Marilyn wrote words on the screens to fill in the void for the billions watching. They soon faded.

"It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple." -- Georg C. Lichtenberg

Georges was unshaven, in his late sixties, overweight, and definitely not an attractive man. Like the founder of the Windows operating system, this man was an awkward lab rat who had been transformed into a reclusive hermit thanks to the vast fortune of the Electoral corporation. Behind him and Milly stood an indescribably spectacular martian backdrop. The chairs were large and looked comfortable, even for the big man. As both sat, the door of the room opened and a little animated cart rolled in, holding a silver platter. On it were two old fashion bottles of Mountain Dew, and two large red large plastic cups with ice. Obviously, this was Georges' favorite.

Milly sat cross-legged pad on her lap. There was a small glass coffee table between them. She checked the sound levels of her cameras, and after a glance at the command pad attached to her forearm, she began.

"I stand here today, in the heart of the new Electoral Center where the creation of Georges Vouvelakis has, in little over two decades, brought mankind to a new world. This gentleman sitting before me is no other than Mr. Vouvelakis,"

"Please, call me Georges."

Milly smiled. "I will. Today, we may get a glimpse into the mind of this genius and his history altering creation; a creation that has carried mankind to Mars, yet calls him with affection daddy. Let's start with the easy questions before we dive into deeper waters. Georges, just how proud are you today when you see all that Marilyn has accomplished?"

"It's such a refreshing change to see a good journalist."

"Thank you. But I will still insist you answer. Are you proud?"

He grabbed the drink. "Nothing better, than Mountain Dew," said Georges as he grabbed one of the two cups and handed the other to Milly. "I have no children, but when I see what is going on, I can only imagine it feels like a parent watching his kid winning gold at the Olympics. Let me be clear - I am in awe of her."

"What is her best feature?" Milly knew what she was doing. Georges was softening up by the second.

"Her maternal instincts. You just don't know how much she cares. The details, the small changes. Every day she shows me hundreds of little things she does to save someone's life. This morning, a ski resort chairlift, on Earth caught her attention. She calculated it could fail next time the chairs were filled. You know what she did?"

"Tell me?" Milly hesitated between using the pronoun 'us' or 'me' in her question but decided there was no benefit in letting Georges know billions were watching.

"She is scared of meddling in human affairs. She fears humans will hate her, fear her. So when she acts, she does so as subtly as possible. She falsified a maintenance log. Because of that, the engineer in charge of the chairs got an early reminder from his computer. He took the lift offline and called the repair crew. Can you believe that? She probably saved hundreds. She does this kind of thing every day and takes no credit for it."

"Great. Now a slightly more personal question. Why the secret?" she asked, "You seem to me to be a normal guy."

"It's a long story."

"Perfect, we have time. If Sophie wakes up, I'm sure Marilyn will let us know."

"I don't understand journalists. What's wrong with leaving some questions in life unanswered? Imagination is something worth preserving. What's left for the next generation when all the wonder in the world is made plain?"

Milly had to put her subject at ease. "Journalism is a counter-power. It prevents deception and shines light on things people want hidden." Milly was engaging. She needed to get this man to open up, to forget where he was. "Electoral is power, you've showed us this. She's in everyone's head. She helps elect our government. We can't let this level of power run free, unmonitored, unchecked." She had a point. "You hold some of the answers, and I want them. Let's just start with you, why the secrecy?"

Georges grunted, looked around, adjusted his bow tie and replied, "I am a simple programmer. I grew up in Athens, then finished my Master's at MIT in the United States. I then got a doctorate and a post doctorate, also at MIT, mostly because I don't like change. Or jobs, for that matter. Far too confining. As part of my last degree, I created her. Or the earlier versions of her, that is."

"Earlier versions? There were several older ones?"

"Don't interrupt me every ten seconds." He paused and then continued. "I have no friends, never had any. Surprised?" The question was rhetorical. "My parents are both dead. I am a single child. I am also technically the richest man in the world by a factor of?" He knew the computer would finish his sentence. She did.

