Hunter was inside the facility for an entire day, but it felt like a week. His muscles ached from the exertion and stress of nearly crashing in on Melissa. He was glad that he didn’t get caught, and to be back on familiar ground, even if it was his mother’s place. As soon as he got home, he went to the dining room and collapsed on a chair.

“Hunter, what’s the news?”

Jony’s voice startled Hunter for a second.

“Why are you so jumpy?” Jony asked.

“Why did you sneak up on me, anyway?” Hunter asked, his voice sharp.

Jony looked confused. “You walked into the dining room just now. You know—the area we’ve been working in over the past week?”

“Oh, I . . . was deep in thought. Is Mum here?”

“She’s in the study. She has that bloody Sultan on the line.”

“What country does the Sultan lead, anyway?” Hunter said.

Jony laughed. “He’s not a real Sultan—just thinks he is. Nah, he is a bloke from Morocco with a lot of money.” After a pause, Jony continued, “So, you going to spill? What did you find up there?”

“Mason has developed an artificial intelligence so advanced that it is interrogating other AIs around the world.”

Jony seemed to be lost in thought. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

“I overheard a conversation between Jeremiah and a bloody computer, which sounded like Mirai.”

“The voice inside those home automation systems?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t call it that. He called it Lev, or something like that.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Who is Lev?” Dahlia said.

Hunter hadn’t heard his mother come in.

“The voice of the AI that Jeremiah Mason was talking to,” Hunter said.

“What else don’t I know?” she asked.

Hunter got his mother up to speed before proceeding.

“What do the Timeslicers want with an AI?” Dahlia said.

“They talked about Black Iris having an AI.” Hunter said. “What’s that about?”

Jony looked at Dahlia. She nodded.

“It’s an experimental project I call AlphaFour,” Jony said.

Hunter chose his next words carefully. He didn’t want to sound like an idiot.

“I’m not sure what the Timeslicers want with these, but if he is attacking other AIs, he has something up his sleeve,” Hunter said.

“If he is launching attacks against other AIs, then he has a lot more processing power than we do,” Jony said.

“How much processing power does AlphaFour have?” Hunter asked.

Jony seemed surprised by the question. “AlphaFour has over twelve hundred processor cores in a meshed network,” he answered.

“Jeremiah mentioned nothing about cores. I think it said ‘cubes’ or something?”

“Qubits? Is that the term?”

Hunter thought for several seconds. “Yeah, that sounds right.”

Jony slouched in his chair.

“What’s the matter?” Hunter said.

“A qubit is a measurement of how powerful a quantum computer is: the more qubits, the more powerful. Did you overhear anything that Jeremiah said about how many qubits he had available?”

“Four thousand is what I heard.”

“What! If he has that much power, they could crack AlphaFour in a matter of minutes. The good thing is she’s inaccessible from the internet. I have the only key!” Jony said.

“Another surprising development is that Melissa has a daughter,” Hunter said.

“I didn’t know she ever dated anyone,” Dahlia said.

“She was a real party girl back in the day—”

“Anything else?” Jony said, cutting Hunter off.

For some reason, Jony looked nervous at the mention of her name.

Ahh, I must have struck a nerve. But why? Hunter thought.

“I was getting to the good part,” Hunter said as he looked around to gauge the temperature in the room. “Melissa’s daughter is sick—some illness—and they are planning to transfer her into another host. I didn’t know that was possible.”

“It isn’t,” Jony replied. “That would require advanced technology capable of growing human tissue. There’s also the matter of connecting the thousands of nerves from another host’s brain to the new one.”

“How do you know that?” Hunter asked.

“Hacking biotech is a hobby of mine,” Jony said.

“There are few surgeons who can do anything even close. We should do some research on these surgeons,” Dahlia said.

“Let’s see what I can find,” Jony said.