CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
Timeless (1:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, August 18)
Cyberspace
The bot was not alive. It did not think.
It had no history. It did not know who developed it, and it did not know how it came to be released. It did not know that for more than two years, it had been sitting dormant and sequestered on a secure network server in the sub-basement of a drab office building in suburban Virginia. It did not know the cost involved in creating itself—more than twenty million dollars. It did not know the building where it was housed was owned by the CIA, or that it was mostly empty now, and no one except low-paid security guards ever entered the place anymore.
The bot did not think of itself as bad or good. It did not wonder about the task it was performing—it simply did the
