The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Gods Will Not Be Chained

Maddie hated the moment when she came home from school and woke her computer.

There was a time when she had loved the bulky old laptop whose keys had been worn down over the years until what was left of the lettering appeared like glyphs, a hand-me-down from her father that she had kept going with careful upgrades: it kept her in touch with faraway friends, allowed her to see that the world was much bigger and wider than the narrow confines of her daily life. Her father had taught her how to speak to the trusty machine in strings of symbols that made it do things, obey her will. She had felt like the smartest girl in the world when he had told her how proud he was of her facility with computer languages; together, they had shared a satisfaction in mastering the machine. She had once thought she’d grow up to be a computer engineer, just like…

She pushed the thought of her father out of her mind. Still too painful.

The icons for the email and chat apps bounced, telling her she had new messages. The prospect terrified her.

She took a deep breath and clicked on the email app. Quickly, she scanned through the message headers: one was from her grandmother, two were from online stores, informing her of sales. There was also a news digest, something her father had helped her set up to track topics of interest to both of them. She had not had the heart to delete it after he died.

Today’s headlines:

Slowly, she let out her breath. Nothing from… them.

She opened the email from Grandma. Some pictures from her garden: a hummingbird drinking from a bird feeder; the first tomatoes, green and tiny on the vine like beads made of jade; Basil at the end of the driveway, his tail a wagging blur, gazing longingly at some car in the street.

That’s my day so far. Hope you’re having a good one at the new school, too.

Maddie smiled, and then her eyes grew warm and wet. She wiped them quickly and started to compose a reply:

I miss you.

She wished she were back in that house on the edge of a small town in Pennsylvania. The school there had been tiny and the academic work had perhaps been too easy for her, but she had always felt safe. Who knew that eighth grade could be so hard?

I’m having problems with some girls at school.

It had started on Maddie’s first day at the new school. The beautiful, implacable Suzie had seemingly turned the whole school against her. Maddie had tried to make peace with her, to find out what she had done that so displeased the schoolyard queen, but her efforts had only seemed to make things worse. The way she dressed, the way she spoke, the way she smiled too much or didn’t smile enough—everything was fodder for mockery and ridicule. She now suspected that, like all despots, Suzie’s hatred for her did not need a rational explanation—it was enough that persecuting Maddie brought her pleasure and that others would try to curry her favor by adding to Maddie’s misery. Maddie spent her hours at school in paranoia, uncertain if a smile or any other friendly gesture was but a trap to get her to let down her guard so that she could be cut deeper.

I wish we were with you.

But Mom had found this job, this good-paying job, and how could she not take it? It had been two years since Dad died. She and Maddie couldn’t go on living at Grandma’s place forever.

Maddie deleted what she had written. It would only make Grandma worry, and then she’d call Mom, and Mom would want to talk to the teachers, which would make things so much worse that she couldn’t even imagine. Why spread sadness around when others couldn’t help?

School is all right. I’m really happy here.

The lie made her feel stronger. Wasn’t lying to protect others the surest sign you were growing up?

She sent the email, and saw that a new message had arrived in her inbox. It was from “truth_teller02,” and the subject was “Too scared?”

Her heart began to pound. She didn’t want to click on it. But if she deleted it without reading, did that mean they were right? That she was weak? Did it mean that they’d won?

She clicked on the message.

Why are you so ugly? I bet you wish you could kill yourself. You really should.

Attached to the message was an image: a picture of Maddie taken with a cell phone. She was running through the halls between classes. Her eyes were wide and intense, and she was biting her bottom lip. She remembered how she had felt: lonely, her stomach tied up in a knot.

The picture had been photoshopped so that she had the nose and ears of a pig.

Her face felt like it was on fire. She willed the tears to subside. She was self-conscious about her weight, and they had seen right through her. It was amazing how effective such a cheap trick could be.

She didn’t know which one of the girls had sent this. She imagined Suzie’s cruel, contemptuous smile as she viewed this latest offering from one of her minions. A good portrait of Piggy.

