MIT Lab, 2033
Avery, a small Indian man walked the long hallway of the fourth floor of one of MIT’s computer lab. It was three in the morning and he was walking slowly eyes on a short pad. He finally got to the destination, pushed the door with his forearm as if to protect himself from germs.
Inside were piles and piles of broken old computers. Cathodic tubes were shoved under the tables in complete disarray. On the tables, in the mist of the chaos plastic cups of Mountain Dew were stacked next to empty bags of chips. On the wall was a large poster of Marilyn Monroe.
“Georges, what’s going on?”
“Not much,” he looked at the screens with attention.
“Didn’t you launch the system?”
“Yes,” he answered simply. The programmer wasn’t that social.
“Show me.” The man looked over his shoulder.
The screen was mostly dark. One by one, lines scrolled.
“What are those?”
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“Book titles, it’s reading every book ever written. It is now working on a board filled with thousands of unknown works, Royal Road.” A new line and title appeared every second.
“That’s fast reading.”
“Yes.”
The lines kept flashing and flashing as Georges monitored the Feed, a value he created. The computer kept digesting books one by one all night long.
Then in the small hours of the morning, the scrolling stopped.
“Avery, do you this book? It’s called The Attractor.”
He needed no better reason to get up and snoop. On the screen, the scrolling had stopped. The system was reading a book called The Attractor.
“Let me check it up online. I can’t really find anything. Here, it was published as The Attractor thirteen years ago. Says here longer than Lord of the Rings by a guy named Alain Villeneuve, nothing more. It is still being offered for sale, no one has purchased it recently.”
Georges got up and began searching frenetically for a memory card in his drawers. “It must be here somewhere.”
“What?”
“Remember when I told you deGrasse got me this research grant, well, he gave me a card that day. I looked it up home. There was only a file on it. That was the name of it. A long word file.”
“What did he tell you to do?”
“Upload it into the computer.” They both looked at the computer stuck now for minutes on this file. “Obviously it uploaded it by itself.
They put the file in the computer. “Load it up, let’s see what it says.” The dedication on the first page appeared to the shock of both men: To my father Georges Vouvelakis.
Both men began to scroll the file. Georges typed and indexed his last name, there were hundreds of mentions about him.
Before both could understand what was happening, one word appeared on the screen.
Father