“No. She sent her Sub-4 to meet me. She was away.”

“Then you have not been briefed?”

“I mean, I know why I am here. The broad strokes. Those were communicated to me before I contracted. But…”

“But they haven’t told you the details of what I’ve seen in the past half year here.”

“Not the details. No.”

“Strange,” Evrim said. “Whatever took Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan away from that meeting must have been vital.”

“Or she trusted you to do the debriefing for her. Knew you would fill me in. You are Team Lead, after all.”

“Yes, I am … and I know you must be wondering why I am here, leading this research. There are simpler and more complicated answers to that question. With Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan, that is always the case: there is never only one reason. But there are a few obvious justifications for my presence: I bring a few advantages. I do not forget what I have seen, for one. And I can function as well underwater as I can on land, for another. But I think the true reason I am here—and this was never told to me, but I have guessed it—is to test my capacities. To try my mind in more than some interview or laboratory cognitive test. To see what I do when confronted with a real-world problem of this kind of scale. At least that is my theory.”

“And how do you think the test is going?”

“I have proved, so far, that I am smart enough to know I need to find the real right person for the job—you—and to put myself at their service.”

“Actually,” Ha said, “that is pretty advanced thinking. There are few people capable of that kind of humility.”

“It is not humility. It is simple honesty. The last six months have taught me this problem is beyond me. And frankly—though your book is astounding—I think this problem is also beyond you. But there is a chance it may not be beyond us.” Evrim smiled.

And then Ha saw it. Yes. This was why the world would never build another humanoid AI. The smile was perfect. Sincere, unaffected. Fully human.

And because of that, the smile was like the shadow of your own death. Evrim’s existence implicated yours. It implied you, too, were nothing more than a machine—a swarm of preprogrammed impulses iterating endlessly. If Evrim was a conscious thing, and made, then maybe you were made as well. A construct made of different materials. A skeleton walking around, sheathed in meat, fooled into thinking it has free will. A thing that had occurred by accident. Or a thing made on a whim, to see if it could be done.

“What exactly is the point,” a stream interviewer once asked Mínervudóttir-Chan, “of an android? Why go to such trouble to make them so human, when making humans is almost free?”