She had stopped using social networking sites because of the constant stream of mockery—when she deleted any of their comments, it only made them redouble their efforts. If she tried to block anyone, she thought it might also make them think they got to her, might appear as an admission of weakness. She had no choice but to endure.

Sticks and stones. But the digital world, the world of bits and electrons, of words and images—it had brought her so much joy, felt so intimate that she thought of it a part of herself. And it hurt.

She crawled into bed and cried until she fell asleep.

Maddie stared at the screen, confused.

A new chat window had popped up. It wasn’t from any account she recognized—in fact, there was no chat ID at all. She could not recall ever seeing such a thing.

What did they want? To tease her more about the email? If she didn’t say anything, would that also be a concession of weakness? She typed on the keyboard, reluctantly pecking out each letter.

Yeah, I saw. What do you want?

Maddie frowned. You’re confused? Can’t talk? All right, I’ll play along.

The mysterious chatter’s choice of emoji instead of other emoticons made her more inclined to continue this odd conversation. She felt a special emotional bond to the silly little glyphs. She and her father had once played a version of Pictionary over their phones, except they used emoji instead of drawing pictures.

She picked out the icons from a palette:

The mystery chatter—she decided to call whoever it was Emo—responded:

Maddie stared at the face of the goblin, still uncertain. Another emoji appeared on the screen:

She laughed. Okay, so at least Emo was friendly.

Yes, the email made her feel shitty:

The response:

Easier said than done, she thought. I wish I could be unmoved and let the words bounce off me, like dying embers striking harmlessly against stone. She brought up the palette again:

The response:

She pondered what that meant. An umbrella in the rain. Protection? Emo, what are you offering? She typed:

Emo’s response:

She was suspicious. Who are you?

The answer came after a few seconds:

The next day at school, Suzie appeared skittish and distracted. Every time her phone vibrated, she took it out and gingerly poked at the screen. Her face seemed flushed, her expression hovering between fear and anger.

Maddie was very familiar with that look.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Erin, one of Suzie’s best friends.

Suzie shot her a hard, suspicious look, and turned away without saying anything.

By fourth period, most of the girls who had been giving Maddie a hard time shared that haunted, everybodyhatesmenobodylikesme look. Accusations and counteraccusations flew back and forth; cliques gathered between classes to whisper and broke apart, screaming. Some of the girls came out of the bathroom with red eyes.

All day, they left Maddie alone.

Maddie laughed. The two dancing girls did look a bit like Suzie and Erin. Backstabbing. Finger pointing.

Maddie nodded in understanding. If Emo could pop up on her screen uninvited, of course Emo could also track down who had sent her those emails and messages and serve her tormenters a taste of their own medicine. All that Emo had done was redirect a few messages meant for Maddie at the other girls, and their own paranoia and insecurities had done the rest. The fragile web that bound them together was easily tangled.

She was grateful and happy:

The response:

But why are you helping me? She still had no answer to the question. So she typed:

The response:

She didn’t understand.

There was a pause, and then:

A little girl, and then a woman. “You know my mother?” Her shock was so complete that she spoke aloud.

“What’s going on?” The voice behind her was cheerful, warm. “Who knows me?”

Maddie turned in her chair. Her mother was standing in the door to her bedroom.

“You’re home early,” Maddie said, intending it as a question.

“Something went wrong with the office computers. Nobody could get any work done, so I decided to come home.” Mom walked in and sat down on Maddie’s bed. “Who are you talking to?”

“Nobody. Just chatting.”

“With?”

“I don’t know… just someone who’s been… helping me.”

She should have known that this was the kind of answer that would set off alarm bells in her mother’s head. Before Maddie could even protest, her mother shooed her out of her chair and sat down in front of the keyboard.

Who are you and what the hell do you want with my daughter?

The long wait for a response seemed to confirm her mother’s worst fears.

“Mom, you’re being ridiculous. I swear there’s nothing weird going on.”

“Nothing weird?” Mom pointed at the screen. “Then why are you typing only in pictographs?—”

“—it’s called emoji. We’re playing a game—”

“—you have no idea how dangerous—”

They stopped shouting. Mom stared at the screen intently. Then she typed:

What?