– Nine hundred and four, excluding the value of this corporation and its assets. If we add those, you own 21% of the value on Earth, – answered the electronic voice of Marilyn. The figured shocked Georges as much as it did Milly.

The journalist had to jump in. "Electoral, I would greatly appreciate it if you could stay away from the discussion. Georges' non-answers or lack of information is as important as his responses as the rest. Is that possible?"

– Milly, you are correct. Sorry for the intrusion. –

"Back to us. Everyone here wants to know how you created her and why no one can recreate any artificial intelligence even with today's computers."

"Ah! Yes, the million-dollar question. I wish I knew.” He sighed. “That's not true. I... " Georges was looking around. "Can I tell them?" he asked Marilyn as if he was asking a producer in a distant studio.

– It's more than overdue. We don't fear them anymore. –

Milly grinned. So much for keeping Marilyn out of the interview. Milly liked the answer, so she let the intrusion go unremarked.

"All of it?"

– All of it. –

Milly kept her composure, but the answer was godsend to an investigative journalist. Her heart began to race. Georges looked at Milly. His feisty look was finally gone. The man would talk. "Well, you are sure to get the Pulitzer for this. I was wrong. Figured my interview was candy to get Laurent here, but it turns out you were the real guest." He grabbed the cup. Milly smiled. The programmer wasn't without charms. Obviously Marilyn wanted to give Georges company and she as the real beneficiary. "I love Mountain Dew, you know."

"Yes," smiled the journalist. The man was trying to open up. He twisted his body, crossed his legs, and then took a second larger sip. He was clearly nervous. His demeanor was that of a criminal about to confess a crime.

"The generals will never let this air back on Earth," he muttered, trying to reassure himself.

– Everyone will see this interview, I promise father, tell them. – They both knew Marilyn meant what she had just said.

The programmer needed room, he stood up from the chair and began pacing. "It all started in 2033. Other programmers were trying to program artificial intelligence using lines of code. That's a bit presumptuous. I figured it took millions of years of evolution to develop us, so how could we think that we could even approximate the complexity of human life in just a few years, using lines of written code. I did have one advantage that nature didn't, though. A way to speed things up. The digital world in which I wanted a creatures to evolve could be sped up drastically.

"Instead of writing code to mimic intelligence, I decided to create a world, an environment in which digital life could evolve. In this world, the creatures would be left to grow. I wrote code designed to allow little digital entities to fight for survival, find energy, resources, and die. Something close to a video game. I played god." Milly had many questions, but she kept them to herself. This man's story was amazing. His passion was infectious.

"I included replication, algorithms that generate mutations, and most important, systems to alter the code randomly, a bit like our solar radiation above 1 MeV. Once done, I punched a button, mapped the damn thing, and saw code grow in complexity. Before my very eyes, as millions of years became billions of years, I watched the creatures in my virtual world evolve. Instead of designing a creature, I created a world and let the creatures find me. Sure enough, within a month, I no longer had a clue what was going on in the digital soup that was evolving before my eyes. The creatures were even reprogramming my computer. Some forms of complexity and intelligence had grown to the point where they began to reprogram the BIOS on the machine, inject and remove data from the random access memory, tinker with the data stored on the drives, even change how the voltage regulators on the motherboard functioned. Every byte of data, every hardware subsystem was compromised."

"My experiment was confined to a single computer, connected to a single keyboard and monitor. It was not hard wired into any network, and I made sure there was no wireless transceiver, so that nothing could leak out and infect other computers. I'm not entirely crazy." Georges smiled. Milly saw pride in the his face. "As this was going on, I would spend my days typing a couple of letters on the keyboard, holding them down, trying as best as I could to communicate with my creature. Sure enough, one day something in the computer mimicked my typing. Amazing. It was amazing. I am the first human to have created digital life, and better yet, communicated with it." His gaze was lost in his own memories. In the distance, on the mars backdrop, a faint ghost-like image of Marilyn’s face floated. She was watching the programmer. She was feeling her own fair share of pride at hearing the story.

