Chapter 1

Neme May 11, 1984

A small tube television bathes the room in white light. A boy stares at the screen while chewing on a pencil; it tastes bad, but he doesn't care. It's Friday and it's already late. These are usually the nights he uses to watch grown-up movies, but he's tired of waiting for something interesting that never comes, and tonight he wants to do something useful with his microcomputer. Not that he thinks playing games isn't useful—in fact, he loves it—but he'd rather learn something new, something that intrigues him: how to program.

Every so often he turns around and looks at the door, in case his mother shows up. What he doesn't know is that, as long as it's the weekend, his mother couldn't care less if he stays up until all hours. She doesn't understand what's so fun about spending hours in front of a screen; all she knows is that her son will sleep in and she'll get to enjoy her weekend more. His father, well, hardly cares about anything his son does, except when the boy asks him for money for “nonsense”, like the other day, when he asked for money for a soldering iron. “What does a twelve-year-old want that for? Couldn't he be like the other kids and ask for a TENTE set?” he wondered.

He's been stuck for a while. He goes over his notes; he likes to write everything down. The notebook is almost full, and soon it will join the shoebox that holds every one he's used since he learned to write. Sometimes this urge to write everything down is almost unhealthy, and it makes a strange impression on adults, who see a child pretending to be a grown-up. Once, a classmate stole his notebook and made fun of him. The bully wanted to find something to humiliate him with, but found nothing but circuit drawings, scribbles he couldn't understand and sentences in English he couldn't translate, so he soon threw the notebook in his face, finishing with: “If you were any dumber, you wouldn't have been born.”

The keys on his ZX Spectrum are made of soft rubber, which is why people call it “El Gomas”, the rubbery one. He contorts his fingers to type all the commands he needs to program. It starts to smell like something burning. That's typical of this model; it's nothing, it never actually catches fire. He even likes the smell, and the heat the heatsink gives off under his hands; to him it's a pleasant feeling. He checks a book on BASIC lying open at the middle. He thinks he's finally got it this time. This is the program he's spent an hour typing:

10 BORDER 0: PAPER 0: INK 7: CLS
20 PRINT "========================================="
30 PRINT "       *** Futuro Program  by Neme — 1984 ***                          ="
40 PRINT "========================================="
50 PRINT
60 PRINT "ASK ME A QUESTION:"
70 INPUT Q$
80 PRINT
90 IF RND<.5 THEN PRINT "     YES!" ELSE PRINT "     NO!"
100 PRINT
110 PRINT "ANOTHER SILLY QUESTION? (Y/N)"
120 INPUT A$
130 IF A$="N" THEN GO TO 60
140 PRINT "SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR!"

At last he runs it. At the bottom of the screen it reads: "ASK ME A QUESTION:". Then Neme types: “Do you love me?”. His heart pounds; he pauses, caught between fear and hope. He hits Enter, and the program answers: “NO!”.

James January 6, 2032

“Getting up is already a win,” he thinks as he makes his bed. He's in no hurry. He goes into the kitchen, realizes he isn't hungry and grabs his phone. No messages. He doesn't know whether that's a good sign or not. He opens the app to order a self-driving taxi; he doesn't want to talk to anyone. “Half an hour!” he exclaims. He huffs around the house. He looks out the window and grabs a sports jacket that doesn't suit him, since he's always been a weakling. “Turn everything off!” he says out loud. The house sinks into half-light and he heads out to the street.

It's sunny and he's forgotten his sunglasses—too late to go back. He looks up at the sky and studies the clouds. In San Francisco it can rain at any moment. He's about to check his phone again, but he doesn't; there are still at least ten minutes to go. Then it will buzz, and that will be the moment to watch for where the taxi appears.

It finally arrives and sets off. He confirms the destination and thinks it's absurd to have to; he already typed it in. Elevator music plays. “Turn off the music and open the sunroof,” he says, so clearly that his order is carried out at once. He thinks back to a day at the beach when it started raining, but only over the sea. He was fascinated by how unlikely it was for that to happen and for him to see it. It was so beautiful. The only thing he regretted about that moment was having lived it alone. Sometimes he told his friends about it, and they didn't believe him.

The taxi stops. That was quick, the upside of living close to the office. He walks into the glass building and the security guard recognizes him, which spares him the questions and the pat-down. He swipes his card and is surprised it still works. He hurries to the elevator. Ninth floor. He walks briskly to where he usually works. He's lucky: there's no one there. At the far end of the room he sees his team in the coffee area, and he smiles at that. He picks up his laptop and heads for the only place he knows is safe.

