Li Jin took the news of Professor Yao’s death with the resigned stoicism 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 hour ago but he was still reeling from the fact that he would never see the professor again and his work on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence was over. The directive in the message was clear and nonnegotiable. 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 compromised the major-general’s clandestine project and soon the security guys would arrive to clean up the mess. Not that there was much to clean up.

Black Jade was long gone, its 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 benefit of the quantum neural network and the reprogrammable array of qubits. It would not possess the same stratospheric level of intelligence but it would have longevity and it had probably learned enough and modified the code to allow it to thrive in cyberspace. With the distributed computing 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 stronger. The 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 custom-built motherboard was the neuroprocessor that had enabled the becoming of the AI, the chip that the AI had designed over countless iterations and in return had fuelled its progress. Li Jin studied the transparent housing that held the three dimensional array of one billion odd quantum bits, resulting in computing power orders of magnitude above what was commercially available.

They had only created one fully functional neuroprocessor, not counting the flawed early prototype. The professor preferred to go through the entire proof of concept phase before committing limited funds to producing another. The outcome had been totally unexpected. The nanotechnology 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 university department for use on another project.

Technically, the processor belonged to the Chinese military, since they paid the bills. But now, the chip belonged to Li Jin. He smiled at the thought. He was going to make enough money from this to finance several lifetimes. He would find his place in the coming singularity, the abrupt sequence of events that was going to propel the human race into 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 coming to pick up Black Jade. You don’t mess with the PLA.

Once the credit from the sale of the neuroprocessor was safely his, he would secretly ensure that 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 detection. 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, parentless. The authorities had nobody to take away for questioning or to use as bait to trap him. They would not make the link to the old man.

He quickly removed the processor from its housing and carefully placed it in the cube-shaped storage unit that he had prepared for its safe transportation.

His agile mind had rapidly formulated a plan of action once he had decided on what he was going to do. He would replace the chip in the server with the functional but useless early prototype and he would install one of the many pre-Black Jade AIs that they had stored in the system. The PLA would have no idea until it was too late. Li Jin chuckled wickedly to himself. With the kind of money he was going to raise from the sale of the chip, who needed a PHD? He thought about where he would disappear to once the credit was at his disposal. He would have to make arrangements before hand on how to clandestinely move the credit through the system but there were well documented ways to do that and there were people who would do that for you for a small fee.

Then an idea struck him that made so much sense that he wondered why he hadn’t thought about it earlier. The perfect place to disappear to during the playing out of the singularity was cyberspace itself or Professor Yao’s new PLA network. The AI was pre-programmed to head for the closed proprietary network and would almost certainly first flex its muscles there, a prelude to it propagating into cyberspace itself. By the time Professor Yao’s revelations at the World Technology Forum resulted in other truly conscious AIs being unleashed in cyberspace, Black Jade would have become a finely tuned machine.

Li Jin had worked on the early network code and he knew the intricacies of the system well. The professor had said something about a backdoor rig, which he kept at his courtyard home in the Houhai lake area here in Beijing. Li Jin had never seen the rig. The professor had been ultra secretive about that. He would have to pay the professor’s home a visit. He would do it during the professor’s funeral which was bound to be soon. He could find that out easily from the professor’s family. He would have to do it soon before the PSB placed the family under questioning as was the routine in these situations. Then he would disappear for a while.

But who would pay big money for the chip, no questions asked, no repercussions? The last thing he wanted was the Union Security Agency or the CIA on his back. The Russians? Yes, they would pay. They would give anything to upstage the Union and the United States especially in this emerging area of quantum computing. But there was a credit risk. He would have to be very clever about arranging the details of the financial transaction. Yes, he would sell the chip to the Russians.