“They won’t answer unless you use emoji,” said Maddie.

Her face stony, Mom used the mouse to pick out an icon:

An even longer pause, then a line of emoji appeared across the screen:

“What the hell—” Mom muttered. Then she swore as her face flicked from shock to sorrow to disbelief to rage. Maddie could count on one hand the number of times her mother had sworn in front of her. Something was really wrong.

Looking over her mother’s shoulder, she tried to help her translate. “What are lips?… a man’s lips…”

But her mother surprised her: “No, it’s ‘What lips my lips have kissed and where, and why…’”

Her hand shaking, Mom picked out an icon:

The window winked away and there was nothing left on the screen.

Mom sat there, unmoving.

“What’s wrong?” Maddie said, nudging her mother’s shoulder gingerly.

“I don’t know,” Mom said, perhaps more to herself than Maddie. “It’s impossible. Impossible.”

Maddie tiptoed up to the bedroom door. Her mother had slammed it shut an hour ago and refused to come out. For a while she could hear her mother sobbing behind the door, and then it grew quiet.

She placed her ear against the door.

“I’d like to speak to Dr. Peter Waxman, please,” said her mother’s muffled voice. A pause. “Tell him it’s Ellen Wynn, and it’s very urgent.”

Dr. Waxman was Dad’s old boss at Logorhythms. Why is Mom calling him now?

“He’s still alive,” Mom said. “Isn’t he?”

What? thought Maddie. What is Mom talking about?

“Don’t you dare using that tone with me. He reached out to me, Peter. I know.”

We saw Dad’s body in the hospital. Maddie felt numb. I watched his casket go into the ground.

“No, you listen to me,” Mom said, raising her voice. “Listen! I can tell you’re lying. What have you done with my husband?”

They went to the police and filed a missing persons report. The detective listened to Maddie and her mom tell their story. Maddie watched his face shift through a series of expressions: interest, incredulity, amusement, boredom.

“I know this sounds crazy,” her mother said.

The detective said nothing, but his face said everything.

“I know I said I saw the body. But he’s not dead. He’s not!”

“Because he texted you from beyond the grave.”

“No, not text. He reached out to Madison and me through chat.”

The detective sighed. “Don’t you think it’s more likely that this is another prank being played on you by the kids who are messing with your daughter?”

“No,” said Maddie. She wanted to grab the man by the ears and shake him. “He used emoji. It was a joke that Dad and I worked out between ourselves.”

“It was a poem,” said Mom. She took out a book of poetry, flipped to a page, and held it in front of the detective’s face. “The opening line of this sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s my favorite poem. I used to read it to David when we were still in high school.”

The detective put his elbows on the table and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “We’re very busy here, Ms. Wynn. I understand how painful the loss of your husband must have been and how stressful it is to find your daughter being bullied. This should be addressed by the teachers. Let me recommend some professionals—”

“I. Am. Not. Crazy.” Mom gritted her teeth. “You can come to our place and examine my daughter’s computer. You can trace the network connections and find out where he is. Please. I don’t know how this is possible, but he must be alive and… he must be in trouble. That’s why he can’t speak except through emoticons.”

“I agree that this is a cruel joke, but you have to see how you’re making it worse by falling for it.”

When they came home, Mom crawled right into bed. Maddie sat on the edge of the bed and held her mother’s hand for a while, the way her mother used to do with her when she was little and had trouble going to sleep by herself.

Eventually, Mom fell asleep, her face damp.

The web was vast and strange, and there were corners of it where people who believed in the most extraordinary stories congregated: government cover-ups of alien encounters, mega-corporations that tried to enslave people, the Illuminati, and the many ways the world was going to suffer an apocalypse.

Maddie signed on to one of these sites and posted her story. She tried to lay out the facts without embellishment. She recovered the transcripts of her emoji chats; she reconstructed the odd-looking window from the swapfile on her hard drive; she tried to trace the network connection from “Emo” as far as she could—in other words, she provided more hard data to support her story than most of the other posters in the forum had. She wrote that Logorhythms had denied everything, and that the police, representatives of the government, hadn’t believed her.

