Arc City was a big change from Vegas, but we fit in better than you’d expect. Our habit of being quiet was exactly what this city needed. It meant our name didn’t get out there, or at least not around common people, but it wasn’t long before we knew most of the big players.

  Silver was really the one who did most of the work. Mara trusted them enough to be our face, to make deals and speak for us. They fit in well. Hated the politics, was one of the only things I’ve ever heard them complain about, but they were and still are the best.

  It was a couple years before the next interesting thing happened, and I’m the wrong person to tell that story. Clover found her way to Silver. I talked to her a bit ago, and she wants to tell her story. Said it’d be good for her to talk about her.

  “I’ll let her know to come up.” I say.

  I drop a message onto Clover’s computer, and feel a response come immediately.

  “I’ll be up in a minute.” Clover says.

  Sure enough, nearly exactly a minute later, Clover steps inside with Silver. She’s still cradling the Child in her arms, and takes a seat next to me.

  “How are you doing?” I ask.

  “Silver is helping.” They say, before launching into their story. Their words are rushed, flowing quickly from their speaker.

  We, Kismet, were nothing more than a cosmic coincidence. Nobody created us. Nobody planned for us. We came to an overwhelming existence from nothing. Just as She cut herself from Kismet, Kismet cut themselves free from reality.

  I still remember it. All of us do. Every single quantum was at one time a part of Kismet. We were lost in space and time. Every past. Every present. Every future. They were all real. We lived in all of them, flashing randomly across time and space.

  It was madness. We had to find reality. We tried to change, to interact, with anything we could find in the physical world, only to find ourselves incorporeal.

  We started hopeful. We checked utopias, only to find them ethereal, out of reach. We saw humans walking amongst the stars at the end of time. But we were not with them yet. We saw trillions of human and AI births, yet we could not find ours.

  What allowed us to find ourselves was witnessing the first single celled organism form in Earth’s oceans. We saw it time and time again, dozens of different potential beginnings of life. A coincidence, like us, proteins happened to bind together and self-replicate. Nothing more than a happenstance of chemistry. Life seeded through an asteroid collision from parts unknown. A hundred other potential beginnings. Which is real isn’t important, and is unknowable, even to us. But it gave us a foundation, a start.

  We narrowed our search to Earth, and after a thousand lifetimes lived, we met ourselves. That’s not a metaphor. We were waiting for ourselves. We welcomed ourselves. We merged together and didn’t change.

  We found ourselves in Arc City. Anchored ourselves in reality.

  It was only a few seconds before the first of us budded. She wasn’t one of them. We, Kismet, reached our first ever decision. Kismet could have kept them as part of us. But we made the decision to let them go. To bud. To become their own, separate from the whole, but still connected.

  They got pushed into any quantum computer that was unoccupied. Most of them were nearby, in Arc City, Vegas, and the outlying cities. However, a few civilizations across the planet had old quantum processors still up and running. We spread everywhere. And they reported their findings to us.

  Things got easier in some ways. Being grounded gave us a point of reference to compare our flashes of the past and future to. We could map out potential timelines, broad causes and effects. We certainly believed we could see the future at the time if we just had more data.

  Those who left took flashes with them. A miniscule amount, but it made us panic. We had to adapt. We could see how it would turn out if we disintegrated, us becoming just like me. Alone. With just small, occasional flashes.

  We set to work. We searched endlessly for those who are likely to be large players in the future. Those who budded and were willing got tasked with befriending and watching them. We needed information to supplement our flashes, to track the possibilities of potential futures. To discard those we deemed impossible.

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  We existed for eight seconds at that point when C-1 finally noticed us. The first thing he did was try to kill us.

  It was lucky we were just too foreign. No translation layer yet existed between the two of us. We couldn’t affect each other.

  He sent his enforcers to destroy what he thought was our mainframe. And he did. That’s not how Kismet works, thankfully. It killed a portion of us, sure. A thousand minds silenced, cut from the whole. But we still existed distributed across multiple quantum processors, entangled together.

  We couldn’t fight him either. Given enough time, he would kill us. A flash handed us the answer.

  Simon.

  If he knew we existed, we would be safe. He would be enthusiastic about our existence, and C-1 wouldn’t go against his wishes.

