Getting off the elevator, I waited for Ghost to stop screaming from her net search. After a moment of gaging, she finally stopped, and I could hear her catching her breath, followed by several clicks that were probably her clearing her search history. And after a few more gags, a green arrow pointed to the left, and I got moving.

“So what sight did you find, and what did you see?” I asked teasingly as I continued down the hall, noticing there was no checkpoint, making my job that much easier.

Ghost shivered, “I don’t want to ever see that ever again. I launched a cyber attack on the site and destroyed all evidence of it ever existing. I was going to get something to eat, but that ruined my appetite.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said in a sing-song voice.

“And I never will. Because it never happened.”

“Let me guess. The most beautiful woman imaginable with large breasts and thick thighs—”

“No!”

“Who’s in a loving relationship with a very handsome man—”

“NO! STOP!”

“Get’s fucked senseless by—”

“Please, stop! I’m begging you!”

“The fattest—”

“NO!!”

“Ugliest—”

“NO, NO, NO, NO!!”

“Hairiest bastard with a tiny dick.”

“AHHH!! BLAUGHH!!”

I laughed as Ghost gaged and almost threw up over the comms, “I told you not to look that up.”

“Ughh. Please, let’s change the subject.”

“Okay, okay. What am I getting next?” I obliged, changing the subject.

“The door on the right, go through it,” Ghost answered, and I opened it up to see dozens of cylindrical metal tubes the size of my arm, three feet long and a foot wide. “Those are carrying tubes. Keeps the processors safe for transport. You could drop it from a high orbit, and the chip would be completely safe. We just need one of them.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

I grabbed the closest carrying tube and left the room, heading back to the elevator. As I walked, I decided to ask an important question I should have asked before I took the job, “Hey, Ghost, why do you want this microchip processor thing?”

“I told you it has the processing power of thirty-three supercomputers. It’s the closest humanity has come to a quantum computer in all human history,” Ghost answered immediately.

“That’s a reason to have it,” I countered, “Why do you want it?” I asked again, entering the elevator and going down to SB2Z.

Ghost went silent for a moment before saying, “Promise you won’t laugh.”

I blinked, “Yeah, I promise.”

Ghost didn’t answer right away again, but she soon said, “Recently, my mom died.”

I blinked again, “I didn’t know you had a mom.”

“She was sick for a long time. Whenever you were here, I made sure she was at the hospital for her checkups.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Wouldn’t want Mom to meet the homicidal maniac. But I can’t empathize with you. I killed my parents,” I nodded, understanding her logic.

“I know. But I love my Mom. I wanted to save her so badly, but money can’t solve everything … and she died,” Ghost continued, and I heard her sniff on the other end of the comms as the elevator dinged, opening to another empty hallway. Stepping out of the elevator, a picture appeared on the smart-glass down the hall. I walked up to it to see a young Jasmin and her Mom, smiling happily. Jasmin looked to be five or so, and her caramel skin matched her mother’s with wavy chestnut-colored hair and emerald-green eyes. Her mother had the same hair and eyes as her daughter.

“This her? And is there a point in showing me this?” I asked as picture after picture appeared on the walls leading down the hall.

“Yeah, that’s mom,” Ghost confirmed, taking a deep breath, “I really didn’t want her to die, so I built a machine that would map her neural pathways,” blueprints began to replace the family photos gradually, “It took months, but I finally finished it with Zander’s help, and I managed to map out my mom’s neural pathways before she passed. And that’s when I ran into my first major problem.”

“And that is?” I asked as Ghost stopped talking. Without prompt, the blueprints began to be replaced with articles and research papers. I quickly grazed over the words in several different languages and began to piece everything together, “A.I.?”

“Not just A.I. but quantum theory,” Ghost began, sounding excited, “You see, using just the map of my mom’s brain, I can only make a copy of her that’s stuck in an endless loop. She can’t grow and learn without deleting her memories. Slowly killing herself again. But with A.I., I can make her grow and learn again, given enough storage and processing power.”

“Thus the processor.”

“Exactly. And with the processor, I hope to get something more out of it.”

“Like what?”

“The singularity.”

I froze in my tracks as I processed what I was hearing, “The singularity?! The premise that humanity and—”

“And machines will merge into one, giving us immortality,” Ghost interrupted, finishing my sentence, “That’s exactly what I mean. Remember when I said this processor was the closest to a quantum computer humanity has ever gotten? Do you know how close it is?”

“How close?” I asked.

“Five percent,” Ghost answered in an almost conspiratorial whisper.

I shook my head and kept moving down the hall, the elevators now in sight, “Well, I hope whatever you plan on doing works out for you.”

“Me too,” Ghost said as the elevator opened for me, and I pressed the holo-panel button for SB3Z.

***