Anna stared off into space as the coffeemaker hissed on the kitchen counter as it reheated what mom had brewed earlier this morning. MIT needed her more than she needed MIT, she told herself. And when she became the kind of person who got interviewed about her work, she’d be able to talk about how she nearly made the mistake of her life by attending MIT, and they saved her from mediocrity by rejecting her genius.

But there was no catharsis in the thought - it just felt a little pathetic.

She was spiraling again. And had been since about 3am. The weight of her future weighing her down, making her sweat, and forcing her to loop over the same few data points over and over and over again without reflection or refrain. “Super useful, good job Anna,” she told herself sometime around 5. “Great use of your weekend.” The sarcastic attempt at a pattern break didn’t have the effect she’d hoped, and it took almost until 6 for her to fall asleep. It was almost noon now, and her mood hadn’t improved much. Maybe the coffee would help.

Still grumpy, she slid into her virtual desktop and stared at the stacks of icons and documents. Her father had once been the most important person in the world, because of his mind and his ideas and his vision. He had helped make something so radical, so meaningful, so challenging to the default state of the world that a stranger killed him over it. And half of her was made up of him. She had that same potential. He was in her, and therefore that same ability to change the world was in her.

In her heart of hearts, she knew his work wasn’t just him, but she didn’t let basic biology get in the way of her pep talk. She was genetically awesome, and just needed the right project to prove it.

Anna pulled up her ideas folder for the twelfth time in the past three days, and scanned through the scraps of stray thoughts and one-line pitches that had felt important at the time, but read hollow today. She flicked through them again and again, top to bottom, bottom to top. She was struck by a depressing feeling: these weren’t ideas that would change the world; they were the ideas of an 18 year old girl who’d lived most of her life inside her own head.

One of her English teachers once said that “write what you know” only has value if you’ve experienced the world, so if you want to write something that reaches people, then go out into the world and have adventures that let you know a larger existence than your own. Anna felt like she knew very little. She knew loss, and instability, and the first time she had to take care of her mother. She knew the feeling of being in the wrong place, and of being an outsider, and the secret knowing nod between kids who had lost parents to tragic circumstances. She knew scars and hearts - often intertwined. But she’d spent most of her life inside a computer. Her knowledge was ultimately binary, hidden in object oriented complexities.

Anna leaned back in her chair, pulling off the goggles and staring through a spot in the wall. The other students at school were probably spending their weekend playing sports or going to the movies or having some awesome party she would never hear about on a beach or their father’s boat. Anna didn’t really care about being any part of that world. That world was for people who reveled in frivolity because they had never known any real trauma. The closest thing they’d ever felt to tragedy was not getting the right Mercedes for their 16th birthday. Anna didn’t want to kick a ball or make out on a boat - she wanted a good idea. Something she could sink her teeth into. Something at the level of her father’s work.

Her eyes flitted to the bookshelf.

Sure, let’s give this a shot again.

She pulled up the Python file.

This time she wasn’t there to scan her journals to Dad, but to try and figure out what it was intended to do. She might not have an idea that would change the world, but Dad did, so maybe he had more than one. Maybe this was the thing that would make everything else a relic from a former computing era, and the reason he’d left it here was for her to one day continue his work. Maybe she was the only way to salvage his reputation and his life’s work. Maybe his legacy was hers to examine, to embrace, and to extend into the world.

She opened the terminal, greeted by the familiar lines she’d unintentionally memorized over a decade. She could probably write the first fifty lines in her sleep. Her father’s life’s work - his … his whole life. Until the end. His legacy. The product of his mind, literally passed down through generations. She scrolled through the file idly.

But fucking hell, Dad’s code documentation was shit.

Anna reminded herself again that this was a product of a number of geniuses, her father included, so the complete lack of documentation or viable comments wasn’t his fault, exactly. She could still give him some shit about it, but it wasn’t like…hold on…oh goddammit.

Something about her father and his philosophies on coding pinged the back of her brain. She pulled up a quick search for “David Gibson Code Comments” and the first result was an old forum debate over what her father meant when he once said “Good code needs no comments; bad code requires them. Write good code.”

Yeah, she’d remembered hearing that one before. Strike one, Dad. Way to be, like, historically wrong.

Anna rubbed her eyes, then sat back and cracked her knuckles. She looked over to the file specs - she was on line 348 of around five million. She took a deep drag of her coffee. Alright, she thought to herself, let’s get to work.

— — — — —

Anna’s notification menu flashed again. Trina was insistent today. Not now, dude.

