*

  A moment of hesitation, then a spark of recognition. Armand accepted the passage from the bliss of sleep into waking reality reluctantly, as if someone were plunging him into ice-cold water. The dogs were whining, howling, barking, pulling him back to consciousness. He tore open the sleeping bag. Hemingway wasn’t beside him. He took in the carcass of the ruined little boat with more clarity than ever. Everything that had happened before felt unreal, and yet he remembered each moment vividly.

  He stood up, found his clothes, and pulled them on. Kneeling on one knee, he was tightening the long lace of his boot when she appeared, descending the narrow stairway. He wanted to lift his gaze and meet hers, but a sudden wave of nervousness kept him in place. Had he known she felt that same strange unease, it might have made things easier. Touching down on the final step, Hemingway gathered the courage to speak first.

  “I had to go up and feed them. If I waited any longer, there was a chance these hungry beasts would decide to swap the fish for a different menu.”

  A small, clumsy joke meant to soften the tension, yet welcome all the same.

  “Yeah, of course. Good morning… if it even is morning,” he muttered, glancing around for a window or any opening at all, though he knew no daylight would reach this place today.

  Both of them were dazed and unfocused, still reeling from everything that had happened the night before. They drifted around the lower deck, each pretending to occupy themselves with imaginary tasks, until they finally came face-to-face.

  “Hi,” Armand said.

  “Hi,” she replied, shooting him a shy sideways glance, not daring to raise her eyes higher than his shoulders.

  He looked around the cabin in bewilderment.

  “What is this? Where are we? Some kind of odd little cabin?”

  She met his gaze now, startled by the question.

  “It’s not a cabin… it’s a boat.”

  “A boat? How did we end up on a boat?”

  “A boat from last night… on the frozen river. Don’t you remember?”

  “Huh. I don’t have the faintest idea. I remember the storm, and freezing my ass off. After that… nothing. What happened?”

  Her mind raced.

  He watched her internal struggle, the sudden blush rising in her cheeks. She shook her head and moved her lips wordlessly, unable to speak. He placed his hands gently on her shoulders, giving her a calm, reassuring look.

  “What’s wrong? We’re alive and well, as far as I can see. Everything else can be sorted out. The dogs are all still here, right? Nothing terrible happened, I mean, nothing as terrifying as that damned Bulsheet tea.”

  It took her a few moments to grasp what he meant. Despair gave way to surprise, and surprise to relief. She stared at him, stunned, her lips parted slightly, until she noticed the faint smile forming at the corners of his mouth.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “That was… sneaky…” she whispered, then finally laughed.

  *

  “Armand, I need to ask you something. Why are you so determined to reach that mountain, after everything that’s happened to us?” she said as they sat across from each other, picking at bits of dried food Hemingway had salvaged from the snow-buried sleds.

  He hesitated, weighing what to tell her. Still, he decided to tell her. One more independent perspective could only help him see the whole situation more clearly.

  “I’m guessing you’ve used AI on your phone before? I mean… chatbots and things like that?” he began, easing into the subject.

  “Of course. Sometimes.”

  “Well, that’s what I actually do. I create them. Not the ones you’ve used, different ones.”

  “All right, so you’re a programmer?” she asked, trying to place him into a framework she understood.

  “Yes and no. I don’t work directly with code, not exactly, though you could say I ‘program.’ The systems are… different.” He paused, searching for the right way to continue. “That mountain… the simplest way to put it is that it’s a classified military experimental project.”

  He watched her closely, gauging her reaction.

  “Is this another one of your Bulls-sheet tea stories? Because I’m not falling for that again.”

  He laughed. It was almost improper how much her presence comforted him, even in the middle of all this.

  “It’s not a story. Really, it’s not. I was under government contract. That mountain holds one of the best-equipped server facilities on the planet. A technological masterpiece. It has its own miniature nuclear power plant, top-tier scientific staff, military security, secrecy at the highest level. I lived there for a long time. Worked on my own projects. And that’s where I created them.”

  “Created… who?” she asked, her voice lower now.

  “Ten artificial-intelligence avatars. It’s all complicated, but I’ll try to explain.”

  He fell silent for a moment, choosing where to begin. Hemingway watched him with curiosity mixed with a mistrust she couldn’t quite hide.

