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  “Really?” she asked, yelling across the rooms.

  “Yeah. I’ll have Mel book us tickets, we’ll be there in two hours. We’ll stop by your place for you to get changed.”

  Gal bit her lip and jumped up. She loved it when he took control.

  They watched Prometheus Bound. Unlike the streak of re-imaginings and modernised plays that were all the rage these days, this play was awfully close to the original, just with modern language instead of Ancient Greek. They had kept a few of the one-liners though. Their meaning was conveyed anyway from the exaggerated acting. That particular play utilised holographic projection technology, and you could hear the wave of disgust sweeping the audience as you saw Prometheus’ liver being torn from his body as realistically and graphically as possible.

  Nobody could look away.

  After the play, they went to the city Nea Epidayros for a walk by the sea.

  “I didn’t know you liked theatre,” he said, licking his ice cream.

  “Did you think I only liked video games and movies?” she said, finishing hers.

  “No, I simply didn’t know. I assumed nothing. Hey, did you eat that already?”

  Gal threw the napkin in the trash and hastily interlocked her arm with his, and dug her hands inside his warm coat. She wanted to do that since the beginning of their walk but she wasn’t gonna admit that to him.

  “Yes,” she winced. “Massive. Brainfreeze. Ouch.”

  “Hah! Noob,” he teased and brushed her head.

  She held him close.

  It was a lovely night, with lights shimmering in the sea, fishing boats lazily moving about, couples walking up and down.

  “Greg?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are we dating?”

  “Of course. Isn’t this our second date?”

  “According to my friend Natalie’s count it’s our third-and-a-half.”

  He nodded deeply, “Third-and-a-half it is, then.”

  “What about our age difference? What will people say?”

  “Who cares?”

  She couldn’t help but smile. “Do you honestly believe that, or are you just saying it because you think that’s what I wanna hear?”

  “Gal, baby, I like you. Your brain, your body, your smile, all of it. Yes we have an age gap. Yes, people might say I’m having a crisis or whatever. But, who cares, as long as we’re happy?”

  “Are you happy?”

  “I’m happier than I’ve been in a very long time,” he assured her.

  “I’m happy too.” She sank her face in his neck and closed her eyes, inhaling his aftershave. “Mmm, you smell like a baby prostitute,” she said sweetly. She kissed him on the neck with her sticky lips.

  “Okay, you really have got to stop watching Mean Girls every night.”

  Chapter 27: Galene @ 0.6x nhs

  The next day, Galene went to work.

  She felt tired. They had gone home early enough from their date, but she was kept up all night by girly thoughts and squeals of joy.

  She waddled in the IT room and went to the kitchenette.

  “Gal!” her boss yelled.

  Heresy. He had violated the holy pentalepto, the amount of time at the beginning of work that nobody, no matter how high up the corporate ladder, could order you to do something.

  “What?” she groaned and shuffled to his door.

  “You’re assigned to the penthouse all day.”

  “’Kay, I’ll go later,” she groaned.

  “Now, Gal. Go!”

  She rode the lift up. There was no one in the lobby. She stopped for a moment, thinking whether she should ring the bell. Knock on the door, maybe? Call Greg? She swiped her keycard and the door opened. It seemed they had upgraded her security privileges.

  She reluctantly walked in. Greg was watching Olympic sports videos on his workstation. Sped up, of course, and the athletes were jumping around like cocaine-addled cartoons.

  He smiled wide at her. “Good morning!”

  “Yeah, that. Whatever,” she mumbled and held her laptop tight on her chest. “Why the fuck are you so chipper?”

  “I love mornings!”

  “You did not just say that to me,” she gasped. “Take it back.”

  “Come on in,” he gestured.

  “Co-ffee,” Gal moaned like a zombie.

  “Help yourself. Have some ginseng tablets too, they’re right next to it.”

  Galene nodded and shuffled slowly to the kitchen.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake!” Greg jumped up and ran ahead. By the time she got there, he was halfway-done.

