“I have a lot of questions, but one big one,” Maggie said.

“Yeah?”

“What does Ishango want?”

I sat silently for a moment but couldn’t process the question. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not a complicated question. What does Ishango want?”

“Why do you think it wants something?” I asked.

“She.”

“Why do you think she wants something? She’s a computer. Her needs are electricity, programming expertise, functionality, crash avoidance, and maybe some fancy desktop wallpaper.”

“Didn’t you just read your father’s journal?” she asked. “Ishango is sentient.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Your father wrote it.”

“He’s crazy, too,” I said, shaking my head with a scowl.

“He’s closer to this than you are,” Maggie said. “And he didn’t write this for an audience. He wrote it down maybe to keep himself from becoming crazy. This is his truth.”

“Given the amount of truth I’m getting from that guy these days, I’m not persuaded.”

“Look,” Maggie said with a sigh, standing up in the shed and stretching her arms out the door. “Everything sentient wants something. And those people at the plant, including your sword-arm dude, seem to be working toward some goal as well. So what is it? Does Ishango want to learn more? Does she want to annihilate humanity? Does she want to join the human race? What? Does? She? Want?”

I lifted my hands toward Maggie so she could pull me upright, and we stepped out into the dusk. “Hell if I know,” I said. “I’ll say this, though: Given all that’s going on, Ishango doesn’t feel like a force of good.”

“I wouldn’t dispute that,” Maggie said. “But what’s the goal, you think? How does Ishango live—and intend to keep living?”

I took a few steps toward the house, then turned around and walked back into the fields beyond the shed. “Safer this way,” I said, and took her hand. It was warm and clammy, and she curled her fingers gently around mine. “If Ishango is controlling people already, programming them, then in a sense she’s already living, no?”

“Perhaps. But perhaps she wants more. Maybe there’s a next step that everyone is working toward on her behalf.”

“And it involves me.”

“Or you’ve gotten in the way somehow.”

“Well, they want me captured alive for some reason. And I have my own special code name.”

“You may be right,” Maggie said, giving my arm a little swing as we stepped through some tall grasses.

“You may even believe me soon about Alpha and his sword arm.”

“Don’t push it.” She smiled at me. “So I don’t know whether this is relevant, but I remember reading in one of Mom’s magazines—from MIT, I think—about learning through experimentation. There was this scenario: Cars on the left side of a road were merging right while cars on the right side were merging left. When skilled stunt drivers were put behind the wheel of each car, they couldn’t pull off this maneuver. Yet computer simulators merged the cars together perfectly, even though no one had programmed them to do it. They figured it out, learned by experimenting.”