“What the hell are you doing?” Hassan asked.

She yanked the bones apart. Metal components had replaced the second lung. Blood vessels and nerves were attached to the surface of… whatever it was. She’d never seen anything like it.

“Holy Mother,” Hassan said, then, two seconds later, “Positive ID for explosives. Move!”

Welga jumped back. The words BLESSINGS FROM THE MACHINEHOOD appeared in her visual. A wall of heat blasted her across the hallway and knocked the world away.

NITHYA

We built software that passed the basic Turing test nearly a hundred years ago. We have WAIs that speak of themselves in the first person, bots that can navigate from a charging station to their place of work—and yet nobody thinks WAIs or bots are sentient. We’re still waiting for an AI to stand up for itself, to say, “I think, therefore I am. Give me liberty or give me death!” We look for a desire for self-determination as proof of sentience. No one has successfully programmed an AI to behave this way in a convincing fashion, but I believe we’re very close, within a decade at most, to seeing this.

—Min Woo, PhD Computational Philosophy, Lectures on the Artificial Mind Expert Rating: 97.8/100. (UC–Berkeley, October 2087)

Nithya’s fingertips moved through the virtual desktop of her office space, opening research results from Asia-Pacific’s International Medical Journal, adjusting the metabolic parameters in her simulation, pulling in an updated code block from her current contract holder, Synaxel Technologies. They funded designs for pills—the tiny biomechanical machines that could affect everything from intracellular transport to DNA and RNA editing. She’d worked on multiple projects for them, primarily with juvers for muscle recovery and repair.

A triple dose of flow kept Nithya’s mind from losing the multiple threads of thought. Her agent, Sita, worked on the background tasks that Nithya assigned her. Sita wasn’t the most expensive WAI design, but she could handle information sorting. Nithya usually had her agent sift through a steady stream of simulation data from other corporations and freelancers, only bringing items of interest to her attention.

At the moment, she’d set Sita to trawl for reports that might relate to her sister-in-law’s data. Welga’s records made little sense to her. The tremors implied a neuromuscular problem, and that pointed to zips as the likely culprit, but why now? What had built up after a decade of use? Or was her sister-in-law’s condition something genetic, and age the trigger? Neurology lay outside Nithya’s expertise, but she could muddle through high-level research. If she made enough headway, she might even earn some tips for the work.