  She sipped some coffee and just stood there, blinking away the sleep dust from her eyes.

  Greg clapped his hands together. “Alright! You asked me to teach you, now’s a good time as any.”

  Gal sighed. Well, she asked for it. “Sure.”

  “Okay. Our goal is to achieve gnosis. Gnosis is a state of flow, where ideas pour out of your mind, creativity is at its peak, anything is possible, solutions simply present themselves to us. It’s not bullshit, it’s achievable. Now, the basic thing is what I’ve told you already.” He picked up a glass and went to the sink. “First, we define what we want to do. We want to fill this amount, 330 millilitres, with water.” He turned on the faucet and let it drip, slowly. “Then, we fill up with information about our subject. Articles, blogs, fan sites, movies, music, books, whatever applies and whatever is available. Okay so far?”

  “Sure, water in glass, got it.”

  “Now, this drip is what you normally have when you research. It takes time, right?”

  “It will take forever to get that glass filled,” she said, pointing.

  “Exactly. So, what I do, is to speed up the process.” He turned the faucet slightly and increased the water flow.

  “Got it. Then what?”

  “Then we let it fill up, to the brink. And more.” He did just that, letting the water overpour the glass. Then he placed it next to the sink. “Afterwards, we leave it there and take a walk.” He started to move away.

  “The subconscious giant, right?” She hurried the whole thing along with a gesture.

  “Exactly, Gal! Now, obviously, this doesn’t work all the time, but it can be taught and it has results. And you can train yourself to be good at it. Every time you do the technique, I swear it gets easier.” He held his palm over his heart.

  Gal had woken up. She had after all gulped down a whole cup of coffee. Plus she was dead-interested about this. You couldn’t deny its results. She sniffed loudly. “So, the steps are, define the project, cram on the project, forget the project.”

  “And,” he added, “very important, note down the ideas as soon as they come to you. Hence the notepad I gave you.”

  Gal hadn’t forgotten. She treasured that notepad. She was clutching it to bed last night. It was a gift. From him. After all, she couldn’t hug the cactus.

  “And that’s how you achieve gnosis.”

  “Mmm, yes and no. It’s one way, but there are more things to do. I honestly don’t know. Melpomene knows best, she’s an expert at precisely that task. Maybe she’ll explain it to you better.”

  “Sure,” she pffted. “Maybe Hermes will waste the time of a billion-euros worth of an asset to me, a lowly IT girl from the basement.”

  “Don’t reduce your worth like that,” he said, frowning. He stepped close and clasped her shoulder. “Yes, the Muses go to the most valuable employees, sure. But-”

  “But what? Don’t make fun of me!” She slapped his hand away. “I’m not getting anything close to that, ever. And I know it. I don’t need you to tell me lies just because we’re dating or whatever.”

  Greg stood there, flexing his grip. He seemed to think about her words. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” she spat.

  He gestured and pulled up a stats page on his veil, then spun it around so she could see it right way.

  Gal blinked, shook her head. “What is that, what am
I seeing here?”

  “You’re watching at the revenue and download data of your speedreading app. Hermes published it yesterday. It made 16 thousand euro in a day, across the globe,” he said flatly.

  Her breath caught. She felt dizzy for a moment. “But-”

  “But nothing. Everything you make is property of Hermes Information Technology. And what you made has already produced more revenue than your current yearly salary.” He was angry. Gal had never seen him angry. But he seemed to be angry at her imaginary shortcomings, not her faults.

  Gal squinted, reading the charts. Thousands of downloads. Thousands of people had bought her speedreading aid app for their veils and were using it right now.

  “Tell me now how little you’re worth!” Greg said and slammed the door behind him.

  Chapter 28: Galene @ 1.1x nhs

  “You’re trying to multitask, again,” sighed Greg.

  “Women can multitask, men cannot,” she said airily. She was jogging on the treadmill and reading about a new programming language, while listening to an audiobook at the same time.

