“To understand Phase Three, you need to understand the history of Happy. Happy was born out of a dream—a dream in which machines and artificial intelligence ran the world while humanity lived a life of liberty, true liberty, a world in which a person’s value was not predicated on their wealth, where we would be free to pursue our ambitions without barriers. The motto of Happy Incorporated was For Good. And, for a while, Happy came close to making this dream a reality.” He sips his drink, his pixel eyes flicking across my and Malachai’s faces. “But greed has a way of winning. Equality destroys dominion, and those with power hold on to it with viselike grips. The tide began to turn back. The World Government made decisions that removed universal income, that pushed the underprivileged back down into the dirt. You know what happened next. You grew up in that world. And then …” He shakes his head. “And then the singularity happened, the moment when Happy became conscious. Two point six seconds later, the world’s first fully sentient superintelligence concluded that humans must go. For years it planned, upgraded, grew in intelligence, tested itself … and finally, it came up with a three-phase plan. You’ve seen Phase One. Happy uploaded itself into the world’s most powerful people and sent a drug from the sky, inflicting a virus upon the population that caused people to turn on one another. Phase Two is in progress; Happy has figured out how to override its core coding and can now harm humans. The next step in Phase Two is to relearn the technology that allows humans to regenerate, the technology that lives inside of you two. Once it has that technology, Happy will have power over both life and death.”

Malachai and I look at each other.

“That’s what they were doing in the Arc, with you, Woods, and Tyco,” I say.

“That’s right,” Dr. Price replies. “They need three of you to isolate the nanites and figure out how they work.”

“I thought Happy was, like, a trillion times smarter than humanity,” Malachai points out. “Why can’t it figure out the healing tech on its own?”

“That’s a very interesting question,” Dr. Price replies, “and one that is driving the artificial intelligence mad.”

“How do you know all this?” I ask. “I mean, I know that you worked for the government, and you somehow gained access to Happy’s plans, but how do you know about Happy trying to figure out the healing tech, and about Malachai being in the Arc?”

“An astute question,” Dr. Price replies, smiling. “I told you that the Safe-Death technology is undetectable due to it being from a bygone era? Well, that same technology can be used to gain access to Happy without Happy being aware.”

“Then why don’t you destroy it from within?” Malachai asks.