She didn’t know she could, not having seen one during the week the skillware was in her glasses’s software library. But the company that supplied Starbucks with barista-guiding software had military contracts for slightly different sorts of skill, and was not above their occasional misplacement.

Sometimes she pictured small computer screens inside each leaf, code scrolling through them like a bad movie’s idea of what hacking looks like.

Genetic engineering could buy athletic potential, not the willpower to train and win, or at least that’s what your father says every now and then. You think every generation wants to complain that things were harder for them than for the following ones, and mostly ignore him and everything else that’s not directly related to your training.

“Forget all the sci-fi you’ve watched. The fantasy of the evil clone is a form of the terror of the doppelganger, which is our fear of our own Shadow. A clone is just a younger identical twin.”

The collapse of the first base on Mars was a harrowing one, sparked by a software error leading to the collapse of the oxygen futures market.

You had thought them a laboratory legend, but now one of their agents was in yours, pointing a gun at you while another connected a laptop to the network holding the AI that was going to be your Turing Prize and IPO fortune.

Decades of algorithmic CEO headhunting inevitably led to the evaluation of potential religious charisma at a very early age.

The first AI superspy was a failure. The only dangers it found were what billionaires, politicians, and would-be terrorists said they wanted to do. On Twitter and the Washington Post. On Reddit and national television. On Facebook and to cheering crowds.

“I can’t sleep,” I complained to my therapist. The inhumanly empathetic rendering nodded.

It wasn’t terrorism to install robots with machine guns in every schoolyard and street corner.