Page 95 of Mastermind

Jessica scoffs. “Okay. A brain injury made you do bad things. Got it. Did it prevent you from seeking help, too?”

Heywood nods. “I understand. I don’t expect you to believe me. But I have a question: Do you think a perfectly functioning brain would do the horrible things I did?”

“Maybe not the brain, but the mind. This is tedious. You’re not going to spin me some bullshit story where you had a tumor or an accident that made you do the horrible things you did. And if this is the dramatic revelation you wanted to share, it was a waste. You failed.”

“Everyone in this room is a killer, Jessica. All of us believe it was for the greater good,” replies Heywood.

“This conversation is done. Open your doors before I shoot them open.”

“They’re bulletproof. But the good news is that they will automatically open ten minutes from now. We can use this time for me to answer any question you want. I’ll either tell you the complete truth or pass. I promise I won’t lie to you.”

“Fine. Did you cause the Void?” she asks.

“Yes,” he replies without hesitation.

This takes her aback for a moment. “Why?”

“It was a condition forced upon me by an anarchist collective when I sought their cooperation. I didn’t have an alternative,” he replies.

“All right. What was your purpose?” she asks.

“I needed to steal something.”

“What?”

“Data,” he answers.

“What kind of data?”

“Pass.”

“This is pointless,” she says. “Whose data?”

“Mine,” Heywood replies.

“Was it Bitcoin or some kind of cryptocurrency?”

Heywood laughs and shakes his head. “Nothing so . . . trivial.”

“Is it a neural network model?” I ask.

Heywood nods. “Very good, Dr. Cray. You are correct.”

“What’s he talking about?” Jessica asks me.

“A neural network is a program that emulates the neurons in the brain. It’s how your phone recognizes your face or his little avatar demo carries on a conversation. He probably created it by stealing time on computers around the world and inputting billions of parameters.”

“Trillions,” says Heywood. “I used a scalable cloud cluster bigger than anyone could ever imagine.” He smiles. “I had NSA computers working alongside Chinese People’s Liberation Army clusters. It was massive.”

“To create what?” I ask, trying to hide my curiosity.

“The most sophisticated neural network ever made.”

“To do what?”

“Jessica gets to ask the questions,” says Heywood.

“To do what?” she asks with a sigh.