“It’s been a few years,” said Mom. “I thought we were friends. But after David died, you never even called.”

Maddie last saw Dr. Waxman at a party at the Logorhythms office, where he had been cheerful and effusive, and told her how close he and her father were and how important her father was to the company.

“I’ve been busy,” Dr. Waxman said. He didn’t look Mom in the eye.

Mom stepped aside to let him in. Maddie and her mother sat down on the couch while Dr. Waxman took the chair across from them. He set down his briefcase on the coffee table and opened it, taking out a laptop computer. He turned it on and began to type.

Maddie couldn’t hold back any more. “What are you doing?”

“Establishing an encrypted connection back to Logorhythms’s secure computing center.” His tone was clipped, angry, as though every word was being ripped out of him against his will.

Then he turned the screen toward them: “We’ve installed the linguistic processing unit—withholding it clearly didn’t work, so what’s the point? You can talk to him through this camera. He’ll write back in text—though he seems to still prefer emoji for some ideas. I imagine a synthesized voice is the last thing you want to hear right now.

“There may be some glitches, as the simulation for the neural patterns for linguistic processing is still new and unstable.”

• • • •

“David?”

All the faces of you—the phases of you. I will never be tired of them; have enough of them all every entire. The lingering light of a September afternoon; the smell of popcorn and hotdogs. Nervous. Will you or won’t you? The promise of the premise. Then I see you. And there is no more holdback suspense doubt. A softness that curls into me, fits me in all the right places. Complete. Warm. Sweet. I will yes I will yes.

“Dad!”

Little fingers, delicate, ramified tendrils reaching extending stretching reaching into the dark ocean that you once drifted in; a smile the heat of a thousand suns.

I cannot conceive you. A missing presence, a wound in the mouth of the heart that the tongue of the will cannot stop probing. I have always have missed missed missed you, my darling.

“What

happened

to him?”

“He died. You were there, Ellen. You were there.”

“Then

what

is this?”

“I suppose you’d call this an example of unintended consequences.”

“You’d better start making some sense.”

More text scrolled across the screen:

Integrating placement and routing; NP-complete; three-dimensional layout; heuristics; fit and performance; a grid, layers, the flow of electrons in a maze.

“Logorhythms supplies the world’s best chips for high-volume data processing. In our work, we often face a class of problems where the potential solution space is so vast, so complicated, that it’s impractical for even our fastest computers to find the best solution.”

“NP-complete problems,” said Maddie.

Dr. Waxman looked at her.

“Dad explained them to me.”

That’s my girl.

“Right. They show up in all kinds of applications: circuit layout, sequence alignment in bioinformatics, set partitioning, and so on. The thing is, while computers have trouble with them, some humans can come up with very good solutions—though not necessarily the best solution—very quickly. And David was one of them. He had a gift for circuit layout that our automated algorithms could not touch. That was why he was considered our most important resource.”

“Are you talking about intuition?” her mother asked.

“Sort of. When we say ‘intuition,’ often what we mean are heuristics, patterns, rules-of-thumb that can’t be articulated because they’re not consciously understood as such. Computers are very fast and very precise; humans are fuzzy and slow. But humans have the ability to extract

insight

from data, to detect patterns that are useful. It’s something that we’ve had trouble recreating with pure artificial intelligence.”

Maddie felt a chill in the pit of her stomach.

“What does this have to do with my dad?”

Faster, faster. Everything is so slow.

Dr. Waxman avoided looking at her. “I’m getting to that. But I have to explain the background to you—”

“I think you’re just dragging this out because you’re ashamed of what you’ve done.”

Dr. Waxman stopped.

My girl.

Dr. Waxman gave a light chuckle, but there was no mirth in his eyes. “She’s impatient, like you.”

“Then get to the point,” Mom said. Dr. Waxman started at the icy intensity in her voice. Maddie reached for her mother’s hand. Her mother squeezed back, hard.

Dr. Waxman took a deep breath, blew it out. “All right,” he said in a resigned monotone. “David was ill; that was true. You remember that he died during surgery, the final attempt to save him that you were told had very little chance of success?”

Mom and Maddie nodded together. “You said only the clinic at Logorhythms could do it because it was so advanced,” Mom said. “We had to sign those liability waivers for you to operate.”

“What we didn’t tell you was that the surgery wasn’t intended to save David’s life. His condition had deteriorated to the point that the world’s best doctors couldn’t have saved him. The surgery was a deep scan of his brain, meant to save something else.”

“A

deep scan

? What does that mean?”

“You’ve probably heard that one of Logorhythms’s moonshot projects is to completely scan and encode the neural patterns of a human brain and to recreate them in software. It’s what the Singularity nuts call ‘consciousness uploading.’ We’ve never succeeded—”

“

Tell me

what

happened to my husband!

”

Dr. Waxman looked miserable.

“The scan, because it needs to record neural activity with such detail… requires destruction of the tissue.”

“

You cut up his brain?

” Mom lunged at Dr. Waxman, who held up his hands in a vain attempt to defend himself. But the screen had come alive again, and so she stopped.

There was no pain. No no no pain. But the undiscovered country, oh, the undiscovered country country.

“He was dying,” said Dr. Waxman. “We were absolutely certain of that before I made the decision. If there was a chance to preserve something of David’s insights, his intuition, his skill, however slim, we wanted—”

“You wanted to keep your top engineer as an algorithm,” said Maddie, “like a brain in a jar. So that Dad would go on working for you, making money for you, even after he died.”

Die, die, die. DIE.

Hate.

Dr. Waxman said nothing, but he lowered his face and hid it in the palms of his hands.

“Afterward, we were very careful. We tried to re-encode and simulate only the patterns we believed had to do with circuit layout and design—our lawyers wrote us a memo assuring us that we had the right since the know-how was really Logorhythms’s intellectual property, and didn’t belong personally to David—”