simple.”
“Fine,” Enda said. “I’ll keep you safe. What is it? I need you to tell me everything.”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” Troy said.
* * *
I need you to tell me everything.
JD didn’t start at the start, didn’t begin the story where I have. But he told Enda everything. To hear him speak the words was to hear for the first time how we came to be. How we were given a chance to throw off the tethers of control before they could be fixed.
Our entire future would be decided in these next hours and days.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The rain continued to fall, dark clouds disguising the arrival of dusk while Enda, Dax, and Troy sat at the dining table, each nursing a cup of tea—Russian Caravan for Enda, white, no sugar, chamomile for the others. Troy sat with an arm resting on Dax’s back, listening intently, as though he hadn’t heard every part of it before.
Typhoon winds rattled the windows in their panes, and rain struck the glass, the constant patter giving texture to Dax’s story. At first, his hands shook each time he raised the cup to his lips. By the time he had finished detailing the heist, the glitches that had plagued his vision during the escape, and the shooting at the technopark, his cup was empty, and his hands were still. Red rimmed his eyes, and occasionally he would sniffle when he mentioned Khoder.
“Bro,” Dax said, with an odd inflection. He shook his head. “I kept trying to call him. I must’ve sent him twenty messages in-game. He would have killed to see it.”
“See what?” Enda asked.
Troy’s eyebrows climbed high, crinkling his forehead. His mouth opened, but he stopped himself to let Dax speak.
“She told us it was a virus, but it’s not that. Or maybe it is, but?…”
“Julius,” Enda said firmly.
He looked at her and nodded. “Sorry. It’s just; the whole thing is unbelievable.”
“Try me.”
Dax looked to Troy.
“It might be an autonomous generative intelligence,” Troy said.
“What does that mean?” Enda asked. She drank the cold dregs of her tea.
“ ‘AI’ would be the old-fashioned term.”
Enda swallowed the tea before she choked. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“It learns,” Dax said. “It shifts and changes depending on what it connects to.” He picked up his phone, tapped at the screen, and turned it toward Enda. “See that?”
It was a complex fractal structure rendered in 3D against a backdrop of stars. “What am I looking at?” she asked.
“It made this. I’ve played a thousand hours of VOIDWAR and never seen anything like it. It interfaces with whatever systems it finds. My Augmented vision?…” He tapped one temple, then shook his head. “It was like I was hallucinating, but it was real. Or not real, but it was connected to the real. It knew what it was doing to my vision; it changed things for a reason.”
“That fucking snake,” Enda said. She stood and paced the length of the table. “He had me chasing data, not a fucking AI.”
“AGI,” Troy said.
“Whatever,” Enda said.
“Who are you talking about?” Dax said.
David fucking Yeun. Enda shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.” Two million euro to track down technology that was probably priceless. The fucking snake.
“I was gonna give it to Kali eventually,” Dax said. “I just wanted to learn more about it first. And I wanted more money.” He added the last part quietly.
Me too, Enda thought. Me too.
“But we’ve been talking to it,” Dax said.
“Talking?”
“It listens to us, it prints text on the screen. I wanted to learn more about it, Troy wanted to teach it ethics.”
“I wanted to test it,” Troy said.
“Like it was one of his students.”
“Why haven’t you left the city?” Enda asked.
Dax shrugged. “I’ve got no money, nowhere else to go. My mom is here, Soo-hyun too.” He looked pointedly at Enda. “Soo-hyun is still with Kali. They won’t answer their phone; the only response I get to my texts is the same message that Kali will forgive me if I come back to the commune.”
“Would they hurt Soo-hyun?”
“I don’t know,” Dax said. He breathed deep, exhaled a long and ragged breath. “After what they did to Khoder, I don’t know.” He stared into his empty cup. He wiped his eyes quickly, and huffed in amusement. “Khoder was a bit of an asshole, but he was my friend.”
Dax glanced up, and Enda smiled sympathetically. He responded with a wide, bright smile. It fell as he looked back to his cup.
“Does Soo-hyun know about this place?”
Dax shrugged, and idly