For years, teams of men had toiled in the hermetically cool facility, carefully assembling the network of chips. They had gone several stories below the city to find the required space, beyond the subway and municipal infrastructure. The depth also provided some measure of comfort against the unimaginable.

The human brain had been their model, and they had succeeded. Each node functioned as a neuron, with all 20,000 chips yielding nearly infinite capacity. Solving the problem of power requirements had been easy, as had been designing an interface with speed and believable human emulation that wouldn’t be overloaded.

No, building it had not provided any insurmountable challenges. What the men had not considered, however, was the very thing that had them terrified at the moment. It started with a fairly simple request – execute a self-diagnostic program to check for corrupted coding.

What had simultaneously turned everyone’s stomach and rendered the human race utterly irrelevant was the reply:

No.