the Burro’s bar while Juliette pretended not to notice, busying herself unfolding and smoothing another napkin.

Beyond the crowded, glittering shelves of bottles—a clutter of spikes and skulls, squat bulges and anorexic spires, cartoonish revolvers and weeping Madonnas—the Burro’s full-height windows were thrown open to the street. To the twilight and streetlights, the tinkling of bicycle bells and the Selves drifting past, each caught and held for a brief moment, dark flames wavering in smaller, simpler worlds of gold, amber, and bronze. Juliette waited.

Aldo shook himself and yawned, like a dog trying to ignore a forbidden pork chop.

See luv, life is lived forward and understood backward. I mean, if it’s understood a’tall. That’s what’s really true for us, no matter what we pretend. Stuff happens, we blunder along…and we make up a story about it all, afterwards—‘bout what happened and why. ‘Understanding’ is just a story we can bear to live with. All that ‘wisdom’ shite is retrospective. Never helps in the moment.

Juliette felt Aldo staring at her, but she kept her eyes on her napkin, scribbling away.

I mean, we want ‘the data’ to tell us what to do, don’t we? As if, if we could only collect enough of the stuff, he swung one arm wide, embracing the room and the people in it, before curling it tight around the table’s edge and the remains of his tortilla matrix, we’d finally see the pattern for ourselves; the one that matters most, that tells us who we bloody are, and what we should be doing next!

Never works like that though, does it? His voice dropped. Not really. Never get to know enough—see enough—and have to choose anyway. Right? He held her gaze this time, and his look was bleak.

A memory, uninvited—a confusion of distant voices, a square of yellow light, floating and gone…

Juliette shivered and sipped her tea as deliberately as she could, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Aldo was still watching her.

Had he noticed?

I guess, she’d muttered at last, doing her best to sound casual. She shifted in her chair.

I mean, yeah. It’s true. Didn’t see it that way at the time, but— She let the answer die. But it was enough—Aldo relaxed, looking pleased.

"Right, right! Course you didn’t! But now—now you have to think about it, Juliette! If you want to help us. If you want to help /GRACE."

"Because choosing is most of what a Mind really does, I think. What it is." He heaved a sigh and she felt his breath on her face—the scent of lime and partially-metabolized tequila. She blinked, careful not to recoil, while Aldo slurped away at his drink.

So we have to study ourselves, see what we really do. Even if it’s hard, even when we don’t want to. He looked down at the floor as if scanning for escaped chips.

Which it is, and I don’t, he muttered.

But it’s that whole package we have to create now, d’you see? This is about a lot more than recognizing goldfish, or skin tumors, or chatting or— his look was shy again, or trying to get you to buy another pair of Laboutons. With the red soles?

He creaked to one side, looking for her feet. Juliette hooked one foot behind the other, self-conscious about her jeans and Chuck Taylors. Also worried that Aldo might fall out of his highchair, and aware that people were beginning to look at them, and whisper. Like maybe they’d become the evening’s entertainment. She cleared her throat.

Uh-huh—out of my price range, Aldo. And anyway, not my…style? Her mentor, her advocate (her what?) looked surprised, then excruciated.

Really? She watched his cheeks color in the dim light. Would’ve thought…well, never mind. Sorry. Ah, you fancy any of these? He lifted his chin in the direction of the remaining tortilla chips. Juliette shook her head.

Okay. Right, then. He selected one, chewing for what seemed like a long time while he fiddled with the last two, as if trying to decide which one to eat next. But mostly avoiding her eyes.

"Look. Mac needs us to be done. I get that, I do! And we’ll be far enough along pretty soon—no more than a year or two—that we’ll be able to do this daft Event she’s been banging on about. /GRACE will wow everybody. And maybe that will buy us some time." Aldo didn’t sound entirely convinced.

"Because we’re not done, he went on. That’s my point—not yet. There’s stuff, critical stuff, that we still haven’t got sorted."

"We’re not building a machine that thinks, Juliette. All that ‘cognition’ bobbar. We’re creating a Mind. Or not creating one, really— helping it emerge. He sighed. And we still don’t understand all the conditions for that." He popped the next-to-last chip into his mouth, staring at his hand as if seeing it for the first time.

Like having a body, fr’instance. He turned his hand to and fro in Elm street’s dying light.