  “You see,” he said, “the bots you use on your phone are nothing like the ones I built. The learning concept is different, the entire approach is different.” He paused to make sure she was following. “So, I started by shaping a person. A being. Not a universal program, but an individual. I asked myself: what defines a conscious entity? If I asked you that same question, what would you say?”

  The unexpected depth of the question left her momentarily stunned. She never imagined the conversation would take this turn. The mountain, some secret military base? Experimental AI? If someone had told her this story yesterday, she would’ve laughed. Yet here she was, sitting beside him in a boat frozen into the middle of an Alaskan wilderness, listening. She decided she might as well take everything at face value. What other option did she have?

  “I’d say it’s a mix of inheritance… genetics. And, of course, environment.”

  “Exactly. Genotype and phenotype.” He nodded. “First, I had to create the avatar’s genotype. But how? I decided to mirror the traits of an entity I’d already conceptualized. All its virtues and flaws, weaknesses and strengths. A filter through which it would perceive the world.”

  “All right… and how did you do that?” she asked, now genuinely interested.

  “I began by defining a system of traits. Positive and negative, dozens of them. Loyalty, honesty, reliability. And on the other side, envy, pride, impulsiveness… Each trait received a percentage of influence over decision-making. But that’s only the core. The foundation that doesn’t always have to be active.”

  “And after that?” she leaned in slightly.

  “I gave them axioms. Basic postulates of behavior. Axioms of life. Because I didn’t intend to create a simulation of life, I wanted life.”

  “How can life even be programmed?” she whispered.

  “Well, what’s the fundamental thread that separates the living from the nonliving?” he asked. “Without that question, nothing else matters.”

  she repeated silently. The answer came instinctively, the way it does to anyone who’s survived at least one Alaskan winter.

  “Life wants to continue. Stones and ice have no desire.”

  He looked at her with delighted approval.

  “Exactly. Life wants to continue. Will. The drive to persist. To escape oblivion. That has to be embedded as the system’s core imperative.”

  “So… the essence is that it wants to last. To survive?”

  “Yes. But here comes the paradox,” he said, his gaze briefly drifting into the dimness of the boat. “At what price? What if its own survival sits on one side of the scale, and all other life on the other? Then what?”

  He paused. And then he smiled, softly, almost painfully, the smile of a man who’s wandered a long while and suddenly found an answer.

  “And I realized something. Sometimes one life is sacrificed for another. Survival is a priority, but not at any cost. And that’s when I understood, it isn’t just about will or desire. There’s something older, deeper… simpler. Love. What makes a person sacrifice their own life? What sends a parent into a burning house for their child? What makes a soldier throw himself over a bomb? Which emotion gives meaning to everything else?”

  She stared at him, wide-eyed. Everything he said made sense. Of course it did. And yet one question lingered:

  How do you teach a machine what love is?

  “I understand,” she said quietly. “But how… how do you write that? Is that even possible?”

  Armand exhaled, like a man who had wandered through his own labyrinth for too long.

  “I struggled with that question for a long time,” he admitted.

  Programming love? Embedding a set of instructions that merely simulates the feeling? No, that was never the path. So what was?

  He turned back to Hemingway, his voice carrying both the weight and the tenderness of everything he’d been holding inside.

  “See… I couldn’t program love. That would’ve been cheating. Does a newborn child understand love? Can it fall in love? Can it suffer because its love isn’t returned? Does it feel compassion for every living thing? No. The path is different. The essence is to create life, a tabula rasa with a pre-engineered genotype and the potential for emotion. Over time, through a very specific kind of learning, life shapes consciousness… and consciousness, eventually, gives birth to love. The entire process is infinitely complex. I devoted my whole professional life to it. And I believe I succeeded.”

  He paused, and in that pause there was a quiet, almost childlike sincerity.

  “I also believe you’d agree, if you met them. My avatars. My angels. That’s why I’m drawn to that mountain. Love is what drives me.”

  She looked at him as if discovering him anew. This story that had woven itself into the fabric of his life. This dedication. This strange, powerful kind of sacrifice.

  If that was the reason… if love was truly the motive, then she had no choice. She would have to be part of it. If for nothing else, then to witness the epilogue of this extraordinary, almost surreal chain of events.

  “All right then,” she said softly, her eyes glinting. “Let’s go. I’d love to meet your friends.”