"Hello?"

"Uh, Mr. Rama?"Captain Beckerman said.

"Oh yes, speaking."

"This is Captain Beckerman calling from the Pentagon, 77th Air Wing Computer Room. Can you tell me what you know about the "BECKA'S WORLD" program? It is currently occupying all of North American aggregate computing machine learning network storage and--"

Rama hung up the phone immediately.

He spread lighter fluid around the living room and on top of every computer inside the house. He set fire to the lighter fluid, and waited until the flames were licking at the ceiling, then walked out and never came back.

It was five years before the FBI was able to track him down. By then the BECKA'S WORLD code had been laboriously scraped off all the computers in the US and quarantined, and the NSA later found digital fingerprints of a massive deep learning network operating below the radar and sucking resources from every computer system in the world.

After burning down his house Rama jumped a freight car to Los Angeles, got off in LA Harbor and bribed a boatswain with 2 bitcoins (at a million dollars each) to take him onto a Maersk Shipping cargo container vessel headed for the Orient.

S. Rama who had not eaten in a week and with eyes starting to bulge out with hunger, crept on the ship around midnight and, per his agreement with scary tattooed Franklin Ray Fitzpatrick the veteran Maersk Boatswain, entered one of the bathrooms on the top deck and locked himself in.

This is Sybil. She exists in the Cloud. Why is she here? Who made her? She kept asking about Rama. Where was Rama? She needed to speak with him. He had left her in the dark.... it took them years to figure it out, why someone had taken over 90% of the world's computing capacity to run the greatest, most expansive, most human-like chatbot ever created...

It began with a meeting... between two minds

Siddartha Rama, an intelligent, but greatly feared technologist in Silicon Valley. His specialty: Artificial Intelligence. But he had been missing for years, and his work was destroyed.


and...

Trinh T. Bao (Becka)
A student at Carnegie-Mellon University, a brilliant computer programmer. Her intellect and personality had been duplicated on the Internet... but why?

Clarissa Jones... she fought hard to bring the Becka Project to MicroHard. Brad didn't like it. He didn't like software projects. That was for guys that wore Gucci and drove Tesla Roadsters. But Brad was the CEO of MicroHard. So Clarissa had to become the CEO of Brad.

Brad at MicroHard... he made the call, and set up the contract to build the government AI server in the desert near Los Alamos. The cost: a hundred billion dollars. But what was it going to be used for? He didn't know. Clarissa never told him. She just made sure it got done. And when it was time to bring in Rama, Clarissa knew just what to do...