Page 97 of Mastermind

“Death,” I reply. “He built a neural network to develop cures for disease.”

“Bullshit,” she says.

“The angels, Jessica. Those miracle cures around the world? You heard of those?” asks Heywood.

Jessica turns away from me and toward Heywood. “What are you talking about?”

“I cured them. My model found treatments that had never been tried before. It looked at the human genome and the millions of medical records and research articles I trained it on, and it learned how to cure diseases. It saw patterns medical science never considered. It noticed why certain drug types would only work on certain genes. It figured out how to boost a treatment with a slightly above average success rate to near one hundred percent.” Heywood is beaming.

“This is bullshit, right?” Jessica asks me. “Somebody would have thought of it.”

“Lots of people thought of it,” I tell her. “The problem was twofold: one, you’d need more medical records than anyone legally has access to; two, you’d need more computational power than anyone has ever had access to. Not to mention an intelligent-enough algorithm to begin with. Basically, you’d have to be willing to invade the privacy of hundreds of millions of people and then steal billions of dollars’ worth of computer processing without anyone noticing.”

“You’re mostly right,” Heywood chimes in. “Although I did pay for a considerable amount of that computation myself. But essentially correct.”

Jessica searches my face, trying to make sense of this. “Is he saying he cured cancer?”

“Some forms,” Heywood answers for me. “The model is still learning. But yes, eventually all disease will be cured in time. Immortality is within our grasp.”

Heywood’s eyes dart to the left for a moment, like he’s listening to something. “It appears the other guests have arrived, and they’ve sent a tactical team up the elevator first. Dr. Cray, you might want to go ahead and open the door so they don’t knock it down. I would myself, but I’m afraid Jessica might accidentally shoot me.”

“It wouldn’t be an accident,” Jessica replies.

I open the door at the same time an FBI SWAT team bursts through. My hands are on my head and I’m on my knees before they even have to yell at me.

An agent fastens a zip tie around my wrists and pushes me to the floor without too much force.

I turn my head to see that Jessica has her badge out. The SWAT team fans out and searches the rest of the penthouse while the commander speaks to Jessica.

“Are you okay?” the commander asks her from under his mask.

“Fine. Can Dr. Cray get off the floor?”

“We have orders to hold him for now.”

“Whose orders?” she demands.

“The director’s orders.”

“I want to speak to him.”

“You can once we clear the premises.” The commander walks over to the window to confer with another agent.

“Theo, I’m sorry,” says Jessica.

“This is the politest arrest I’ve had in a while,” I tell her.

To be honest, my mind is still racing with what Heywood says he accomplished. Intellectually I can grasp what he did, even the finer details, but the scope of it is beyond comprehension. I’ve done some illegal and shady things in the name of helping people, but hacking the largest medical databases in the world, intruding upon that many computing clusters? It’s a work of evil genius. But is it evil?

If he’s telling the truth about the so-called miraculous recoveries and he can prove that his system cured them, the millions of lives he’ll save will outweigh the many he’s taken. Some might even forgive him. A generation from now, many will think of him as a mad-scientist hero. If his neural network continues to evolve, he could go down in history like Pasteur, Darwin, or Newton.

If his goal was to be thought of as a kind of living god, he may have accomplished that.

As hard as it is for Jessica to see it, we live in a world where leaders of nations can send missiles into other countries to clumsily murder enemies, kill innocents with drones, and still be given the Nobel Peace Prize. How would humanity look at the man who cured cancer—and had a viable explanation for his reckless behavior? Would people even remember him for the evil things he’s done? Would they care?

Jessica walks over to me and kneels as two FBI agents frisk Heywood on the ground. The Warlock’s looking in my direction and grinning.

“What’s going on, Theo?” whispers Jessica.