Anna had known Trina since they both were in Beachwood Code Camp together. Anna had never been great at making friends, but Trina seemed to take that as a challenge, and wore her down with almost unyielding affection. Nearly the same age but one year apart in school, Anna and Trina ended the camp best friends, and promised to keep in touch - which they did over the subsequent six years, sharing code reviews, hanging out at HL3, gaming, and watching shows together.

Anna had bounced around from idea to idea and language to language, becoming a proficient generalist and perfecting the art of efficiently finding close-enough answers. Trina, on the other hand, had gone deep into some really fringe shit right around when she turned 16, and got obsessed with biohacking and wetware. As with many new areas of exploration, where the field is new enough that no one has experience to lean upon, the young and hungry become the experts through brute force and free time. Thus it was that Trina had ended up becoming one of the most promising young neural interface coders as soon as she graduated high school.

NIC was barely a specialization - the joke was that if you threw a NIC conference appealing to the true experts, you’d barely need to rent out a Starbucks. Neural Interface Control was a massive idea - everyone knew it was the natural followup to TVIs - but it had barely made any progress in decades, so all of the big money moved on. All that was left were some scrappy hackers willing to fuck with their brains and post the code online for others to follow. So Trina decided to skip college and started carving out her niche. Trina had tried to get Anna to spend her summer break before Senior year working with her and her friends, but Anna had been stubborn that she needed to build her own experience. Alone. And make precisely zero progress on anything. Like an idiot. Great job, Anna. Way to waste the whole summer.

Once she was in, Trina fell into that world hard. Trina had drawn up some plans for neural implants, but her parents absolutely lost their shit when she told them she wanted to drill into her skull. So she did everything with hacked apart Over-The-Skin hardware modified from its original medical use, shaving her thick, curly hair high up her head to ensure a clear pickup of the signals. It worked well enough, but every now and then she mentioned finding the right doctor who might perform a little off-the-record cranial surgery. Lately she’d also started half-joking about wanting to figure out how to get a USB port installed in her forearm for neural code uploads and stats tracking downloads - something no doubt influenced by her friends on the fringe.

Anna ignored another notification. Not that she didn’t like Trina, or didn’t want to talk to her, but Anna was trying to hit a flow state, and interruptions kicked her out. She briefly regretted adding Trina to her Do Not Disturb exception list, and then regretted the regret. Trina had earned it, no matter how annoying it was right now.

Trina was … excitable. And maybe a little reckless. But she was smart and honest and kind. She was always trying to get Anna to try out some new biocode, but after she put herself into a brief coma with a bad feedback curve, Anna decided she wasn’t ready to give up her deck for some borderline functional OTS just yet. To her credit, Trina’s code had been fine, she just ran it straight into an unknown - and unknowable - hardware glitch that had since been patched out with a hacked BIOS.

Anna told herself that her hesitation was because flipping signals through OTS was super slow, required a ton of training, and even then tended to operate a half second or more behind true real-time. Trina was working on a way to speed them up to “match the speed of thought.” Anna told her that once she did, Anna would try it out, but she knew that was a lie of comfort. The truth was, as much as Anna loved and trusted Tina, Tina was splicing wires and soldering new boards into the hardware. It was technological punk rock where no one knew how to play their instruments, and Anna wasn’t comfortable pushing those kinds of signals directly back into her brain.

“911”

Anna saw the notification from the corner of her vision as it blinked red. OK, fine. This had better be important. Like life-changing or life-ending important.

— — — — —

What’s up? You okay?

Anna! I need you to see something.

You better be dying.

Do you know how close I was to a flow state?

I’m sorry but this is like huge, and I need to show someone!

Fine, what is it?

Video.mp4

Is this just a video of you sleeping?

That’s me, experiencing a dream I wrote.

Wait, are you serious? Or is this like a joke?

Deadass serious.

No way.

Yup. I left gaps in the experience code with instructions

for my subconscious to fill in the gaps,

and when I woke up I wrote down my dream.

It followed the script *exactly.*

I even had experiences in those gaps that I didn’t plan out,

but then it returned to the script!

Dude.

I know. But that’s not the cool part.

What’s the cool part?

I modified the same dream every night for a week.

And it happened exactly as scripted every time.

DUDE!

I KNNOW!!

Fuuuuuuck

Right?

So now what? Isn’t this like the holy grail?

I have no idea, but it’s getting there.

What’s with the video though?

It looks like a stalker took it from the closet.

