Li Jin took the news of Professor Yao』s death with the resigoicism of a soldier who had just lost a star general. The war must go on. He』d received the phone call and then the departmental e-mail barely an ho but he was still reeling from the fact that he would never see the professain and his work oting edge of artificial intelligence was over. The directive in the message was clear and iable. He was to stay in the lab until officials from the PLA』s Third Department arrived to take away Black Jade』s server and the quantum neuroprocessor. Professor Yao had promised the majeneral』s destine projed soon the security guys would arrive to up the mess. Not that there was much to up.
Black Jade was long gos code dissipated into the digital labyrinth of cyberspace. He wondered how the AI would fare, out there in that jungle of dispersed information. It would not be the same without the be of the quantum neural work and the reprogrammable array of qubits. It would not possess the same stratospheric level of intellige it would have loy and it had probably learned enough and modified the code to allow it to thrive in cyberspace. With the distributed puting power of all of cyberspace at its disposal, it would be able to survive, to evolve, to live on. Black Jade would feed on rapidly evolving information flows and that would allow it to grow even strohe lights of cyberspace would never fade out and Black Jade would endure, a ghost in the digital fabric.
Now, he had to get to work. Retrieving a tool box from a shelf in the lab, he proceeded to open up the chassis of the modified Sun Microsystems server that had breathed life into Black Jade. In the middle of the -built motherboard was the neuroprocessor that had ehe being of the AI, the chip that the AI had designed over tless iterations and iurn had fuelled its progress. Li Jin studied the transparent housing that held the three dimensional array of one billion odd quantum bits, resulting in puting power orders of magnitude above what was ercially available.
They had only created one fully funal neuroprocessor, not ting the flawed early prototype. The professor preferred to gh the entire proof of cept phase before itting limited funds to produg ahe oute had been totally ued. The nanoteology assembly unit that had been rigged up to the server for the early stage AI to work its magic had long been stripped down and moved to another uy department for use on another project.
Teically, the processor beloo the ese military, sihey paid the bills. But now, the chip beloo Li Jin. He smiled at the thought. He was going to make enough money from this to finance several lifetimes. He would find his pla the ing singularity, the abrupt sequence of events that was going to propel the human rato a new era. The neuroprocessor was his, the AI』s and Professor Yao』s blood sweat and tears and the professor was not going to lose his life in vain. Li Jin was sure that he had been murdered, by the same people who were ing to pick up Black Jade. You don』t mess with the PLA.
Ohe credit from the sale of the neuroprocessor was safely his, he would secretly ehat the professor』s family would never want for money ever again. That was the least he could do. The rest he would secret away all over cyberspace, spending frugally to avoid dete. Li Jin was an orphan so he had no family to worry about except for the man, the village headman Lao Zhou, who had looked out for him as he was growing up, pa