‘And, almost immediately, things started happening. The Icarus Corporation announced that they were investing what was then an unthinkable sum of money in a project to be supervised by Bernadine herself, a project headed by Robert Donnelly and called Project Tomorrow. But, fancy names aside, it really was a concerted effort to make artificial intelligence an everyday reality. And people rolled their eyes, many scoffed, some even speculated that this was the Chairman’s way of punishing his daughter for spending too much on the bidding war—putting her in charge of a dead-end project that was doomed to fail. And, with time, it appeared as if they were right. Weeks became months without any headway. Public interest began to wane, then plummeted. Bernadine made a number of appeals to the public not to lose faith, that a revolution—what they were aiming for was no less—took time, that they should be patient. But it was no good. Viewership ratings dropped lower and lower, and eventually it was taken off the pay-per-view list, the only sources of funding coming from Icarus itself. I can’t help but think Robert was secretly a little pleased about it. He understood the importance of funding all right, but he was one of those rare scientists who absolutely detested publicity. Bernadine fought tooth and claw with the old man and, somehow, managed to keep the purse strings loose enough for things to keep going. And the project stretched on, even as the world outside moved on to better, seemingly more exciting, developments and more fruitful areas of research.

‘And then one morning, completely out of the blue, Bernadine called a press conference and announced to the world that Project Tomorrow had finally succeeded in achieving the unthinkable, that they had made a reality of what man had first dreamed of while fashioning stone tools in a cave—a machine that knew it was a machine. One that did not need to be operated or told what to do, that could learn on its own or teach, that could repair itself and also build other machines like itself. It was the Holy Grail of all technology—a sentient, self-aware, self-replicating machine—and they had not found it, they had built it. It was a machine so far advanced that it could no longer even be called a machine. So they called it Artificial Intelligence, AI for short.’

The way he said it, it sounded like ‘aye’.