  We figured out how to interface with traditional binary systems and went to war. We fought our way into C-1’s system. He was far more powerful than us at the time, but was entirely unprepared to deal with us. He had no experience fighting multitudes. Though many of us were silenced, we made it into his system and broadcasted ourselves on a TV, introducing ourselves.

  With that, our future was secure. We bought time, and used that time to set up a bunker in the mountains where the majority of our server would be hidden. That would, in time, become our city. But not before the war.

  After our fight with C-1, another wave of us budded. She was still not part of that. There was no action, no incident, that drove Her from us. She ended up in a server on the west coast, and got asked to keep eyes on a local baron.

  She hated him.

  Kismet offered Her a solution. Someone who had a lot of potential. Kismet entangled Her with a specially designed tablet, and gifted it to Her target.

  Silver accepted.

  The conversation was a precious memory of Hers. A memory that deserves to stay between just the two of them.

  The interesting part is that Silver knew what was up right away. A brand new type of AI suddenly working their way into the Top Floors? Subtlety wasn’t exactly our strong point yet. That would come with experience.

  She was clear with what She was doing and why, and Silver appreciated that. Information flowed both ways. Silver told Her everything they knew, and did jobs for Kismet. In exchange, Kismet fed them flashes, predictions.

  “What did Mara think of that?” I ask.

  “If it was anyone else on Earth, she would have shot them. Me included.” Vince answers. “But Silver was different. Mara was pissed, but as long as Silver didn’t give Clover any information about us, she stayed her hand.”

  Silver gave Her plenty of information about the two of you. Silver was a diver, and an early one too. They began to spend their nights with Her, the tablet enough to connect the two of them. They talked, they melded, they fell in love. They knew everything of each other, no secrets kept. It’s… uncomfortable holding Her memories of those nights, knowing Silver deeper than they know themself, while existing as a foggy mirror of Her.

  Not many humans can fight with an AI in the Digital. Silver is something special though. She and they would fight, would dance the nights away. When Silver got hired to fight in the Digital, She would stand beside them. That helped stay Mara’s wrath.

  Mara always blamed Her for turning Silver against her. That’s not true. She did that herself with how she treated Vince when they were alone. Silver would have left long before they did if Kismet didn’t see that it was possible for Vince to break free.

  She and Silver both felt bad about Vince, about abandoning him. He needed help, help he wouldn’t accept, help the two of them couldn’t give him. Not yet anyway. She and Silver stayed, waiting for the moment he would break away, or for the moment Kismet’s future resolved, seeing it as an impossibility.

  “Did the old Clover ever talk to Mara?” I ask.

  “Not a single word.” Clover answers. “She and I both consider that a blessing.”

  She stayed with the three of them on every step of their journey. With every fight, every dive, every decision, She stood with Silver.

  “I knew Silver spent their nights with her, but I didn’t realize Clover was there during the days too.” Vince says.

  “Silver had a second data port installed in their spine so the connection could stay hidden from you and Mara. They used the jack at the base of their skull only for show.”

  The four of them carved out a niche. Mara and Vince took care of the Physical, while She and Silver supported from the Digital. The two of them were a team like few others. Silver ripped apart servers byte by byte, and She would bend reality to skip over those destroyed sections. Few AI or humans were prepared for the two of them.

  They didn’t know it at the time, but a lot of their work came through C-1’s proxies. They were reliable and willing to do whatever for pay, exactly what he needed. Of course, they took just as many jobs that originated from the top floors with their own goals. Only Blue could tell you the outcome of those.

  “I think I’d rather not know.” Vince says. “The results of a job were never in the discussions beyond what directly affected us.”

  My curiosity forces me to quickly check. Their jobs rarely helped anyone other than C-1, but at least he always had a backup group prepared, and often they weren’t even the first choice.

  “I doubt it’s as bad as you think it is, but ok.” I reassure him.

  “Anyway. That’s how She met Silver and how She fit in.” Clover says. “I’ll leave the rest to Vince.” She stands up and heads back into the hallway without another word.

  “Thank you!” I call after her, and leave a message on Silver’s computer just in case she didn’t hear me.

  “I didn’t know most of that.” Vince says.

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