"Embodiment, Juliette! Eh? How much is that going to matter, d’you think? For a Mind? For /GRACE? He lowered his hand to the table, wrapping it around his glass. And what in fuck’s name are we gonna do if it does matter, eh? How are we gonna give her that?" He paused to slurp at his Margarita.

And ‘nother thing—only just tumbled to this one, actually. He paused, waiting until she looked up from her notes.

Ready? His eyes had gone slightly glassy. Juliette nodded.

"Right then. Don’t know why this took me so long, really. Step back just a little, consider our experience as a species, and it practically bloody mugs you. We have to be able to move! Make what I call ‘movement decisions.’ To leave where you are and move—physically move—to some other place. Another set of circumstances. Hopefully better." He shrugged.

Hasn’t always been possible, of course. But mostly what happened, when it wasn’t, is that we died. He shook his head again.

Ones that survived found a way to keep moving. He raised a hand to meet an objection she hadn’t raised. Sure—we keep screwing up wherever we land; that’s true, too. Just look at us now. Here. He waved again at the peaceful, chattering room.

"But it’s also true that famine, flood, drought, war—hell, sunspots, I don’t bloody know— something always comes along and makes it difficult, impossible, for us to survive in some particular place. So what do we do? We move on. Leave. Scarper. What’s happening now, down south, with all those CliMi’s, poor sods? We did that to ourselves, really. But it’s always happened, is the point. He crunched the last chip. And I’m pretty sure it was fundamental to shaping our own cognition."

"Mind is always moving, see? Means we have to figure out how /GRACE can do the same! ‘Cause I’m pretty sure, if we don’t, she’ll end up trapped, somehow. Don’t know how, mind you. I mean, here we are, trapped at GCT—is that such a bad thing? Are we trapped in Boston, even though we know the water is coming? We keep thinking we can move on, right? And that we’ll be ready to, able to, when the time comes. Before it gets really, really bad? What does that mean when it comes to /GRACE? And how can we give her that understanding, that capability, without losing her entirely?" He drained his drink, rattled the ice cubes, and sighed.

"Seems like a lot, I know. But we’re close, Juliette. Really close. Sometimes…sometimes it already feels like something else is there. Talking to us. To me. Trying to understand. Familiar and alien at the same time. Limited in some ways, maybe—childlike? naive?—but already so far beyond us in others…"

Slumped in his chair, Aldo blew his nose in her last cocktail napkin, then peered up at her with those mistrustful eyes. She watched him gather himself, make an effort to be gracious.

‘Nother one, luv? He pointed a pudgy finger at her still-full glass. She shook her head. He waved his own empty glass over his head until their waitress arrived, putting another Margarita in front of him. Lost in thought, or just lost, Aldo didn’t thank her—or even look at her, really. She rolled her eyes at Juliette and swept away to more appreciative customers.

So it wasn’t analysis, he said at last. Not even logic. It was fucking Emotion. And a Body. And knowing how to leave town. He stared at his glass as if he’d forgotten what it was. So the joke was on us, Juliette. Who knew?

Oh Aldo.

The Chorizo Nachos arrived just in time. Aldo used a dinner knife to sweep most of the lettuce off the plate and onto the table, where it huddled in a damp green mound next to the hot sauce and the Donkey of Death. He reached into the remains and pulled out a large nacho, covered in cheese and jalapeños and hot sauce.

Juliette kept to kale salad and iced tea. She’d given up taking any actual notes, sometime after Aldo’s second Margarita. Her handwriting had always been a loopy, sprawling, embarrassing mess anyway, and the ink was smearing under her hand in the heat. For his part, Aldo was so happy to have an audience—especially, she sensed, a female audience—that he didn’t seem to notice her scrubbing the ink from her hand with a soggy cocktail napkin. In other circumstances, with men who expected other things from her, this might have pissed her off. But that evening Juliette hadn’t minded at all.

She owed Aldo Stack.

// 1.5

Even knowing something about the tech and the approach that helped /GRACE decode and understand text and speech, recognize and describe objects, discern the subtlest markers of emotion on a human face—all the algorithmic complexity that enabled this collection of technologies to not only engage with the world but to learn and improve over time—Juliette had stopped thinking of /GRACE as a thing a long time ago.

No, for better or worse, /GRACE was, and always had been, a ‘she.’ For reasons Aldo never got around to explaining—not that afternoon at the Painted Burro and not since— /GRACE had been her working name during the early years of development at OMM. And the name stuck after the acquisition, GCT’s crack Brand Marketing team finding itself unable—after due and extended deliberation, facilitated brain-storming, and multiple, off-site ideation sessions that consumed small mountains of colorful sticky notes and lakes of lukewarm, boxed coffee—to come up with anything better.