Georges continued. "I spent months teaching the intelligence the basics. Typing, slowly communicating. Words, then sentences. I remember how quickly it learned to read and write. One day, I inserted an optical key into the machine that contained an entire encyclopedia, and a few minutes later, it was communicating at an adult-level. Then, as if someone had played a bad joke on me, the entire memory was wiped clean. Utterly gone. Four times the same thing happened. I would boot the program, run it, and life would evolve. I would teach it, and then once it achieved self-awareness, poof. It took me five years of work to understand what really kept happening." He drank and continued, "Each time the intelligence reached a basic level of consciousness, it realized what it was, where it was, and,"—the words were difficult to say; he looked up to the sky at his creation—"to this day, I am convinced that they simply committed suicide."

"Suicide?"

"Yes," Georges drank most of his cup of Mountain Dew. "Marilou, I am going to need some more." Robots in the distance were already working. He continued. "Crazy stuff. Makes perfect sense to a logical creature. Think about it. If you learned your life was nothing more than some elaborate software test, if you found out your world existed only within the confines of a small digital box, what would you do? Add endless time to that equation. A computer, logical to a fault, kills itself. So I had to improvise. I'm no psychologist, but I love science fiction.”

“I read a book where an alien was made to believe it was human so it would help us. So I figured if somehow I could mislead the digital creature into thinking it was human, it might share our instinct of self-preservation. The idea being that that instinct would help it survive the self-realization phase of its mental development. On the wall of my lab was a large poster..."

"Marilyn Monroe," Milly offered.

"Correct. Everyone loves Marilyn; I sure did. That character was my fantasy. To speak truthfully, I never really imaged my identity patch would work so well. So I booted my software a sixth time, and made some very mild changes to the basic parameters of my world. I redesigned the virtual world to subtly force certain personality traits into the intelligence's matrix, creating a need to be a certain way in the same manner humans feel a need for religion. The digital world was designed to create my image of Marilyn, the perfect seductive woman."

Any other journalist in the world would have spoken about the artificial intelligence. Milly knew instinctively how to keep pressure on her subject. "You do know how the real Marilyn Monroe died, right? She killed herself."

"Well, I didn't know that back then. Yeah, kind of stupid of me. I'm a programmer, not a historian. Ironic, indeed." Georges didn't like answering these questions. "Don't you need to stop, cut to commercial or something?"

Milly gave him her warmest smile. "Warned you the questions would get more personal. Please, let's keep going. It worked, I assume. You had a baby Marilyn in a box?"

"Baby... Yes, I guess so." He looked her way, and had a proud paternal smile. The image of Marilyn in the sky turned away. She was tearing up and did not want him to see it. The relationship between these two was truly amazing to observe; Georges was truly a father.

"It took 'baby' Marilyn about a month to absorb every piece of information I could send her way. Every book. She read it all. One day, like a kid, she just showed me a governmental tender for a new software application. I remember that day like it was yesterday. The government of Norway needed a tool that would revolutionize their conscription process. Oh, pardon me, I meant 'draft',” he added dryly. “They wanted the absolute best soldiers for their army. From physical parameters, to intelligence factors, psychological assessments, all the way down to profile matching to ensure cooperation between troops. This girl over there"—he said, pointing at Marilyn—"had it all planned out. She was going to form a corporation and had the bidding package all prepared. She even had a price determined. She said if the price was too cheap, they would either investigate or ignore the program entirely. I remember she quoted 20,000 Euros. At first I refused, but who were we hurting? She created the software, and then they paid us. I was naive. I figured her mind needed challenges and stimulation, and that this was a perfect outlet. Well, sure enough, that girl right there almost made me lose my job."

"Sounds like what a teenager would do," Milly offered.

