“How are you doing?” he asked.
“All right, I guess.” She looked down at her empty plate. “The food here is amazing. I never would have guessed it with . . .” She nodded her head at the awful surroundings.
“We spend our money where we think it’s put to the best use.”
“I appreciate the hospitality, but I’m going nuts waiting to talk to my parents. They must have thought I died long ago. It’s going to be a big shock learning that their little girl is still alive.”
“I’m sure they’ll be thrilled. You’ll be able to talk to them as soon as you are on board the Indian Coast Guard cutter.”
“To think we were in India this whole time.” She looked at Juan with tears welling up in her eyes. “Thanks again for everything you did.”
Juan shrugged. “All in a day’s work.”
“Which is what, exactly?
No, never mind. I don’t want to know, and you probably couldn’t tell me anyway. How are you feeling? I’m surprised you were able to walk after I shot you, let alone get us all to safety.”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”
“Are they really all dead?” Lyla said with a mixture of hope and dread.
“The guards? Yes. You’re free of them.”
“And what about the people they worked for? Are we safe from them?”
“We’re going to find out who did this to you. But we need your help.”
“Anything.”
“I know you’ve already talked to my crew, but I’d like to hear it from you. What can you tell me about the project you were working on?”
Lyla took a breath. “It’s groundbreaking. Revolutionary, even. My expertise is in cutting-edge pattern recognition software. If they had recruited me to work on it, I might have done it until I realized the scope of their ambition. But then, if they’d hired me, they wouldn’t have been able to hack into my company’s database using my codes. I never learned its real name. We had to call it Project C.”
“What was the project’s goal?”
“To develop a true, thinking artificial intelligence. One that would be able to write its own software code. They were trying to achieve the technological singularity.”
Juan had heard the term before but wasn’t familiar with its particulars. “The singularity?”
“It’s the point when an artificial intelligence becomes so sophisticated that it can start improving itself without human intervention. After that, its self-improvement will increase at an exponential rate. It’s the Holy Grail of AI.”
“But it comes with big risks as well, doesn’t it?”
“Of course. It could become a runaway reaction that gets out of control. It’s almost impossible to predict how the AI would behave in that situation. It might lead to huge advancements for the human race.”
“Or it might lead to the Terminator,” Juan said.
“That’s what some people think.”
“We’ve encountered something like that before.”
He was thinking of a previous classified mission in which a powerful quantum computer that was used to crack any code on the planet had become self-aware. The Corporation had to shut it down, but Juan remembered a strange phone call he received after the end of that mission that indicated a portion of that computer’s code remained somewhere on the internet. It might have even served as a basis for Project C.
Lyla was both puzzled and intrigued. “What do you mean, you encountered something like that?”
“I can’t say, unfortunately. Could Project C be used for breaking encryption?”
“Maybe, but it’s far more than that. Once Project C is complete and the AI has reached the singularity, code breaking is just a small application. The AI could actually rewrite any computer code it can access.”