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A homely child with no friends his age, young Chang Xiubo had accompanied his father on a delivery to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center when he was fifteen. This short journey of about a hundred kilometers got the boy out of the house and away from the old computer that he had cobbled together. The site was famous for the launch of Shenzhou 5, the first manned Chinese space flight. History had been made here, heroes made. But Chang Xiubo was not nearly so impressed with astronauts as he was with the computers that sent them on their journeys. His father had been delivering spools of computer cable, so Chang had gotten to see the computer rooms, a fascinating treat for the boy, better than going to the zoo. The physicists and engineers smoked constantly, typing away, never looking up from their workstations. At that moment, Chang Xiubo decided he wanted to emulate these stolid men. They ignored him completely until he began to ask questions about discrete math and linear algebra.

One of them called the site supervisor, another humorless engineer who wanted nothing to do with the boy until he found they spoke the same mathematical language. The supervisor telephoned a government minister he knew and eventually arranged for Chang to attend Harbin Institute of Technology as soon he could take the exams.

Chang’s mother had been horrified, not because her son was going away to a school almost as far east of Beijing as Jiuquan was to the west, but because he had displayed his staggering intellect to the world.

She wept when he left home, tissue to her nose, pleading, “Please do not be a smart horse.”

Military service was still compulsory for young men in China, if the government ever got around to noticing you forced their hand. Nowadays, that did not usually happen unless you made someone angry. The PLA had an overabundance of qualified volunteers, so those who were not willing were rarely called on to serve. That was not the case when Chang was a boy. The military officers at the Harbin Institute of Technology had encouraged him to finish his studies, but they were waiting for him when he was done.

He’d called to tell his parents, and again, his mother had reminded him to keep his intellect in check.

But smart was the only kind of horse he knew how to be. He certainly wasn’t handsome or athletic. Fortunately for Chang, his talents were highly valued by his superiors. Otherwise, someone would have long since put a bullet in his head. Past commanders had called him a “stain” on his performance reports, “a disgrace to the uniform,” but had gone on to note that he was one of the most gifted scientists they had ever seen. A secret addendum to his personnel file from a particularly hateful colonel noted that if he were to ever be separated from the military, he should be institutionalized or killed to keep him from putting his skills toward activities not sanctioned by the party. Chang knew of the file, and considered it a badge of honor. He’d found his spot as special assistant to Lieutenant General Bai.

A software engineer by training, Chang was, by disposition, a toad. He was so maddeningly aloof that both superiors and subordinates alike were forced to raise their voices to get his attention. Short and squarely built, with thick black-rimmed glasses and coarse hair that was forever in need of a trim, he could most often be found snowing flakes of dandruff on his desk, staring into space, apparently forgetting to blink. Those new to his lab might think he’d fallen into a catatonic trance, but these were no states of stupefaction. Chang’s face might be flaccid, but behind the blank stare, his mind clicked through problem after problem at an incredible rate. He’d talked to himself since he was a small child, though now he’d learned to do it silently, asking questions and then working through solutions while the world stumbled on blindly around him.

And now he had Calliope.

This magnificent thing was going to either see his star rise to astronomical heights or extinguish it entirely. He had suspected this gaming software to be advanced, but not nearly this fantastic. The Americans overused the word awesome, but this… this entity did nothing if it did not inspire true awe. Artificial intelligence was just that — artificial. But Calliope was as much art as she was science.

Like most any other scientist in his field, Major Chang realized that the future of technology was intertwined with AI. Saudi Arabia had already granted citizenship to a computer named Sophia. It was a stunt, of course, but the reality was not that far off. The presidents of Russia and China, even Iran, all saw AI as a key to power. Tech developers, billionaire businessmen — who did not get to be billionaires by accident — folded AI into their business models or changed those models altogether.

Personal assistants, self-driving vehicles, and even medical diagnoses were now driven by neural networks.