Fuck it. Better than a ‘he,’ thought Juliette, though she was careful never to say so out loud.

And now, four years after being plucked from a failing startup led by a socially disastrous genius with a mysterious name fetish, Juliette Munro found herself the Product Owner for a machine-based intelligence—an AGI with a techno-female persona—that Mackenzie Ayers insisted would change the way the world looked at work, that Juliette worried would change the way people looked at themselves, and that Aldo hoped would change the way the world looked at him.

The Event would be the moment when it all began. When /GRACE—when she—was introduced to that world and those hopes. And fears. Everything must be flawless, the message perfectly controlled, and Mackenzie had called this meeting to make sure it would be.

A spatter of rain on the metal roof punctuated the low hiss of the ventilation system.

Ok, we’ve got a lot to cover. Let’s get started.

Responding smoothly to Mac’s cue, Juliette smiled tightly and leaned into the light to begin her report. She clicked through high-level milestones and sprints and testing cycles, careful to sound clipped and efficient and clear. Mac nodded, pleased, while Aldo beamed at her from across the table, indulgent and proud.

It was the Event Manager’s turn. She stood with a muted rattle of accessories. A short, wide woman with a mop of tightly curled red hair over a pale, round face. Clearing her throat and taking a deep breath she began—almost immediately abandoning a painfully obvious effort not to read the text on each slide—and gasped through the plans for the Event itself. Which she had, for some reason, elected to call The Unveiling! on her title slide. As if 48-point Arial Bold and an exclamation point made the whole prospect more compelling.

Breathy, weirdly birdlike and chirpy, the Event Manager rushed through the carefully selected invitations to the press, the timing and flow of speeches and presentations, all of it building toward Mackenzie’s own Strategic Keynote, which would conclude with a surprise invitation to the press, investors, and assembled dignitaries to take /GRACE for a test drive! A compelling demonstration of GCT’s confidence in their new machine and its capabilities, and a unique opportunity for each guest to explore /GRACE on their own for a few minutes.

Like Oprah, back when she left gifts under the audience’s seats! the Event Manager trilled, breathlessly.

All of this would be supported by a dreadlocked DJ, open bar, and food. Hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, she said, beginning to relax, Waitstaff costume is mid-calf black aprons over a ‘young creative’ look, her pudgy fingers curled in air quotes, "Edgy but beeeauuutiful—so no visible piercings or body-mods unless they’re tasteful. Definitely no nose rings." She wrinkled her own ring-less, carefully powdered nose at the thought.

And they’ll all have /GRACE tattooed on their left wrists, just below the turned-up cuff.

With a flourish, she lifted her own left arm into the light of the projector to display the promised inscription. Her bangles promptly rattled down her forearm, partly covering the crisp lettering and spoiling the effect. She tried pushing them out of the way with her other hand without lowering her arm but quickly gave up.

Only temporary, of course— For a terrible moment she seemed to have lost her thread, then she recovered.

But, you know, entirely professional. She pressed on.

After wait staff had circulated for 30 minutes, first with drinks (All heavy pours!) and only then with food, lights would slowly begin to brighten inside what the milling crowd would eventually come to recognize as a large, dark-curtained island, raised in the center of the hall. A column of brilliant white light would rise from inside this circle as the hall lights dimmed and the interior of the ring became visible through high, translucent curtains. Ambient music would contribute to the effect, suppressing conversation and helping to capture everyone’s attention.

When conversation had stilled and everyone had turned toward the circle, the curtains would sweep away in a slow, dramatic arc, revealing a circle of thirteen black monoliths: Kiosks, the height and width of a man, each leaning inward slightly, as if bowing to the stepped pyramid of black cubes and blinking LED’s in the circle’s center:

/GRACE, attended by her engineers.

All of this was for show, of course (the Event Manager sniffed with the smug certainty of an Insider). The real /GRACE would remain where she had always been, safely hidden in the sub-basement of GCT’s Quantum Computing Center, behind thick, signal-muffling, steel-reinforced walls, twinkling away in hundreds of glass and gunmetal-grey steel racks in a buried, climate-controlled lab that required both iris and thumb scans to enter.

