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compulsion.”
    “By
compulsion. Which you’ve already done.” Her voice was
low, quivering on the edges with a mixture of curiosity and fright.
    He straightened up
across from her. “I’m sorry, but yes. This matter
requires your urgent assistance.”
    “And if I
refuse to help when we arrive?” she said.
    “We have other
consultants on our list. The next is Dr. Corey Abboud, I believe,”
he said.
    Dr. Abboud. He was at Olin LabCorps, working on chimpanzees to develop new
digital intelligence chips that could be implanted without having to
rely on an external source of energy. His work was phenomenal.
    So they were combing
through digital intelligence researchers. She immediately felt
herself reach toward the unknown, jealous of anyone who was able to
work on such groundbreaking research. Was it a bluff? She stared at
Lieutenant Johnner and he stared back dispassionately.
    Despite her
misgivings, it seemed as though Lieutenant Johnner actually had a
project underway, and it sounded intriguing. If they were working on
the biological substrate problem, she wanted to know about it. She
wanted to be the first to know.
    She thought about
the next two weeks. Her lecture and charity dinners in New York. The
Boston book signing. All cancelled. For what?
    “Fuck.”
Chal leaned her head back on the seat. Her hand dropped away from the
seat belt buckle. “FUCK.”
    Lieutenant Johnner
sat silently in front of her, waiting. Finally she shrugged in
reluctant assent. If there was no way out of this for the time being,
she was at least going to make the most of it. She sighed, turning
away from the military man to look out the van’s windshield.
The road in front was empty, the headlights shining onto an endless
highway. To Phoenix.
    “This had
better be interesting.”
    ***
    Interesting was Chal
Davidson’s primary criterion for anything. Men, food, work: if
it wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t for her. This was not,
despite one ex-lover’s words to the contrary, how she explained
away her commitment issues. It was simply that she enjoyed being
around people that made her think. Most men didn’t do that, or
at least not for very long, and when she got bored she moved onto the
next one. Her relationships came and went like the seasons, and she
didn’t seem to care.
    Some said that Chal
Davidson had become obsessed with discovering interesting things at the expense of friends, family, and just about everything
else. Others simply called her a genius.
    Her background in
undergraduate school had been in theoretical physics, which she had
abandoned for a doctorate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins that never
reached fruition, her advisor having kicked her out once she made
clear her disagreement with him on the practical applications of
metaphysical philosophy. She ended up switching over to computer
science at the same school and wrapped up her thesis on digital
intelligence within a year, impressing everyone except those in the
philosophy department, who squarely turned their backs on her.
    Her career in
academia was imbalanced, to say the least. Whereas most intelligence
scholars focused on theoretical models, Davidson only published
papers under pressure when she had to extend her grants, preferring
to focus on practical applications. She would seem to have been
tailor-made for corporate work, but she despised the suits and the
suckups. The one corporate job she worked at a large software company
lasted only a week before she yelled at the head boss during a
division meeting and was fired for insubordination.
    Still, she had done
well for herself after a venture capital fund sniffed out her work on
biological substrates and granted her a cool three million dollars to
continue studying the applications. She hated biology and hired two
young brilliant students out of MIT to wrangle with the substrate
problems, turning her attention fully to the nascent field of digital
intelligence. Her work quickly took off and soon there was