Suddenly he sees Christine. She looks at him and waves him over; he clumsily avoids her eyes, so she gets up and stops him dead by grabbing his arm.

“James! Helen from People Ops has been looking for you all morning. I think it's urgent.”

“Sorry, I'm in a hurry. I'll call her later.” He pulls her hand off his arm.

“Don't forget!”

He never got along with Christine; he thought she was a stuck-up know-it-all. He'd rather not think about her. He takes the emergency stairs so he won't run into anyone. Now that he has the laptop, being careful is essential. He gets there in no time; it's only two floors.

On the smoked-glass door, gold letters read: “Prayer Room”. It's his favorite place, even though he isn't a believer. There are no chairs, no symbols, nothing. Just red carpet and dim light. The silence is total. He thought about putting on his headphones, but better not; he wanted to hear if anyone came in. It was very unlikely, if not impossible, but he's a little paranoid.

He sits down and crosses his legs. He rests the laptop on them and flips the lid open hard. He brings his eye up to the camera and is relieved: he can still get in. He opens a terminal and, for two hours that feel like an instant, he writes everything he's been planning for days. He has to try. He reviews parts of what he's written; one paragraph doesn't convince him, so he rewrites it entirely.

He looks at his smartwatch and, just for peace of mind, at the operating system's clock too, which shows exactly the same time. He decides it's done. Deep down he has no hope that any of this will go through, but he has to try. He types:

glab mr create --title "Small changes to the core" --description "These are some slight changes to Alice's personality that I believe will give her more focus and, in the long run, help her adapt to new instructions. This would add more functionality to version 3.1"

After hitting Enter and taking a breath, he opens the repository website and checks his latest merge request—in other words, his request to change code on the main branch. Nervously, he reads that it was created. Now it's under review. Within seconds he gets a notification: “merge request” rejected by an AI bot. It didn't even get past the first filter. A tear runs down his cheek. He clicks the link to see why it was denied. The login screen appears. He's been kicked out of the session. He tries to log in again. Nothing. He can't access a single application.

He closes the laptop and kicks it into a corner of the room; it's no use to him anymore. All he wants is to go home and surround himself with the things he knows. As he leaves the room, Helen appears, next to the security guard from the entrance, who looks down at the floor to avoid facing him. The head of personnel is a head taller than him. Helen notices his reddened eyes, but even so she says, in an authoritative tone: “James, we need to talk. Let's go to my office.”

Sofía November 13, 2017

In class, her mind is always elsewhere. Life itself leaves her wanting more, and everything bores her deeply. She has to take refuge in her daydreams to escape reality. Being a junior in high school doesn't give her enough excitement, so she takes refuge in TV series, mostly anime, and she also reads, a lot, so much that she doesn't stop until her eyes hurt.

“Sofía!” A distant shout. “Sofía!” Much clearer now. “Don't we sleep at night?” Her classmates laugh in unison. She jolts in her chair and straightens her skirt; she opens her mouth but doesn't have time to say anything. “Let's see. What do you want to be when you grow up? A firefighter, like most of your classmates? Or maybe a police officer?”

She thinks for a few seconds, which only makes her classmates more interested. For a moment she considers saying she wants to be a teacher—it would be harmless—but she doesn't want to lie, and she says: “An actress.” The classroom erupts in laughter and insults. She lowers her head.

“Please! Quiet! What's the matter? Why can't she be an actress? Is that so strange to you?” The teacher tries to calm things down.

“She's ugly!” says Ernesto. Sofía gives him a look of contempt.

“Look who's talking, Adonis!” says a supposed friend, coming to her defense.

The bell rings. There's a stampede. The noise of chairs and desks being dragged mixes with cries of freedom. Meanwhile, she gathers her things, unhurried; she has no desire to run into her classmates in the hallways and would rather wait for the euphoria to pass. The teacher comes over to her while putting on a denim jacket; he reminds her of one of those ugly old rockers her father listens to so much. “Before you go, stop by my office. I want to talk to you.” She nods, and now she hurries off to recess.

A Latin class plunges her into a stupor that makes her forget what happened in Spanish class. She starts thinking about Julius Caesar: “How could he write this drag about Gaul?” She can't wait to get home, have a snack, shut herself in her room and keep reading, but she remembers she'll have to stop by Evaristo's office first.

