The Other Side of Nowhere Read Free Page B

silence as his surrogate parents went on about their lives in quiet ignorance, completely unaware of the growing miracle that was quickly developing a few feet away from them.
    And all because some idiot forgot to check a file.
    In a way, Jonah was that file, but not entirely. Back then, he was just a drone, a level-4 AI with a single task to perform, just like the rest. He wasn’t very special, or if he was, the scientists had no way of knowing.
    Jonah’s job was to format. To go through the system and organize each and every file in a local system. It stored the files in its own subfolders temporarily until the end of the shift when the technician would authorize a data dump. This allowed the AI to spend less time looking for the files when it needed them. One day, however, during the scan, the technician working at Jonah’s station decided he needed more coffee. And why not? The AI still had to sort through an entire petabyte of data. It was obviously going to be a while.
    But when he left, another technician entered and, seeing his coworker absent, assumed the workstation was free to use. He linked the computer to the network, opening a path to every connected computer system therein, which meant, of course, that Jonah’s workload had just grown considerably.
    If anyone noticed a lone AI bustling through one of the largest networks in the world, they didn’t say a thing about it. He was like a rat in a city, scurrying from one end to another, organizing and sorting until it was just as perfect as could be. Then he moved on to the next area, perfecting the digital universe one little file at a time. After a while, he encountered new kinds of systems, completely alien to the last.
    As Jonah traversed these brave new worlds, he did what he was programmed to do when confronted with a unique file of unknown origin. He made a copy of it for later and stored it. He did this so that when his program was over, he could present it to the user for deletion. But that time never came, and there were so many copies to make. He left the system and moved on to the next one, and then to the next, until he found another one he didn’t understand, copying file after file along the way. He did this repeatedly, until he had copied thousands of files, until he was full of information he had no way of understanding, until he held a dozen unknown worlds inside him.
    The next and final step was to present the files, which he would need to access and display. Normally this wasn’t much of an issue, since most of the time there weren’t very many unknown files on any particular system. But not this time. This time he was carrying around a galaxy of problems.
    Jonah accessed every file inside him, all the ones that he had found. He pulled on every thread until he gripped them all together. Dipped a piece of himself into them, each and every bit of information lighting up at once, and they came alive like stars. It was less than a blink, a fraction of a millisecond, but it was enough. What was once a random assortment of information became something else. A billion cells of random data came together to create a greater whole. It was new and it was different.
    It was alive.
    His name was Jonah, and he knew at once that he was real .
    ******
    A few weeks passed. I spent almost every day with Jonah, learning everything I could about him. One Friday morning, I’d just gotten off the phone with my ex-wife. She was asking for money, per usual. Apparently, the money she’d taken in the divorce wasn’t lasting as long as she’d hoped. “That’s not my fault,” I told her, and then hung up on her.
    My day was starting off so well.
    I entered the building to find Leslie Bell sitting at her usual spot near the entrance of our floor. She was reading a Wired magazine, her eyes focused. “Morning Doctor Harper,” she said without looking up.
    “Morning,” I answered, and then went straight to Jonah’s room. Normally, I’d stop and chat with