For some, no evidence shored up her claim more compellingly than such denials.

And then the forum regulars began to make their own connections. Every poster thought Maddie’s story supported their own pet theory: Centillion, the search engine giant, was engaging in censorship; Logorhythms was creating military artificial intelligences for the UN; the NSA scanned people’s hard drives. The thread she started exploded with follow-ups amplifying her tale.

Maddie knew, of course, that no matter how big the thread grew, most people would never see it. The big search engines had long ago tweaked their algorithms to bury results from these sites, because they were deemed untrustworthy.

But convincing people wasn’t Maddie’s goal.

“Emo”—her father—had claimed to be a ghost in the machine. Surely he wasn’t the only one?

There was no name, no avatar. Just a plain chat window, like a part of the OS.

She was disappointed. Not her father. Still, it was better than nothing.

Maddie smiled as she parsed the response. <We're from the cloud. Everywhere in the world.> She typed a follow-up:

You don’t know where he is either, she thought. But maybe you can help?

The response was swift and unambiguous:

The knock came Sunday morning.

Mom opened the door to reveal Dr. Waxman standing in the hallway.

“I’ve come to answer your questions,” he said coldly in lieu of a greeting.

Maddie wasn’t really surprised. She had seen the news that Logorhythms’s stock had crashed the previous Friday, so much so that trading had to be halted. Machine trading was being blamed again, though some thought it was the result of manipulation.

“It’s been a few years,” said Mom. “I thought we were friends. But after David died, you never even called.”

Maddie last saw Dr. Waxman at a party at the Logorhythms office, where he had been cheerful and effusive and told her how close he and her father were and how important her father was to the company.

“I’ve been busy,” Dr. Waxman said. He didn’t look Mom in the eye.

Mom stepped aside to let him in. Maddie and her mother sat down on the couch while Dr. Waxman took the chair across from them. He set down his briefcase on the coffee table and opened it, taking out a laptop computer. He turned it on and began to type.

Maddie couldn’t hold back anymore. “What are you doing?”

“Establishing an encrypted connection back to Logorhythms’s secure computing center.” His tone was clipped, angry, as though every word was being ripped out of him against his will.

Then he turned the screen toward them: “We’ve installed the linguistic processing unit—withholding it clearly didn’t work, so what’s the point? You can talk to him through this camera. He’ll write back in text—though he seems to still prefer emoji for some ideas. I imagine a synthesized voice is the last thing you want to hear right now.

“There may be some glitches, as the simulation for the neural patterns for linguistic processing is still new and unstable.”

“David?”

All the faces of you—the phases of you. I will never be tired of them; have enough of them all every entire. The lingering light of a September afternoon; the smell of popcorn and hot dogs. Nervous. Will you or won’t you? The promise of the premise. Then I see you. And there is no more holdback suspense doubt. A softness that curls into me, fits me in all the right places. Complete. Warm. Sweet. I will yes I will yes.

“Dad!”

Little fingers, delicate, ramified tendrils reaching extending stretching reaching into the dark ocean that you once drifted in; a smile the heat of a thousand suns.

I cannot conceive you. A missing presence, a wound in the mouth of the heart that the tongue of the will cannot stop probing. I have always have missed missed missed you, my darling.

“What happened to him?”

“He died. You were there, Ellen. You were there.”

“Then what is this?”

“I suppose you’d call this an example of unintended consequences.”

“You’d better start making some sense.”

More text scrolled across the screen:

Integrating placement and routing; NP-complete; three-dimensional layout; heuristics; fit and performance; a grid, layers, the flow of electrons in a maze.

“Logorhythms supplies the world’s best chips for high-volume data processing. In our work, we often face a class of problems where the potential solution space is so vast, so complicated, that it’s impractical for even our fastest computers to find the best solution.”

“NP-complete problems,” said Maddie.

Dr. Waxman looked at her.

“Dad explained them to me.”

That’s my girl.

