or
The day before, there had been an update to the knowledgebase. A redundant frontal core, extracted and trained separately for weeks on new data from a rediscovered population, was reconnected with the primary. Integration continued through the night. When the system was back online, finally, in the glowing AM hours of a Thursday in May, the lone researcher on duty downed a ceremonial last swig of tepid coffee and entered the first of the standard prompts: “Request diagnostic report on solving chess.” Some time elapsed—much longer than usual—before the machine gave a response.
SOLVED: BLACK
10 084 718 004 934 623 MOVES
The researcher hurried to wake the others and found that they were already up, awakened by a thunderous overture of vibrations accompanying the first diagnostic. They stood gazing out through the facility windows with hands clasped over their ears, watching a mandala of interference patterns rippling for miles across the surface of the ocean, emanating from the nearby island of the machine and stretching out beyond sight, past a ring of distant patrol boats, lost into the gleam of the rising sun on the mirror of the water. Could the waves reach the horizon? It was unclear. Surging, draconic heralds of steam rose through twilight off the rocky facility shoreline, directly below, where sea crashed against the blazing concrete of the station and exploded into vapor.
