Li Jin was over the moon. He had played a dangerous game with a sophisticated adversary and had emerged the unlikely winner. He was now wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. As soon as he arrived in Xian he was going to first remove all trace of the money from the system. He shuddered in his empty first class compartment as he recalled the face of the assassin when he had realized that Li Jin was not in the maze at Kowloon Park. Even then, the assassin had known that he had lost. Yet he had come running out of the maze anyway, like an irate rhinoceros. Li Jin stared outside the window of his compartment, watching a seemingly endless expanse of greenery and various shades of concrete and white tile flash by. His view of the world would never be the same again.

Li Jin knew that coming back to China could either be a stroke of genius or the prelude to his demise. Yet, he suspected that once the PLA found out that he had sold the chip, the natural assumption would be that he had fled the country. And he had made sure, with his fake ID chip, there was little to zero chance of him being traced through the New China railway system. Yes, he was happy with his plans so far. As he headed north through Guizhou, feasting on some tea-boiled eggs and a packet of preserved vegetables, Li Jin thought about Oleg Krachev and wondered whether the Russian had made it out alive. Li Jin didn’t rate his chances, although if the Russian had been patient and slipped away from Kowloon Park to return later to retrieve the deposit slip there was a chance that the assassin would have been long gone.

Yet, from his brief encounter with Krachev, Li Jin didn’t think he was the patient type. After realizing that the money was gone he was bound to go after the slip cursing as he went. Li Jin had checked his account and there had indeed been an attempt to return the money to its source. If he hadn’t taken the additional precaution of setting up the standing instruction on the account, the money would have disappeared back to Russia as quickly as it had been wired. Li Jin had checked his other accounts on the console in his compartment and had been pleased to see the credit sitting there waiting to be used. In Xian he would transfer part of the money to several anonymous credit chips. After that it was just a matter of not loosing the chips. Then he would go shopping for those important items and then hire a van to take him back to his Shaanxi village.

The plan now made perfect sense. Li Jin would first make contact with Professor Yao’s family after the furor had died down, probably the professor’s ailing mother out there in Mutianyu, by the Great Wall. He would make sure that she was well provided for through an account that disbursed money to her on a monthly basis. And then Li Jin would disappear for a while. Li Jin opened his bag and examined Professor Yao’s backdoor rig. Despite its simple look, the unlikely-looking green plastic box was his window to another world. From there he would witness the emerging singularity. Poor Professor Yao. He was a genius no doubt, yet he hadn’t lived long enough to really see the fruits of his labor tested in the real world. Yet, somehow, in Hong Kong it had seemed that the good professor had been looking out for him, guiding him along. Those last minute changes to the plan, which had plugged some glaring holes, had been instrumental to his success. And Li Jin believed he had the professor’s guiding hand from beyond the grave to thank for that.

He wondered whether the PLA had found out that both the AI and the processor running the server were both duds. That AI was powerful but it was orders of magnitude behind Black Jade in terms of intelligence and it definitely did not have what could be considered a consciousness. Without the reconfigurable power of the neuroprocessor, there were limits to how far that AI could evolve. And what about Black Jade itself, out there in the fabric of cyberspace? By now, it would have evolved into something quite different from the AI on the standalone machine in the lab at Tsinghua. Now with the entire cyberspace at its disposal and the rapidly changing body of human knowledge therein, it would have grown exponentially in knowledge and power. Yet, Li Jin knew he would recognize the AI if he ever came across it.

Li Jin was responsible for a huge chunk of the software code that had brought Black Jade into being and even though both code and neuroprocessor had been fine tuned by the AI over millions of iterations, the core DNA of Black Jade was still the same. There was not an AI like it on the planet, one with a concept of nationality, of Chineseness. That was the beauty of this one. It was as much a citizen of New China as any other Chinese person and in many ways it was more Chinese than any Chinese could ever hope to be. Five thousand odd years of history absorbed, digested and cross-referenced using more computing power than you could imagine. That was what Black Jade was. Add to that the entire body of global knowledge and you had something that was nothing short of brilliant.

Li Jin thought of the Easter Eggs that he had planted deep within an intractable portion of Black Jade’s code without Professor Yao’s knowledge. These would ensure that once he himself was locked into cyberspace, he could call on the AI at anytime and it would come, ready to do its master’s bidding.