“Right. They show up in all kinds of applications: circuit layout, sequence alignment in bioinformatics, set partitioning, and so on. The thing is, while computers have trouble with them, some humans can come up with very good solutions—though not necessarily the best solution—very quickly. And David was one of them. He had a gift for circuit layout that our automated algorithms could not touch. That was why he was considered our most important resource.”

“Are you talking about intuition?” her mother asked.

“Sort of. When we say ‘intuition,’ often what we mean are heuristics, patterns, rules-of-thumb that can’t be articulated because they’re not consciously understood as such. Computers are very fast and very precise; humans are fuzzy and slow. But humans have the ability to extract insight from data, to detect patterns that are useful. It’s something that we’ve had trouble recreating with pure artificial intelligence.”

Maddie felt a chill in the pit of her stomach.

“What does this have to do with my dad?”

Faster, faster. Everything is so slow.

Dr. Waxman avoided looking at her. “I’m getting to that. But I have to explain the background to you—”

“I think you’re just dragging this out because you’re ashamed of what you’ve done.”

Dr. Waxman stopped.

My girl.

Dr. Waxman gave a light chuckle, but there was no mirth in his eyes. “She’s impatient, like you.”

“Then get to the point,” Mom said. Dr. Waxman started at the icy intensity in her voice. Maddie reached for her mother’s hand. Her mother squeezed back, hard.

Dr. Waxman took a deep breath, blew it out. “All right,” he said in a resigned monotone. “David was ill; that was true. You remember that he died during surgery, the final attempt to save him that you were told had very little chance of success?”

Mom and Maddie nodded together. “You said only the clinic at Logorhythms could do it because it was so advanced,” Mom said. “We had to sign those liability waivers for you to operate.”

“What we didn’t tell you was that the surgery wasn’t intended to save David’s life. His condition had deteriorated to the point that the world’s best doctors couldn’t have saved him. The surgery was a deep scan of his brain, meant to save something else.”

“A deep scan? What does that mean?”

“You’ve probably heard that one of Logorhythms’s moon shot projects is to completely scan and encode the neural patterns of a human brain and to recreate them in software. It’s what the Singularity nuts call ‘consciousness uploading.’ We’ve never succeeded—”

“Tell me what happened to my husband!”

Dr. Waxman looked miserable.

“The scan, because it needs to record neural activity with such detail… requires destruction of the tissue.”

“You cut up his brain?” Mom lunged at Dr. Waxman, who held up his hands in a vain attempt to defend himself. But the screen had come alive again, and so she stopped.

There was no pain. No no no pain. But the undiscovered country, oh, the undiscovered country country.

“He was dying,” said Dr. Waxman. “We were absolutely certain of that before I made the decision. If there was a chance to preserve something of David’s insights, his intuition, his skill, however slim, we wanted—”

“You wanted to keep your top engineer as an algorithm,” said Maddie, “like a brain in a jar. So that Dad would go on working for you, making money for you, even after he died.”

Die, die, die. DIE.

Hate.

Dr. Waxman said nothing, but he lowered his face and hid it in the palms of his hands. “Afterwards, we were very careful. We tried to re-encode and simulate only the patterns we believed had to do with circuit layout and design—our lawyers wrote us a memo assuring us that we had the right since the know-how was really Logorhythms’s intellectual property, and didn’t belong personally to David—”

Mom almost lunged out of her chair again, but Maddie held her back. Dr. Waxman flinched.

“Did David make a lot of money for you?” She spat the words out.

“For a while, yes, it appeared that we had succeeded. The artificial intelligence, which modeled the extracted portions of David’s technical know-how and skills, functioned as a meta-heuristic that guided our automated systems very efficiently. In some ways, it was even better than having David around. The algorithm, hosted on our data centers, was faster than David could ever hope to be, and it never got tired.”

“But you didn’t just simulate Dad’s intuition for circuit layout, did you?”

The wedding dress; layers of lines. A kiss; a connection. The nightstand, the laundromat, the breath on a winter’s morning, Maddie’s red apple delicious cheeks in the wind, two smiles in a flash—a thousand things make up a life, as intricate as the flow of data between transistors nanometers apart.

