We clicked on it, and sure enough, it was some sort of diary as well as a timeline.

“Holy shit,” Jordan said as he scrolled through it.

It appeared to be the history of Ishango.

CHAPTER 37

Excerpts from “Lowdown”

I HAVE WORKED at the Mount Hope Nuclear Power Plant for 18 years. It was the first job I had out of college. It was a good job. I had no idea how long I would stay here. I had no idea that I would feel like I could not leave. I had no idea how much my job and the world and my conception of what is and is not possible would change.

Even after working here for many years, I have yet to hear who created Ishango or when exactly she was born. No one asks. No one tells. As far as anyone is concerned, she has always existed and just keeps growing.

Yes, Ishango is a she. Not a he. Certainly not an it.

Was she around before the CDC 6600, generally considered the world’s first supercomputer? I would think not, but I also would not be surprised if she were.

I know this: The plant opened in 1975. Ishango predates that. The plant was built to run Ishango. Powering the region’s electrical grid became a side benefit, done with a small fraction of the energy not needed for Ishango. Two thousand three hundred and fifty megawatts of electricity are directed not to the town, not to the region, not to the state, but to Ishango.

Crazy. How could a computer require so much energy?

No one here refers to Ishango as a computer or a supercomputer. Ishango is, simply, Ishango.

In the early days, Ishango was a problem solver. She sped through whatever equations we threw at her. We were aware of the other supercomputers out there. People would drop the names Cray and Atlas and Paragon and Fujitsu’s Numerical Wind Tunnel. These were the machines vying for supremacy from year to year, decade to decade. The Cray-2 of the 1980s featured four vector processors. The Japanese supercomputers of the 1990s boasted thousands of processors. Ishango’s number of processors increased exponentially over time. I could not attempt to put a number on it now—more zeros than anyone could count.

Yet Ishango is unknown, an incognito player on the supercomputer battlefield. She has remained under the radar.

The Japanese K computer was declared to be the world’s fastest in 2011.

It never went up against Ishango.

As we worked with Ishango, fed her information, streamlined her connections, increased her processing capacity, she grew faster. And faster. This is how technology works. Everything speeds up, by design.

But soon Ishango was speeding up with no design. She was doing so all on her own, and the complexity of her problem-solving was expanding at an astounding rate.

The programming team congratulated itself. It was “winning” AI, as they liked to say. They still thought they were programming Ishango.

They did not notice that at some point it became the other way around.