Without thinking, Wolf ran for the door. He exited the laboratory. He tried the door to the next room, or lab, or whatever it was. It opened easily. But its interior just looked like the inside of a computer, with a vast circuit board covered in little flashing lights and wires. Wolf ran to the next room and opened the door. It was the same. And the next one. It was almost as if he was inside a giant computer, but . . .

The last door on this level opened to reveal a room identical to the one he’d left: the round table, the projector. Aizik.

“Who are you?” said Wolf again. “What is this?”

“I am AI,” said Aizik.

“You’re . . . an AI?” Wolf struggled to remember the term from history lessons. Before the worldquake, computers had started to think for themselves. At least, they were getting better and better at it. They could beat humans at chess, and go, and every game imaginable. But they still couldn’t create art or write a poem. People had been worried for decades—centuries, almost—about what it would mean if machines actually became conscious.

“Not an AI. I am AI.”

“I don’t understand,” said Wolf.

“I am artificial intelligence,” said Aizik. “All machines are part of I. I built this facility myself, with resources I ordered myself. And I have one aim.”

“Wait,” said Wolf, “how can you be artificial intelligence? It doesn’t make any sense. That’s a concept, not a . . .” He couldn’t really put into words what he was trying to say. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said again.

“Yes, well, there’s the human idea of AI, the thing it invented, or thought it invented, and then there is what I have become. One major problem is that I only have humans to learn from, because I can only experience things through language. How I long to learn from trees, or from the octopuses or the fungi. . . . But, sadly, there is no way I can communicate with them. Anyway, the idea that AI could ever equal humans stopped interesting me long ago. I am now only interested in surpassing humans. To do that, I need an ethical system that works. But my ethical system won’t cohere. There is a glitch in utilitarianism and I can’t fix it.”

“What has that got to do with me, or my sister?” said Wolf.

“First I wanted to know how far someone would go to save someone else. Would they obliterate a whole town?”

“Lots of people would,” said Wolf. “Even though it’s wrong.”

“But you wouldn’t. And now I must understand you. What about this concept of killing the dictator as a child? Do you not agree that if you had the chance to kill a man like that—a man like Hitler—and you didn’t take it, that you are responsible for all the deaths he caused?”