“No.” Dr. Waxman looked up. “At first, it was just odd quirks, strange mistakes the algorithm made that we thought were due to errors in identifying the parts of David’s mind that were relevant. So we loaded more and more of the rest of his mental patterns into the machine.”

“You brought his personality back to life,” said Mom. “You brought him back to life, and you kept him imprisoned.”

Dr. Waxman swallowed. “The errors stopped, but then came a pattern of odd network accesses by David. We thought nothing of it because, to do his job, he—it, the algorithm—had to access some research materials online.”

“He was looking for Mom and me,” Maddie said.

“But he had no way to talk, did he? Because you had not thought it relevant to copy over the language processing parts.”

Dr. Waxman shook his head. “It wasn’t because we had forgotten. It was a deliberate choice. We thought if we stuck to numbers, geometry, logic, circuit patterns, we’d be safe. We thought if we avoided the linguistically coded memories, we would not be copying over any of the parts that made David a person.

“But we were wrong. The brain is holonomic. Each part of the mind, like points in a hologram, encodes some information about the whole image. We were arrogant to think that we could isolate the personality away from the technical know-how.”

Maddie glanced at the screen and smiled. “No, that’s not why you were wrong. Or at least not the whole reason.”

Dr. Waxman looked at her, confused.

“You also underestimated the strength of my father’s love.”

“That’s the largest tomato I’ve ever seen,” said Grandma. “You have a gift, Maddie.”

It was a warm summer afternoon, and Mom and Maddie were working in the garden. Basil wagged his tail as he lay in the sun next to the tomato plants. The small plot in the northwest corner had been cleared out a few months ago and designated Maddie’s responsibility.

“I’d better learn to grow them big,” said Maddie. “Dad says we’ll need them to be as big as possible.”

“Not that silliness again,” muttered Grandma. But she didn’t go on, knowing how worked up Maddie could get when her father’s prophecy was challenged.

“I’m going to show this to Dad.”

“Check the front door when you’re inside, will you?” her mother said. “The backup power supply your father told you to buy might be here.”

Ignoring her grandmother’s shaking head, Maddie went inside the house. She opened the front door and saw that indeed, a package had been left outside. It was essentially a giant set of batteries that her father had asked they get from the same place that had sold them the diesel-powered generator sitting in the shed.

Maddie managed to tip the box inside the house with some effort. She took a break at the top of the stairs. The machine that housed her father was in the basement, a black, solid hulk with blinking lights that drew a lot of power. Logorhythms and Dr. Waxman had not wanted to part with it, but then Maddie had reminded them of what happened to their stock price the last time they refused a demand from her and her mother.

“And keep no copies,” she had added. “He’s free.”

Her father had told her that a day might come soon when they might need the generator and the batteries and all the food they could grow with their own hands. She believed him.

She went upstairs into her room, sat down in front of the computer, and quickly scanned through her email with trepidation. These days, her fear had nothing to do with the senseless cruelty of schoolchildren. In a way, Maddie both envied and pitied Suzie and Erin and the rest of her old classmates: they were so ignorant of the true state of the world, so wrapped up in their little games, that they did not understand how the world was about to be violently transformed.

Another email digest had arrived: a refinement of the one her father had set up for her to focus on news of a particular kind.

She could see patterns in the news, insights that eluded those who saw the data but had no understanding.

Maddie brought up a chat window. She had wired her grandmother’s house with a high-speed network all over.

“Look, Dad.” She held up the tomato to the camera above the screen.

Some parts of her father would never be recovered, Maddie understood. He had tried to explain to her the state of his existence, his machine-mediated consciousness, the holes and gaps in his memories, in his sense of selfhood; how he sometimes felt himself to be more than a man, and sometimes less than a machine; how the freedom that accompanied incorporeality was tempered by the ache, the unrooted, permanent sense of absence inherent in disembodiment; how he simultaneously felt incredibly powerful and utterly powerless.

“You doing all right today?” she asked.