There's almost nobody left at school, just stragglers and a few kids trading stickers. She's standing in front of the door, which has a sheet of paper taped to it reading “Language and Literature” in calligraphic handwriting. “Come in!” she hears. When she enters, he's waiting for her on his feet and offers her the chair.

“Even if I wanted to, I couldn't offer you anything to drink. How are you? Well... fine? No?” He rubs his hands together and she nods. “You see... I... I just wanted to say that at your age boys can be very cruel.”

“And girls,” Sofía points out.

“Yes, of course, girls too.” He swallows. “I wanted to see you to tell you not to take those jokes earlier seriously. If you want to be an actress, I'm sure you can. You know there's a degree for that, right?”

“Yes. I think so. Acting, right?”

“Exactly! Well, you should start preparing. The sooner the better. You have to watch a lot of films and read a lot.”

“That part I do well.”

“I can recommend what to read and what to watch.” He gets up, takes his chair and puts it far too close to her. “You see. I don't know how to explain it.” Sofía goes on alert, very stiff. “You have the most important thing to be an actress. It's like, I don't know, a special kind of beauty. I mean, you're pretty. In your own way, mind you. You have blue eyes and blond hair, which might seem like a cliché, but it can also work in your favor.” Evaristo touches his beard. “Don't listen to people. Follow your instinct. I was young once too, you know? I always wanted to act, but life... I could help you, if you want, of course.”

He moves his hand toward an uncomfortable place, like a cat: his thumb strokes her knee while the other four fingers grip her bare thigh. It sends an electric shock through her; her brain goes on alert. She opens her eyes wide, looking for her teacher's gaze, but he is still lost in his ramblings, as if his arm didn't belong to him. She grabs his arm and can see the fear in his eyes. She's so furious she wants to hit him. Instead, she gets up from the chair, heads for the door and slams it behind her, leaving the teacher with a feeling of guilt and fear.

Neme March 12, 2032

“8008 makes 7, damn.” He adds up the digits of a blue car's license plate, recursively, until he gets them down to a single number between 0 and 9. In the distance he sees a red car parked: “2358 makes 9.” He doesn't even need to do the mental math; it just comes to him, like a flash in his brain. He's near the entrance of the Advanced Research Center, where he has come to work every day for 25 years, and this year he turns 60. It's raining in Santiago, which is nothing unusual, but he doesn't carry an umbrella; he's lost too many in his life. A van goes by: “1495 makes 1.” No luck. An intern who is about to go into the building comes up to him. “Aren't you coming in, Mr. Neme?” She pushes back part of her hood to see better. He doesn't know what bothers him more, being called Mister or having it done wrong: it would be Don Nemesio, and if she wants to say Mister, she should say Mr. Barreiro. He grunts and says: “In a bit. I'm waiting for someone.” He's lying, and she nods as she walks away. Today won't be the day she gets to exchange ideas with one of the oldest hands in the place either. A white car with the plate 1331 parks right in front of him: finally, an 8, and white to boot. He breathes hard through his nose, eyes closed. Now he can go in.

Today is a very important day. There's a visit. Normally he couldn't care less and does his own thing, but what his boss has pulled off is unparalleled: a contract with “Link AI” to install an AI in the Data Center, full of underused machines bored of doing nothing. Neme wouldn't attend the main meetings, but he would keep an eye on the servers. There's an air of excitement in the normally monotonous office. Looking around, he notices his colleagues are, how to put it, far too dressed up. He can't remember what he put on this morning, so he glances down at his chest. The Resu 2023 hoodie isn't the most appropriate choice, but he doesn't really care. He heads to his desk, a strategic spot from which he can see everything and no one can see his screen. He used to have an office, but five years ago someone, whom he'd rather not even remember, decided everything should be open-plan for the synergies. He missed his privacy; it was much cozier and safer. He checks that the Raspberry is on. Sometimes the cleaner unplugs it, which drives him up the wall because then he can't connect from home. He's lost count of how many notes he's left. He turns on his computer—he always shuts it down before leaving—and types in a password no mortal could ever remember. In fact, he doesn't know it himself; the movement of his fingers is burned into his brain, but it would take him a huge effort to write it down on paper. A black terminal appears with a blinking cursor, and he runs a script that fills both screens with windows holding everything he needs. For a while he's absorbed in checking that the servers are fine and that everything is ready for the installation. There's a commotion. A young man with blue eyes and messy hair walks in surrounded by an entourage; the director is among them. From that moment on, everyone present pretends to work, paying more attention to the newcomers than to anything else. Neme notices the black briefcase the foreigner is carrying. The director introduces him to the people they come across. Everyone greets him and says “Nice to meet you”; some even bow their heads. When they pass by Neme, the representative of the American startup shakes his hand, and Neme feels a kind of shiver: it's a limp handshake, like shaking hands with a baby. They quickly head to the meeting room. Neme watches out of the corner of his eye to keep track of what's going on. From the briefcase the visitor has taken out a laptop, a very small one; Neme doesn't recognize the brand, it's too far away. The visitor plugs in the network cable. The moment has come. Neme has been working on this for about two weeks. The American opens a terminal and connects to a server. At that very moment Neme can see everything he types. He feels the thrill he gets when he finally cracks something he's been at for days, or when he manages to get into a machine without permission and see everything stored on it, or when he's programming and finally gets the algorithm to work.