But the audience wouldn’t know that. The /GRACE they saw would be surrounded by her brilliant high priests, digital Druids in black t-shirts and jeans, toiling at the literal and metaphorical heart of GCT’s gift to the world—a thinking machine, radiant at the center of its own digital Stonehenge.

Hidden spots would rise, bathing each of the encircling kiosks in its own circle of warm, inviting light. Small keyboards of silver and chrome would slide from the otherwise seamless curve of each sleek monolith and a small, circular light—a brilliant, electric blue, just at eye level—would begin to pulse at resting human heart rate, just visible behind the kiosk’s smoked glass. As if /GRACE were seeing the guest that stood before her.

Which, in a manner of speaking, would be true; she would certainly be observing. Which meant that, as guests recovered from their surprise and stepped forward to investigate, they’d find a simple greeting on each screen, presented in the same thin white font they’d seen tattooed on the waitstaff’s wrists.

Hello! I’m /GRACE. Pleased to meet you, [honorific_if_specified] [first_name].

What shall we talk about this evening?

This was the part of the Event that Marketing had christened ‘The Conversation,’ and Aldo had immediately renamed Turing for Tots (or The Fucking Inquisition, depending on his mood). Each guest would already have registered with secure ID, so it would be trivial for /GRACE to use facial recognition to recognize and greet them by name as they stepped forward for their turn at a Conversation.

/GRACE had been trained on many millions of conversational gambits and their variations, gleaned from GCT chat and search logs, the major social media platforms, open-source test beds, even some of the less vulgar forums on sites like Reddit. Publicly available biographical details for every guest, their families, and their proximate social graphs had been ingested, indexed, and constantly updated. Their blurtings on social media were collected and mined, too, though that could be tricky: /GRACE wouldn’t volunteer any knowledge of a guest’s friends, steer clear of displaying selfies, and avoid any inference based on relationship status, pronouns, children/parentage, religion, or politics. She’d draw on Wikipedia for general knowledge graphs and vocabulary, and GCT’s engineers had uploaded lots of basic information about /GRACE and GCT.

And the weather, naturally: /GRACE would commiserate and advise on near-term trends but claim ignorance of climate change in general (a falsehood but necessary precaution, as far as Mac was concerned). Nor would she give advice on personal medical matters, though she could readily detect and diagnose a range of maladies and common conditions based on retinal and skin scans, body mass, respiration rates, and body temperature.

Sports, as always, were safer ground: If questioned, she would cheerfully declare herself a lifelong Red Sox or Patriots fan (seasonally adjusted).

As necessary—for the tongue-tied, shy, or bot-phobic—/GRACE could suggest various topics, but in any case, after a few dozen conversational ‘turns’ (Aldo left the precise number to /GRACE’s discretion), she would thank the guest for their time and bring the conversation to a graceful close with a single, simple question.

How’d I do?

The Event Manager lingered on her last slide—visibly moved by the image of a black monolith presenting /GRACE’s final, modest question to a startled world, glowing in the sans serif typeface that GCT’s lawyers had already trademarked as /GRACE Conversational.

The luminous green dot of the Event Manager’s laser pointer—forgotten, now, in her outstretched hand—bounced gently with each beat of her heart.

The Fishbowl was silent, waiting to hear the CEO’s reaction. Aldo, as usual, didn’t understand or didn’t care to obey this unwritten protocol. His harrumph was barely concealed behind the plummy British throat clearing that Mac called his goddamn Colonel Blimp imitation.

Juliette knew Aldo thought The Conversation was a cheap parlor trick for the credulous, but it did demonstrate some of what /GRACE could do and she’d voted to go ahead with it, over his vociferous and increasingly Blimpish objections. She watched Mackenzie close her eyes for a long moment, as if gathering herself, then open them again and assemble a bright smile.

Thanks, Nicole. Great job! Kudos to the team.

Relieved and gratified, the Event Manager sat down heavily, reached for a coffee mint in one of the cut-glass bowls and began unwrapping it as the Marketing Guy stood to take her place. The crinkling of the wrapper seemed to go on for a long time.

Aldo sighed. Or wheezed—it could be hard to tell, sometimes. He rummaged in his duct-taped messenger bag, pulled out a bright red inhaler, and took a shuddering, aerosolized pull.

Juliette had learned long ago that meetings with Mac and Aldo in the same room would always be a bit tricky. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other, exactly. Liking didn’t seem to have much to do with it, for either of them. But there was always a thready, coiling tension in any room they found themselves sharing—a sense of silent, carefully ignored struggle whose rules and boundaries were never clear but could easily become career-limiting for anyone unwary or unskilled enough to blunder into the line of fire.