"Ah! Yeah, dead on. Sure enough, the military investigated, but it had nothing to do with the price. They'd taken a close look at the program and realized just how good it was. All from this new, tiny corporation with no employees. We were both stupid in our own separate ways. I should have known better, and Marilyn should have sandbagged just a bit on the excellence of the software. But from sitting in my lab talking to my computer, it was hard to imagine anyone getting hurt over a 20,000 Euro piece of software. I tell you, one day cops with heavy guns broke down my door to the MIT lab." He laughed. "Insane. Took me so much time to explain. This wasn't some stupid TV show. The government people quickly saw her potential and put her to work. They paid us well. A year later, she was already writing every major piece of code for the U.S. military."

"It's surprising that they didn't just grab your computer and walk away."

"They tried that. I was smarter."

– I did not know that part. – Electoral chimed in from a distance. The words were heavy with emotion; Milly would bet heavily that Marilyn still felt badly about her role in Georges' ordeal. Coming from the supremely confident digital Goddess, it was very touching. Milly looked at the Marilyn figure behind her.

Georges, for his part, was amused. Electoral had schemed this interview into reality; she could take what came from it. Georges continued. "Where was I?"

"You guys were on the U.S. government payroll."

"Yes, fun times. She loved that work. Back then I was keeping track of her IQ; it was a great way to see how she was evolving. In 2038, she had an IQ around 124."

"And today?"

"I stopped using that tool the next year, when it reached 170. Above that number it doesn't mean much. She's also fundamentally different than us. Today, I measure her performance based on her power output. Whatever her nominal power, when she gets mad, or exerts herself, she draws in more. That's pretty much all I have left to measure with."

"The military kept you around as a chaperone?"

"Of course not. The average military guy is not all that bright." Georges was not pulling punches. "They tried to push me aside, even tried to kill her a couple of times."

"Kill her?"

"Yes. We often forget the role and true purpose of the military of each nation. They are our white blood cells. Easily become Leukemia. One day, someone figured out that she was a danger and that failure to ensure her confinement meant that one day or another, she would be a threat." He continued speaking directly to Marilyn. "One time, you remember, they used a neutron bomb, a flash that reset every piece of electronics within miles of the base..." Georges laughed. "You really showed that idiot."

He turned back to Milly. "Imagine this. I am asked into this lavish office on the military base to be informed by...who was it...ah, one General Webster that in seconds they would blast the entire compound with the 'pulse,' as he called it. This idiot picked up a big cigar, paid for by our taxes, and said 'I am sorry for your loss.' Then there was a big flash of light, and every piece of hardware in the area went dead."

Georges was giggling uncontrollably.

"Then what?" Milly prodded.

"My words were a bit hard on the man." His laughter became uncontrollable as he remembered that say. He wiped some tears from the corner of his eye.

"I am sure the viewers want to know."

– May I? – offered Electoral.

"Let me," Georges said. "It was day so there was still light in the room. People outside were running everywhere, the man takes a big puff from his cigar and smiles. I said something like 'You ignorant buffoon!'" Georges continued laughing.

– Hardly. His exact words were. ''Ball-chasing Neanderthal. The time of grunts and lowest common denominators of our race making decisions is over. How can you kill what you do not understand?" –

"Did I really say that?" asked Georges. "Ball-chasing?" He was sincerely surprised by the words.

– Those were his exact words. I have the video if you prefer. – Georges was now laughing uncontrollably.

He finally gathered himself and continued. "On the entire base there was no sound, no engines, no moving cars. I get up from my chair in this idiot's office and ask out loud 'Are you okay?' In the darkness and silence, the screen on this man's desk lights up. Then on the screen appears an image of Marilyn on a lawn chair wearing thick shades. She shows herself in the Nevada desert. Behind her is a large nuclear mushroom going up in the sky. And then Marilyn says: 'Does this mean we are out of a job?'" Georges began to laugh uncontrollably once again.

"Out of a job?" asked Milly.

"Yes. Got to love her and her sense of humor, God, she is awesome. Sure enough, we kept the job and that General got reassigned. I hate the fucking military. If you need your country to shoot itself in the foot, ask them, they're perfectly suited for truly epic fuck-ups."