  “No, that’s a myth. There is no neurological difference between a male and a female brain, i.e. you can’t multitask. Stop trying to do so.” Greg turned her audiobook and her treadmill off.

  She huffed and puffed. She gulped down on the water.

  “Don’t drink too much,” he said, trying to to pull the bottle away.

  She slapped him, finishing it completely. “Why do people say that? I’ll do whatever I want.”

  He shook his head and walked away.

  She munched on a ginseng tablet. She decided to go all-in, trying out everything Greg did and taught her. It felt nice at first, popping in her mouth, but the aftertaste was weird, alkaline.

  It was afternoon. They had half an hour of silent fighting, moving about their business without talking. Gods, had they gotten to that part of their relationship already? But Galene didn’t feel that bad. After all, he was trying to prove her her worth.

  It still felt so unreal. Was it a promotion? She grinned. Would she get a bonus? She did a tiny happy-dance, but not too much cause Greg was watching. She needed a shower, but she didn’t want to leave him out of her sight. Was that dumb? That was dumb.

  After a while they both stopped ignoring each other, and she sat herself down next to him, touching her butt on him.

  “Okay, look. Let me explain the multitasking thing now that I’ve thought about it better. When I was a kid, we had this computer at our parents’ office. It was an Intel 386 processor, and it had a ‘Turbo’ button. When you pressed that button, it overclocked its 40MHz to 44MHz. But the problem was, that the games I played used the internal CPU clock, so if you went turbo, the game became faster. I didn’t have a great selection back then, so if I beat a game and wanted a greater challenge I’d use the turbo button to make it harder. But, as you very well know, an overclocked processor heats up, gets damaged, and might even lose bits of data during processing. So you have to use it in moderation.”

  Gal touched her mouth, practically biting down on her knuckles not to laugh. “You mean Gigahertz.”

  “Nope, Megahertz.”

  Gal couldn’t keep it down, she laughed hard. “Gods, how old are you?”

  “I predate the internet. Chew on that for a little while,” he said meaningfully.

  Galene froze, wide-eyed, mulling it over. Her forehead glistened with sweat.

  “Anyway, what you wanna do is use that turbo button sparingly. You focus on information you want to absorb, and train your mind to shift gears at the push of a button.” He mimicked the motion. “Push, you’re overclocked, sucking in information at three or four times normal human speed. When something comes up, a distraction, or simply your lift shows up, you depress the button and you’re back to normal. Burnout is a real risk here.”

  Gal took a moment to respond, starting to mouth words and shutting up again. She pointed at him like a crazy person.

  “You. Predate. The internet?!” she yelped in astonishment.

  Chapter 29: Moirai @ 27x nhs

  Two weeks ago:

  It was a secure white room, in a nondescript basement owned by Moiragetis Holdings. The three women were perched upon their marble pedestals, mumbling and threading the flow of information.

  The women, dressed in white, seemed aged beyond their years. Their thin hair barely flowed, their frail hands moving, twitching, as if working the air with purpose.

  Bundles of flashing and glowing optic fibres were feeding into their backs, directly into their spine. They connected them to the server at the room below, an unlisted supercomputer with a singular purpose.

  Their eyes were glazed white, for they could not see in the conventional sense. Their optic nerves had been claimed by the stream of data. In front of their eyes, it was as if the internet was the Earth’s seas and rivers, and you had struck a blow in the rock face and made a marvellous shower erupt, the rays of the sun making rainbows in the mist. It was like that, each second of each day, for the three Moirai.

  Klotho, to weave the thread of data.

  Lachesis, to measure the thread and assign it to its proper owner,

  And Atropos, to cut the thread at its proper place.

  For data was fate and fate was data. For if one person or three could see the twists and turns of fate, they could see the immediate future and seeing the future meant seizing it. Snatching it out of the infinite possibilities and probabilities in the quantum foam of the universe and forcing it to gel into existence, an Observer making electrons decide on molecular trajectories by the mere push of his gaze.