Yeah, after I sent it I realized it

was a lot creepier than I intended.

— — — — —

Anna and Trina talked for an hour about what needed to happen next. Trina had a whole list of things she wanted to do. The scripted dream was really just a proof of concept, and the steps to make it something more than a difficult one-off were still onerous. They talked through details as small as how to time elements of the dreams, and as large as whether it was worth inventing a new scripting language to shorten the distance between the idea and the code.

After Trina dropped off to get to work though, Anna felt the vacuum. Working on the problem was exhilarating, but it wasn’t her problem. It wasn’t her idea. She had a hundred thousand suggestions, but that was all that she had. Suggestions. Not decisions, not agency, not ownership. Even when she knew down to her bones the right decisions to make. She knew Trina would share without hesitation, but she would always be the person who started it, who shepherded it, and who brought in others to enact her vision.

This part sometimes left her bitter. Not always, but sometimes. You spend so much time in the excitement of taking something that can be anything, and the magic of exploration molds into the most perfect version of itself, and then you have to walk away while someone else gets to see it made real. All you’re left with is the memory of intense creativity and a fair amount of mental exhaustion. It was like an idea hangover.

She pulled up her ideas list again. They were all shit. Meaningless. Nothing but broken promises and false starts.

Anna turned back to her dad’s Python files. The shine was off. It was yet again someone else’s idea. Her curse: she could see something for what it could be, extrapolating out layers upon layers of complexity to know - with absolute certainty - where the potential of an idea lies. But that inception continued to elude her. That flash of inspiration. She could make something better, but she couldn’t make something from scratch.

What a fucking unimaginative loser. No wonder MIT told her to fuck off. She wouldn’t make the future, she’d only refine someone else’s. Good little worker bee, make this process 5% more efficient. Here’s your trophy for saving the company 140 milliseconds this year.

Anna knew this spiral well. She rode it at least once a month. Sometimes more than once. She sometimes thought of it as her other legacy: the emotional one; the one that forced her to compare herself to her father. She knew no one else did. At least not yet. Certainly not anyone who loved her or even knew her. But she did. Still. Even in the moments where she knew he wouldn’t want her to. There was still that part of her that said she needed to earn her last name.

Anna pulled her rig off, and her head slowly came down to the desk. Her dark hair swept forward as her forehead bounced slightly off of the oak. She didn’t feel like crying, but the cool wood might draw it out of her nonetheless. So she sat there, head on the table, feeling sorry for herself. She’d give it five minutes, and then she’d tell herself to bitch up and pull herself together. And then probably start texting exes until one picked up. Some of them still appreciated her more than she did.

— — — — —

High on caffeine, rage, and ambition, it was after midnight on Monday morning when Anna finally found the right string. The string that unlocked her understanding of everything else. “The one string,” she thought to herself, chuckling.

She had been searching for hours. Running her eyes across code she didn’t write in an attempt to understand something so obvious it was never expected to be communicated. Everyone working in and on this file, and every other file it connected to, knew precisely what they were working on. They were worried about the details of the big idea, not the larger vision itself. Anna needed the context of what they were trying to make in order to understand the details. It was like seeing a pig, a cow, and a field, without knowing that someone was eventually going to make a ham and cheese sandwich.

But then she found that string. The one referencing a successful output. But most importantly, the one with code comments defining “success” for anyone delving deeply enough, or needing a reminder of what their additions must eventually support.

// If the goal is to quickly intake, analyze, and understand complex ideas, and communicate the output using naturalistic human speech, then ideally we’ll eventually use this section to simplify or waveform collapse the output of quantum calculations, and be able to connect them to classical computing systems and language models in order to control quantum calculations with plain language. Code with these future hooks in mind.

To intake, analyze, and understand. That’s what the key was. That’s the context Anna needed. That’s why so many hooks were built into this code - hooks that she didn’t have the files or models to connect to. The code she was looking at was basically just skeletal infrastructure. And reams of other data were expected to connect to this to make the model functional.

It wasn’t that this model needed to crawl before it walked, but that Anna need to build the muscle tissue and attach it to the skeleton before it could crawl.

She felt elated and defeated all at once. She finally understood what the file was for, but her understanding came with knowing that she was missing everything that would make it work. It would compile, but it was an engine without fuel. Or a car.

But she was right about one thing: it was definitely her dad’s life’s work. Anna knew it in her gut. In her soul. From the moment she read that line, everything fell into place.

This was without a doubt the program that made Eve.