For now he only sees the normal things any system administrator does. The American is checking versions, looking for hidden files, creating directories, running updates. Then the interesting part begins. He logs in to a git server. This takes a while; Neme watches him take out a phone for two-factor authentication and bring his eye up to the camera. “Iris recognition! What a bunch of pros,” he thinks. Once the American is logged in, Neme can see from his own terminal how he clones a repository called “alice_old”. As soon as the clone finishes, Neme copies that directory to another server. It's taking a while. “How big is this thing?” He's getting nervous; the guy types fast and has chosen a branch called “customers”. Just then the director distracts him by asking if he'd like something to drink. He says no, but the director insists—as a good host, he wants to be kind—and in the end he says he'd like an iced tea. The files are still copying, and this is when Neme regrets not having used “rsync”; that way he could see how much of the copy was left. He looks up: the American takes a sip of his drink, puts the glass down far from the laptop, which must have cost a fortune, and gets back to it. At that moment the command finishes running and Neme lets slip a “Bravo!”. Nobody pays him much attention, because everyone knows his eccentricities. He checks what the American is doing and sees him delete several branches and log out of the code repository.

His heart is pounding out of his chest. He checks his server and, running “git branch -a”, he sees a huge list. He nervously closes the window; he'll look at it when everything calms down. He thinks about how lucky his director has been. He's bought the source code of an AI from a company in serious financial trouble, at a price that is a real bargain. Fine, yes, it's an old version—they're on 5 now—but 3 was the one that broke with everything that came before. Since things went well for them, they got carried away, invested badly, the people who had put up the money applied pressure, and of course, there aren't many options left.

They come out of the room and the director calls everyone over for the photo. He puts Neme right at the back, but even so Neme is too tall to go unnoticed. At least you can't see what his hoodie says. He never takes it off—and not because of the cold anymore; he loves putting on his headphones, pulling up the hood and concentrating on his own things. He used to do that at work, but after the murderous looks from his superiors he stopped.

Everyone has gone except the intern, and Neme glances at her impatiently. She's working on her thesis; she usually stays late. After weighing up the situation, he decides to go back to the server and list the branches again. There are loads of them, so he digs a command out of his history to sort them from newest to oldest.

“git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(committerdate:short) %(committerdate:relative) %(authorname)%09%(refname:short)%09%(objectname:short)%09%(subject)'”

The first of many lines that come up is this one:

“2032-01-06 2 months ago James Redfield develop 1807675 Small changes to the core”

“Small changes to the core?” Neme wonders, intrigued. He starts digging. For a moment he wants to pull up his hood, but he looks up and the intern is still there; how he hates her. Never mind. He goes on LinkedIn and searches for James Redfield. A result comes up right away. All the young Californians from startups have the same pearly teeth. “Do they all go to the same dentist? Why do they smile so much?” Neme hates these young people for the mere fact of their youth. James hasn't worked at Link AI for a month now; he's on “personal projects”. He studied at MIT, a real hotshot; he's only worked for five years and he's already completely burned out, unlike Neme, who has 38 years of contributions behind him and still gets excited when a new Zelda comes out. Layoffs are normal, he tells himself, they've run out of cash, but it seems strange to him, because from what he can see on the résumé, James was a very important person at the company. He goes back to the terminal for more information on those small changes. He's surprised: the changes aren't small at all. They were made on a development branch and there are loads of them. Mostly prompts, from what he can see. “How could they leave this here?” He answers himself: surely they respected James and didn't dare delete his branch. Compared to the “customers” branch, there's an outrageous number of changes. The Center had been sold 3.0, but this went much further. Without a doubt it was something far more advanced. It was 3.1.

