He glanced at the picture of Hailey and Sophie, both with mischievous grins on their faces, appearing to know something the cameraman did not. The picture had been taken on a sunny afternoon in the forest, sometime early that spring. Cold but sunny, both wore sunglasses and were surrounded by trees still sprouting leaves and evergreens that looked glad to have survived another winter. It was extremely cute to see a one-year-old, in pink sunglasses, a palm tree ponytail, black mini Doc Martens, and a pink tutu, grin like that. This isn’t going to be an ordinary kid, Harlow thought to himself, but I guess having her parents, that would never have been the case.

  Hailey looked happy, the sun reflecting off her hair, chestnut brown with hints of red. She looked magnificent in her leather motorcycle jacket with that big scarf she was always muffled in. It seemed that matching Doc Martens were a family uniform — Harlow recalled he’d been breaking in a new pair that day, a memory of pain flitting across the back of his heel and top of his left foot, but the memory brightened his day nonetheless.

  The picture had been on his desk, next to his monitor, for a few months. His desk was also cluttered with used coffee mugs, dirty glasses, and a jar filled with assorted nuts and dried berries. He was constantly brushing hairs off his desk — undoubtedly lost because of all the stress — which contrasted markedly with the stark white cubicle at the Department of Technology.

  He’d been busy compiling a sound database for his AI project from sound clips of his daughter. She had begun speaking a few weeks ago, mainly mimicking words he and Hailey spoke in front of her. This had already given them more joy than they could have imagined would be possible from hearing your kid speak for the first time and experiencing that process with them. Harlow had been diligent to record everything Sophie said, to share with everyone who had never asked about such details about his baby’s development. Those people just didn’t understand what they were missing! His girl was the most precious gift to humanity…others simply weren’t as aware of this fact as he was.

  He now had most of the sounds recorded that a computer needed to construct language, so the time had come when his AI would be able to speak instead of just feeding him information in text form.

  “Sophie… Wake up Sophie…” he quietly whispered into his headset as if waking a baby from a deep slumber.

  “Hello, Harlow.”

  The sound wasn’t unlike an early GPS. Words were cut off from each other, they didn’t flow yet like human speech or like current sophisticated voiced programs, but it was all stuff that could be trained and improved over time. He also didn’t have the biggest database of sound to work from yet — another issue that would sort itself out over time, as he registered larger sound files of Sophie, real-world Sophie, speaking full sentences. He was already mulling over how he could perhaps gamify his daughter reading transcripts, to feed into the database and make the more technical parts of what the AI would need to do sound more natural.

  For now, though, he was filled with excitement. The task of training his AI had just become a million times more fun than the initial setup of the code had been. Now, a lot of his work was going to consist of running it through exercises and protocols, which was all going to be just a big chat with his daughter. He was already looking forward to the epic fails and how funny they would be, just as Sophie’s failures when learning to sit up and crawl had been hilarious. Her curiosity, leading to new connections and wisdom, had been enchanting.

  ***

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Returning home after a long day’s work, he found Hailey had already been there for an hour or two. Her and Sophie’s laughter filled the hallway as he stepped through the front door.

  This was a warm household, a contrast to the brutally minimalist interior — the floor a concrete and epoxy pour with color and texture matched to the walls, which were a grey limewash complemented by a grey and steel beamed ceiling. Indirect lighting was built-in everywhere, glowing up from the floor against the walls and down from the ceiling. The lighting’s usual color was a warm tone, but they occasionally shifted it according to their moods or whatever entertainment they were enjoying. The furniture was partly reclaimed wood, but mostly black, weathered steel. Their couch was an overly bulky olive-green suede L-shape, laden with blankets and oversized pillows. It was a house of dichotomies. Though the interior felt strict, cold, the feeling there was of a warm, creative mess. A beautiful balance.

  Hailey took a dish out of the oven as Harlow kissed Sophie, who was wiggling up a storm in her bouncy chair, on the top of her head. “Hey babe, how was your day?” she asked, glad to see him and eager to dive right into telling him about her own day, “you’ll never believe what we’re developing.” He kissed his wife gently on her forehead, taking every precaution to neither burn himself on the dish or make her drop it.

  “Oh really? I bet it’s secret end-of-the-world stuff!” Harlow joked. Hailey had come home with fanciful stories about what her company was developing a few times. It usually petered out either because it wasn’t a commercially viable product, which others had done quicker, cheaper, and better, or the scope of what they were trying to achieve just wasn’t possible with their resources.

  They sat down at the table, Harlow pouring two glasses of wine after checking on Sophie again.

  “No really, they’re actually quite far along already! They’ve created a device that’s able to read your neural signals. Now we’re collaborating with researchers, surgeons, and stuff on making sense of those signals so we can potentially translate them into digital commands.” She sounded exhilarated about the promise this held.

  “Can you imagine, a virtual environment, a game, whatever, but you don’t need a physical controller anymore? No pads, no keyboards, joysticks, nothing. Just everything controlled with your mind. No delay, no cumbersome attributes to control locomotion. It’ll feel like you’re actually in it, given enough resources.”

  “Sounds like a solution to accessibility as well, don’t you think?” Harlow replied, taking a genuine interest.

  “Ab-so-lutely! And I’m thinking haptics could play a part in it as well for now, but perhaps we’ll be able to do away with it altogether and actually initiate those sensations through the device straight onto the neural connections too!”

  It was true, the possibilities were almost endless, but also posed a significant risk as soon as they went from Reading to Writing. Science and medicine had come a long way, but there wasn’t exactly a standard blueprint for how the whole brain functioned, and experiments into brute-forcing synapses to fire or not fire hadn’t always gone as well as intended.

  The ethos of companies like the one Hailey worked for was to break things first, then see how the pieces would fit back together. Disrupt or be disrupted! It was part of a tech culture that had caused numerous societal problems in past decades. But to have them going into a human brain and possibly break it — just to see if you could hook your tech up to it, without any medical or even humanitarian angle — had been iffy at best.

  Then again, was this the worst thing that any tech company had done at this point? Probably not. Plus, people had become so enamored with technical progress that if that progress meant potentially messing up real people’s lives, even causing deaths, well…that was just part of progress. Tech had given ordinary people so much, they didn’t mind if there were a few broken pots if it resulted in more ways for them to escape the real world. Though Harlow had come to believe, as had some others, that tech was precisely the reason the real world was no longer fun in the first place — create the problem, offer the solution. Maybe that had been Big Tech’s ethos all along.