  There was one misunderstanding though.

  Fate was not tailored to a person, as it was commonly believed. No. Fate was a given constant, only the person it was assigned to was the thing to be decided.

  Take the Twelve Labours of Hercules, for example. One might think that Fate came with the life of the person itself, the demigod, despised by Hera and forced to endure endless tragedies. In truth, the Fate of Hercules was a constant, and it happened to befall upon the poor man. Like a story already told, looking for its protagonist.

  “Sister?” Klotho wheezed.

  “Yes, my dear?” Lachesis replied in the same rasping whisper.

  “Take note of this particular thread of Fate,” Klotho said and passed the data on to her left.

  “Oh, my, what a nasty one this is!” Lachesis rasped and measured the thread of data.

  Klotho turned her cataract eyes to her sister, watching with interest as she worked the thread. “To whom shall we assign this, Sister?”

  “Give it to me,” snapped Atropos, the nastiest and oldest sister, as she snatched the thread from them. “Yes,” she said with delight as she cut the thread. “Yes, yes, yes.” She picked up another thread of data from the folds of her white dress, it seemed as if she was saving it for a special occasion. She spun and weaved the smaller thread to the original one, matching twists and making ends disappear. It was an expert’s work.

  The younger sisters turned to her side, dreading to interfere. A woman’s face showed up in the shower of Augmented Reality they saw, along with every bit of data about her. Every keystroke she ever pushed, every step she ever took, every frame of video she ever watched and was in. Her life, digitised. They gasped. “Can she endure it?” the two sisters said in unison.

  Atropos, finally done with her work, smiled a toothy grin.

  Chapter 30: Galene @ 1.2x nhs

  “Okay, so I had another brain fart.”

  “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Greg smiled at her, giving her his full attention and support.

  She had gathered Greg and Mel for her presentation. They were in the meeting room, which was practically never used by Greg. It had a large and ridiculously expensive meeting table and all the necessary gadgets and screens. It was a perfectly good room going to waste. Gal made a mental note to encourage him to use it more often, it made
him look even more important.

  “I was watching a movie with you, and you said you feed the movies into the AI so it gives back shortened versions of them. Naturally, I kept thinking about ways to optimise that. You have to understand, what we call Artificial Intelligence can also be called Artificial Idiocy. Computers are powerful, but extremely dumb. Sorry Mel, but you know what I mean. You can tell it to analyse each frame in real time, but if it doesn’t have clear instructions on what to do, it can’t make decisions.”

  Mel brushed her comment away with a delicate gesture.

  “I’m with you so far. Indeed, sometimes the algos spit out gibberish, I’ve seen it many times,” Greg nodded.

  “I’m only gonna mention him once, so pay attention. I had an ex, he was a wannabe filmmaker. Always toying around with a camera, with sounds, editing, all of it. It was his passion. He sucked, but he was passionate, no one could deny him that. We broke up cause he was a loser but I remember something about music scores. He’d say to me, music in movies is completely cliche, but it is cliche for a reason: It works. It works across boundaries, across language, across race, across culture. If you sit a man down to watch a movie in a foreign language and he can hear the music score, he will know what to feel. He will know what the scene is about.”

  “You’re gonna take the music score into account!” Greg jumped up. He sat back down, motioning her to carry on her presentation.

  “Precisely! I tried it out a couple of times and it seems to work great. With the old algorithm, it sometimes trimmed scenes that were important but didn’t have dialogue or a lot of motion or camera motion. Now, it can identify a music swell for example and it will never trim that scene down because it’s important.”

  “This seems like a brilliant idea,” Mel said with her soothing voice. “Well done.”

  “So, ba-dum ba-dum,” she rapped the desk and clicked the slide.

  A mockup of an app showed up, with fanfare sounds worthy of a Hollywood film. The logo was a draft but passable, it said ‘TimeShave.’