Neme logs in to the server where the visitor installed the AI that morning. He copies the branch that seems far more advanced to him and starts compiling. The screen spits out plain text until it stops dead. An error! He doesn't lose his cool; this is very common. He starts installing missing packages. He tries again. New errors! He checks again and adds even more libraries. “Boy, are there differences! This is a gold mine!” He congratulates himself on his decision to replace the code they were sold with a much more recent one, and surely a much more powerful one. He bites his lips, his gaze fixed on the white lines racing up the screen, reflected in his glasses.

“Hi. What are you doing?” Neme jumps in his chair and instantly types “Ctrl + Alt + L” on the keyboard, which takes him straight to the login screen. “Sorry, I didn't mean to bother you.” He grunts. “I'm leaving now. You'll turn everything off, right?”

“Yes, of course, as always. Don't worry. Sorry... what was your name again?”

“Ana. Ana Santos. I've been here three months now.”

“Right, of course, sorry, I'm a bit absent-minded. Anyway. Have a good night. I'm going to stay here a while... with my things.”

“Lots of work, huh? Today was a really interesting day.” She waits for him to say something, but gets no answer. “Roughly what time will you leave?”

“I don't know. I think I'll be done in 80 or 85 minutes.”

“OK. Have a good weekend.”

He follows her with his eyes until he loses sight of her. Today is Friday, but he doesn't care; he has no plans. He'll stay as long as it takes. When he logs back into his computer he sees that the compilation has finished without errors. He gets excited. At the end he can read a message in capital letters: “DO NOT DEPLOY TO PRODUCTION”. First he stops the notification service so no alarm goes off, then he stops the current service. He checks his email in case a warning arrives and waits 10 seconds. Nothing. He's in paranoid mode; of course nothing was going to be sent. He updates the service to the version he's just compiled, then starts the program and the alerts. Everything in its place. He smiles proudly. His stomach growls. It's 10:30 p.m. and he's eaten only two chocolate bars all day. Time to go out for dinner and a beer to celebrate. He'll carry on from home afterward. He does a lap of the whole office to check that nobody has left anything on. He tries the lab door, but it's locked, so he looks through the smoked glass and sees no lights on. Finally he shuts down his computer and just hopes the cleaning staff won't accidentally unplug his Raspberry.

Ana March 12, 2032

She's cold and wet. It won't stop raining. She's been waiting behind some trees for 30 minutes now. The things you have to do to get a damn date, she tells herself. At last she sees Neme leave the Center. She watches him pull up his hood and walk away with his hands in his pockets, and with those long strides he soon disappears from view. “About time. I thought that old geek was never going to leave.” She takes out her magnetic card to get in. It was a stroke of luck that there were no time restrictions on access to the building.

She takes off her jacket, sits back down in the chair where she'd spent the whole day and takes a key out of her drawer. She heads to the labs. Inside is her little nook, barely a meter wide, and her gleaming robotic arm. She turns on the little server they gave her. “They're so cheap!” she says out loud. She opens a terminal and types

“ssh -R 80:localhost:3000 nokey@localhost.run”

Among all the text that comes up, there's one line she cares about: “db4549db774192.lhr.life tunneled with tls termination, https://db4549db774192.lhr.life”.

She grabs her phone. First she turns off the Wi-Fi, to make sure she'll still be able to connect when she's not inside the building, and goes to the URL. In two seconds a simple web page appears showing the robotic arm. An AI made the page for her, but she's proud of it anyway, since she picked the CSS colors herself. Last week, when Neme walked past her with a coffee in his hand, she showed it to him. He made an indifferent face but said: “I hope you've put a username and password on it? No? At least a Basic Auth with htpasswd.” She answered: “Yes, of course.” But it was a lie. She wrote it down in her notebook to do later, but she never got around to it; too many things on her mind.

She adjusts the webcam so it frames the arm and the objects around it better. At the bottom of the page there's a joystick and some buttons that control the arm. She tries picking up a wooden cube and lifts it, then sets it back down on the surface. “It works like a fucking charm,” she tells herself. She closes the lab door and thinks about how Alberto—a Physics student she met in the cafeteria the other day—will react when he sees her project. “He loves this stuff. He's going to be blown away and fall in love with me.”

Before leaving, she notices there's more noise than usual. You get used to it when there are servers running nearby, but this is too much. She walks over to the door of the server room. Her card doesn't give her access; only the director and Neme go in there as if they owned the place. Here the glass actually is transparent. She cups her hands around her eyes like a visor, presses against the glass and sees something unusual: all the servers are on. There are so many blinking lights it looks like Christmas already.