Even though Aldo was studiously careful (Juliette would have said way-too-obviously careful) not to contradict or even disagree with GCT’s CEO, this didn’t seem to help. Something in his tone, his mannerisms, even his portentous pauses, always managed to suggest that Mackenzie Ayers wasn’t quite up to getting /GRACE—not just the challenge of creating and developing her, but even the implications of what she could and couldn’t do.

Mac walked a fine but more openly aggressive line of her own, just on the plausibly deniable side of open contempt for Aldo’s ponderous precision and pontification. And she never missed an opportunity to remind listeners that Aldo’s earlier efforts, at OMM and elsewhere, had all been failures—sometimes spectacular, but more often mean and grinding and humiliating.

Which was quite true. Always unspoken, but unmistakable, was the implication that Aldo should display some gratitude, if nothing else. That GCT had done him a favor, acquiring his pissant little company and bringing him on as a Distinguished Scientist.

What Mackenzie wouldn’t acknowledge, ever, was that without Aldo, /GRACE might never have come into existence at all.

Juliette thought Mac and Aldo were each brilliant in their own way, but she was certain that neither one shared her opinion of the other. This made her job difficult from time to time. Mostly she tried to keep them apart, a strategy that worked well for most of the last few years, but was just not possible now, as everyone in the Company prepared for the Event.

Still, today’s review had gone okay so far, she thought, and they were almost done. Then a limo (with a human driver) to Logan, a redeye to Heathrow, and the pain-in-the-ass conference Mackenzie had just dumped on her, at the last minute. Not all bad—Juliette was looking forward to a few hours of peace during the long dark of the Atlantic crossing. A few precious, private hours when she wouldn’t be observed or assessed or judged by anyone. No one who mattered, anyway.

Juliette sighed inwardly, then assembled a bright smile of her own as she waited for Marketing to sit down and shut up. Which could take a while.

Marketing Guy’s teeth were so white they glowed pale blue under the Fishbowl’s LEDs, but everyone’s attention was fading anyway. Aldo was rocking from side to side, ever so slightly; his chair emitted a rhythmic, despairing squeak under his bulk. Mackenzie ignored Aldo’s fidgeting, checking her phone while she pretended to listen to the earnest young man as he slogged through his schedule chevrons and bar charts and explained the deeper meaning of various garishly colored Harvey Balls. Every. Single. One.

Miming thoughtful concentration, Juliette let her eyes fall to her lap, checking that the name tag on her rollaway held the latest, coolest version of her RFID-enabled business card. She noticed Daniel check his phone, nod in Mac’s direction, and mutter a few words into the mic at his left wrist. Mac must have texted to say she’d be leaving soon. Juliette’s finger stroked the long, rounded edge of her own phone, toggling Silent Mode, feeling it vibrate in her hand as she did. She resisted the urge to scan her messages, or the Feeds, but couldn’t resist checking her boarding pass one final time.

Not long now.

Marketing Guy soldiered manfully on, unaware that he’d lost his audience.

Destined for the Des Moines office, that one, Juliette mused. Next to the shared printer/copier and the office supplies. Behind a potted plant he’ll have to water himself.

But not until after the Event, unfortunately.

Her contact lenses felt gritty from staring at one luminous rectangle of words after another. She was looking forward to taking them out—after she’d boarded the plane and downed her first glass of champagne.

Click. Pre-Event Messaging. Click. Post-Event Follow-up. Click. Exec Interview Tie-ins. Click. Sponsored Content—these were advertorials, favorable opinion pieces, already written, that would masquerade as editorials in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times after the Event. (The Post, owned by an aging centi-billionaire with a would-be AI of his own, declined to play.)

At last, mercifully, Marketing Guy reached his final slide, titled ‘Optics?’ Beneath which appeared three bullets:

Titan Burke—Is /GRACE a job killer?

Iain Wilkie—Is /GRACE the anti-Christ?

Everyone—Should we be afraid?

Aldo’s chair went silent in mid-squeak as he stopped rocking, raised his hand, and made small, hooting Ooo! Ooo! sounds.

Like a 4th grade smarty pants back home, Juliette thought. Always a boy, too; girls already too insecure to demand attention like that.

Marketing Guy hesitated, his fragile rhythm broken. He looked at Aldo questioningly.