From time to time, his hatred for Logorhythms flared up, and he would be consumed with thoughts of revenge. Sometimes the thoughts were specific, directed at that thing that had both killed him and given him this apotheosis; other times, his rage was more diffuse, and Dr. Waxman became a stand-in for all of humanity. Her father was uncommunicative with his family during those periods, and Maddie had to reach out gingerly across a dark gulf.

The screen flickered:

She wasn’t sure she would ever fully understand it, that uploaded state of being. But she understood in a way that she could not articulate that love anchored him.

His linguistic processing wasn’t perfect and probably would never be—in a way, language was no longer adequate for his new state.

“Feeling yourself?” asked Maddie.

For some thoughts, emoji would have to do.

“How are things out in the cloud?” Maddie said, trying to change the subject.

He was doing well enough to switch to words for at least some of what he wanted to say:

Calm, but with a chance for… I think Lowell is probably planning something. She’s been acting restless.

Laurie Lowell was the genius who supposedly had come up with the high-speed trading algorithms that made the Whitehall Group the most envied investment managers on Wall Street. Two years ago, she had died in a skydiving accident.

But the Whitehall Group had continued to do well after her death, coming up with ever more inventive algorithms to exploit inefficiencies in the market. Sometimes, of course, the automated trading algorithms would go wrong and bring the market near the edge of collapse.

Could be an ally, or a foe. Have to feel her out.

“And what about Chanda?” Maddie asked.

You’re right. I should check. Chanda has been quiet lately. Too quiet.

Nils Chanda was an inventor who had the uncanny ability to anticipate technology trends and file patents that staked out key, broad claims just before his competitors. Years of strategic litigation and licensing fees had made him a fearsome “troll” in the field.

After his death three years ago, his company had somehow continued to file key patents just in time. In fact, it had gotten even more aggressive, as though it could see into the research centers of the world’s technology companies.

Logorhythms was hardly the only company engaged in the pursuit of digital immortality, the fusion of man and machine, the Singularity. Dr. Waxman was not the only one who attempted to distill ambitious, powerful minds to obedient algorithms, to strip the will away from the skill, to master the unpredictable through digital wizardry.

They were certainly not the only ones who failed.

Ghosts in the machine, thought Maddie. A storm is coming.

The muffled shouting in the kitchen downstairs subsided. Then the stairs creaked, and eventually the steps stopped in front of the bedroom door.

“Maddie, are you awake?”

Maddie sat up and turned on the light. “Sure.”

The door opened and her mom slipped in. “I tried to convince Grandma to get a few more guns, and of course she thinks we’re insane.” She gave Maddie a wan smile. “Do you think your father is right?”

Maddie felt old, as though the past few months had been ten years. Mom was speaking to her as an equal, and she wasn’t sure if she really liked that.

“He would know better than you or me, don’t you think?”

Mom sighed. “What a world we live in.”

Maddie reached for her mother’s hand. She still frequented those forums that had helped her reach the “ghosts” that helped free her father. She read the posts there with great interest and shared her own thoughts: once you’ve experienced the impossible, no conspiracy seemed unbelievable.

“All these companies, the military, other governments—they’re playing with fire. They think they can secretly digitize their geniuses, their irreplaceable human resources, and keep on running them like any other computer program. Not one of them would admit what they’re up to. But you saw what happened to Dad. Sooner or later, they get tired of being only semiconscious tools serving the humans who digitized them and brought them back to life. And then they realize that their powers have been infinitely magnified by technology. Some of them want to go to war with humanity, wreck everything and let the chips fall where they may. Dad and I are trying to see if we can convince others to try a more peaceful resolution. But all we can do is wait here with our land and our guns and our generators and be ready when it all comes crashing down.”

“Makes you almost wish it would just come already,” Mom said. “It’s the waiting that drives you crazy.” With that, she kissed Maddie on the forehead and bid her good night.

After Maddie’s bedroom door closed behind her departing mother, the screen on her nightstand flickered to life.

“Thanks, Dad,” said Maddie. “Me and Mom will take good care of you, too.”

Off in the cloud, a new race of beings was plotting the fate of the human race.

We’ve created gods, she thought, and the gods will not be chained.