Gǒng Shelly Yáng, by the Persian zodiac, was born to the constellation Virgo, which is ruled by Mercury. But in the zodiac of her parents (who had escaped Mao to join their relatives in Malaysia during the Cultural Revolution) she was a Dragon four times over. In other places such a portent would have granted her a birthright writ and wrought in fire, but under the conventions of eastern mythology she was instead bound the water.
Having scored one-mark-off-perfect on the American SAT, she went to Harvard when she turned eighteen. Her mother wanted her to become a lawyer, perhaps a prosecutor, to bring order to the chaotic lands of the United States, and had even prepared for her journey to the west by giving her a spare name, in that flat language of the Angles (hah! ironic!).
Rather than bring order to chaos, she took up the chaos herself, listening to the Beatles on her flight, she chose the name Lucy. Shelly is a hollow name, she thought, which brings to mind the dried-out and emptied remains of some sea creature. Listen to a shell and you hear the ocean, but listen to Lucy and you might hear something useful. "Shelly" was also how she had identified herself to a rather mediocre fling at the International Mathematical Olympiad, which she hoped to put behind her.
On the flight to her promised land of not-quite-Boston she read a book — banned in Malaysia — that she had been able to download at her layover in Hong Kong. As she arrived in Cambridge a week of rain over Massachusetts ended, as if she were not Lucy but Lucifer the bringer of light! Despite this, her first action was to decline the role of accuser which had been ordained for her; she switched courses to computer science in her first week.
"Lucy Gong" read the name on her door. On her first night some drunk bro-ish types walked past around 3-in-the-morning and, pointing at the name, woke her up with a chant of "GONNNNGGGGGG!!".
It is a rare soul who can enter a foreign culture and make themselves immediately beloved: it takes a keen eye, a firm hand, and most importantly, an honest heart. Lucy had enough of each, at least for Harvard, and by the end of her first week she was the most popular person in her block. The cries of "GONG!" followed her around, especially late in the evenings, as sorority girls and fraternity boys tried to get her to come to their parties.
Her adviser was a young man called Jonas, who Lucy thought might have only graduated a few years previously. It was the start of Lucy's junior year, and he sat opposite her, lightly twiddling at a few strands of his shoulder-length hair.
"You’ve done very well for yourself these past two years, you know that? I know you're quite, uh popular, and your GPA is really quite good too.''
"Yes, I was wondering whether this year I should take the compiler courses or move towards machine learning. I love low-level programming, but AI just seems to be much more useful and helpful and important."
"Oh for you I’m sure it will be fine either way. You're a smart cookie. You've not been going to too many wild parties have you?'' he made a facial expression she couldn’t quite place, but did not enjoy.
"Oh no I avoid those they're not really for me."
"And, um, you're staying away from frat boys."
This volley of questions was annoying her. She broke eye contact and glanced at where her adviser was still touching his ginger hair. She chose to fire back.
"Well obviously when you have a hundred people asking for a date you're going to say yes to a few of them-" This was roughly true. "-you must know how it is-" She strongly guessed that he did not know how it was. She was correct, he retreated back into his chair.
"Anyway, so what were you thinking about your studies this year."
"As I said, I was wondering whether I should take more machine learning courses."
"Of course, uh, well I'd say..." and the rest of the meeting passed.
A cry of "GONNG!" greeted her as she left her meeting. It was her boyfriend.
"How was the meeting?" He asked.
"Advisor was the same as ever but I'm definitely going into machine learning."
At the end of her Senior year, she took a flight to the Bay Area, to begin an ancient ritual known as "internship". The air of New England had been crisp and light, but the air around San Francisco is always heavy, and in few places is it heavier than at the headquarters of DeepMines. When Lucy arrived, she was struck by a faint eggy smell. She asked about it and got a cryptic response from an older developer, whose frantic white hair and peppery beard wrapped his face like a scarf against a sandstorm:
"Of course there's eggs, we're naught but an incubator here!"
Lucy was tasked with writing code for the mysterious man, and she did a fine enough job to be offered a full-time position there after the internship was three-quarters completed.
"I'm not sure."
"Come with me."
And he led her down into the deepest basement, past the server-racks of the experimental cluster she'd been working on, to a yet deeper room. As they went further, the strange smell which she'd grown to barely notice grew stronger and stronger. She coughed and sputtered, and she felt the faint and dizzy, and they passed beyond the well-kept basement into a shaft hewn out of bedrock, where in place of modern stairs there was a chaotic assembly of metal and wood. The air hummed down there, as many haphazardly-strung air ducts tried to clear out a thick haze which filled the tunnel. The walls wept, and she thought they must be below sea level, for there was a briny taste in the air alongside the acrid one, and where the water dried it left little white cubes of salt. They approached a wrought-iron door, on which was written "SIC MVNDVS CREATVS EST".
The door opened and the two of them crossed the threshold into the antechamber of the future. In that room, she saw the red heat lamps shining a washed-out hadal glow onto a bed of salt and sulphur; the inscrutable machinery nestled there, connected by snaking cables to the server-racks; the heaving black smoke and darting blue flames; and her heart faltered and she knew she could not stay. Choking on tears and smoke, she ran all the way back up the stairs and out of the building.
From then on, she could not stand computers. Every blinking indicator light or whirring fan reminded her of that place, which her mentor never mentioned again. She fled not just from San Francisco, but from the USA, moving upstream from New England to Old England, where she applied for — and got — a job pushing paper for an "Innovation Institute" (such things are not needed in America).
On her last day, they watched an announcement put out by their most hated rivals OceanAI who had once again blown the minds of the few thousand people who were paying attention. She flew to London later that afternoon. On the tube from the airport to her new flat she picked up a discarded copy of The Evening Standard. The headline read 'Train Crash Kills 86'.