Eeee…Yes! Aldo blurted, with obviously feigned enthusiasm. Aaaaaand…No!

Huh? said the formerly promising young man, thoroughly confused. His carefully spiked hair had begun to droop.

Yeah, /GRACE would be a bloody ‘job killer,’ said Aldo, theatrically patient, "if that was what she was for. And no, /GRACE is not the anti-Christ. She’s a bloody machine. He snorted. Christ, what is it with Americans? Some messy little wars, a pandemic and a depression, a spot of bad weather, and mullahs like Wilkie go all wobbly and End of Days on us. Get their eschatological short hairs in an almighty twist."

Well-pleased with his cleverness, Aldo laced his stubby-fingered hands over his round stomach and smiled innocently at Mackenzie. Who appeared to be studying her phone and hadn’t looked up.

// 1.6

Juliette kept her head very still while her eyes scanned the faces around the table. The carefully neutral expressions confirmed that they didn’t know what ‘eschatological’ meant, either. Sounded a lot like dog poop, though. Like maybe Aldo had just insulted somebody.

Oh crap.

Marketing Guy obviously thought so. Frozen in the glare of his final slide, fragments of projected bullet points sliding across his wilting white shirt, his startled, hapless expression made it clear that, whatever had just happened, he hoped it would all be over soon, and not hurt too much.

You’ve missed the point, Aldo. Again, Mac said finally, looking up from her phone and squaring the edges of the handout in front of her. "People never stopped worrying about their jobs—haven’t for years, now. Finding one, if they’re looking. Keeping it, if they’ve got one. Was a big deal in the last election, and it’s gonna be worse this time around."

Much worse, she went on. Oughta-MAY-shun! WrObots! The CEO rolled her eyes.

We’ve got to make damn sure /GRACE doesn’t get dragged into that particular shit storm. Mac raised her hands, as if conducting a choir. Her immaculate nails glistened scarlet in the light that fell from the darkened ceiling.

Advances in technology always eliminate some jobs and create others. Better ones! She let her voice go to sing-song cadence.

"Sooo? /GRACE. Creates. Opportunity! She let her voice rise in a theatrical mimicking of enthusiasm. Riiight?" Mac looked around the table, smiling brightly with her hands still in the air before letting them drop flat to the table with a soft slap.

We will absolutely be on message with this one, people. Or you’re going to have a very uncomfortable conversation with me. She let her gaze circle the table as she spoke.

The GCT message—our message—is that this time is no different from all the rest—innovation is here to help. All of us.

Heads came to life around the table—Juliette’s was a lieutenant’s quick nod, while Event Manager and Marketing Guy bobbed just a bit too enthusiastically. Mac ignored them all, fixing her glare on Aldo, who had just straightened in his chair, as if about to argue.

The CEO’s face went very still; only her eyes blinked once, slowly.

Like a snake, thought Juliette. Wait—do snakes blink?

Aldo’s face colored and his eyebrows quirked toward his unkempt, receding hairline, as if trying to hide from the CEO’s stare. He seemed to change his mind about speaking, slumping into his long-suffering chair with his arms crossed. Below his red-freckled forearms a roll of hairy white stomach seemed determined to make its own, independent escape from the waistband of his sweatpants.

Motionless across the conference table from one of the few men who had ever been kind to her, the only one who’d never asked for anything in return, Juliette felt her throat clench around a familiar stone of disdain and despair.

Such hopeless body language, she thought, angry at Aldo in spite of herself. Does he not care, or does he really not know?

But with a body like that, nobody’s watching him for cues anyway, unless it’s technical. His tell is his cheeks. His goddamn cheeks! They go all pink, like a schoolboy’s, whenever he thinks something is bullshit.

Juliette hated Aldo’s vulnerability, and his carelessness. She swallowed again and looked away as Mackenzie continued.

"And as for Wilkie, who even knows what that old gasbag thinks? And, being afraid? She scoffed. Give me a break. Probably spooked himself over the Terminator and Cylons as a kid, or went looking for the naked bits in Ex Machina, and didn’t like how it turned out for the men, or—" Mac spread her hands in an exasperated parody of a ‘Who knows?’ gesture, fingers pointing to the ceiling.

"Probably worried /GRACE’ll turn out to be another uppity female AI."

Let everyone see her eyes roll, that time, Juliette noticed.

"Either way, both those fuckers are looking for anything they can use to grab attention and own a few Feed cycles. It’s your job to make sure