LITMIR.BIZ

      MAY 29,-26 LD

      2099 CE

      When Reggie stepped out of customs at London Heathrow, C exclaimed, “He’s over there, over there!”

      Reggie had his phone synced with his implants. As his eyes scanned the crowd—passing over families decked out in Union Jack T-shirts, business people in gray suits, and security guards with drug-sniffing dogs—C had run a facial recognition app for its creator: Jamal Kaeden.

      Reggie waved at the man C indicated, and the two swam through the throngs, dodging baggage carts and people too focused on their implants to watch where they were going. Jamal was only perhaps half a foot taller than Reggie, but his lankiness gave the impression that he was a tower of a man. Neatly sheared dreadlocks were gathered in a ponytail at the base of his neck. He smiled broadly while they shook hands, and his smile shone bright white in his dark face.

      “And this is C,” Reggie said, holding up his phone to display the open PA avatar. C presented as a shifting green-and-purple fractal design. While the system allowed the user to set whatever avatar they wanted from an extensive list of customizable displays—everything from human faces to insects to galaxies—Reggie had let C choose its own form.

      “All right, C?” Jamal greeted the program, but then looked at Reggie quizzically. “You didn’t rename it? C is just its personality type indication—you’re supposed to call it whatever you want.”

      “Oh, I know. I had a hard time coming up with one, though, and it seemed happy enough referring to itself as C, so I left it. Not very creative of me.”

      “C is a good name,” C agreed.

      Jamal smiled again, clearly tickled. “My colleagues—blinkered sometimes, the lot of ’em—keep asking why I continue to create patches for the Cs now that AI personalities have fallen out of style, but I knew someone out there must enjoy them as much as I do. I used to patch Gs and Ks, but no one was downloading them. C is the only one still hanging on. Can I tell you a secret, C? You were always my favorite anyway. I still use C on my tablet.”

      “Thank you, sir,” it said, sounding genuinely flattered.

      Jamal showed Reggie to his tiny electric car. The project had taken Reggie all over the place, and he’d learned to travel light, so cramming his baggage into the two-door wasn’t much of a hassle. They drove to Reggie’s hotel with the windows down. Rain had soaked the city a few hours before, and everything smelled damp and renewed.

      “You have an interesting accent,” Reggie noted during the ride.

      “Algerian,” Jamal explained. “Lived there until I was ten. It’s my mother’s home country.” He explained that she’d come to the UK for university, where she’d met his father. After graduation they married and went to Africa to teach. They lived there for fifteen years until Jamal’s paternal grandparents had fallen ill and the family had relocated to London. “I’m a man of two nations.”

      After dropping off Reggie’s luggage, they went to Jamal’s firm for a tour. “I thought you’d be knackered after your flight,” Jamal said when they reached his workspace. Four monitors sat in a semicircle on the desk, each covered with a series of Post-it notes and conversion charts and reminder stickers. “Was going to spiff up the place tomorrow morning.”

      “I’m too wired. And C probably couldn’t wait,” he said with a small laugh. “Besides, it’s fine. My workspace is ten times worse.”

      The computer engineering firm took up the forty-third floor in a glass high-rise within six blocks of the famous Gherkin. They had a hardware subgroup and a software subgroup, and Reggie had done enough research on Mr. Kaeden to know he did a lot of crossover work. He was the best AI specialist in the world, as far as Reggie was concerned.

      Which meant the mission needed him.

      They strolled over to the long bank of windows and Jamal showed off the view. He pointed out several of the visible London highlights. “So, why are you here, Dr. Straifer?” he asked when they’d finished with the cursory pleasantries. “None of the other project leaders have wanted to visit the firm, let alone asked to have a chin wag with me specifically. It’s the ship engineers who’re most interested in the computer systems.”

      “My lead engineer—Dr. Akane Nakamura, you might have heard of her—told me that none of the convoys are set to use intelligent personal assistants in their user interfaces.”

      Jamal shrugged. “Because most people think they’re duff. Irritating window dressing. Sorry, C.”

      “What is ‘irritating window dressing’?” C asked. Both men ignored it.

      “Well I don’t think it’s, uh, duff. And I want my project to have one,” Reggie insisted. “Actually, I want it to have C.”

      Jamal sat quiet for a moment. He seemed pleased, but concerned. “That’s smashing,” he eventually said. “But it won’t be easy to sort. C’s line isn’t set up for personalization on the order we’re talking about—no PA has ever had to tailor itself to so many users. I couldn’t, for instance, just copy your version of C and upload it into the system. I’d have to start from scratch.”

      “But could you make it like C, or use parts of C? There’s got to be a reason it’s hung on so long when the rest have gone extinct.”

      “The basics can be the same, sure. But I don’t know if I can mirror its growth pattern. It’s easy to develop basic response algorithms these days for a single user, but … Imagine it’s a person,

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