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possibly begin to comprehend. He only taught the class because the powers-that-be had convinced him that he might find one or two great programmers there, and it behooved him—and those potential great students—to benefit from Barr’s own vast stores of knowledge.
    However, he had said, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of his students would not be great programmers, and probably that last point-one percent wouldn’t be either, and this was truly an appalling waste of his time, but he supposed they had better get on with it and get it over with.
    That speech alone prompted half the class to drop it.
    Barr announced the second day of class that—now that he had weeded out the stragglers and the ones who wouldn’t amount to anything except some job as a corporate drone writing drab code for unappreciative middle-management types—“you are going to work your brains to the very nub.”
    He also reiterated his position: nobody would get higher than a B. “But you will learn more from me than from any other professor you will ever have in your life.”
    Half the remainder dropped the class after that.
    Lisa decided two things at that point: that she would stick with the class no matter what, and that she would get an A.
    She spent the next three months being subjected to an amazing amount of abuse, vitriol, condescension—and also the most brilliant theories on AI she had ever heard before or since. Barr came by his arrogance honestly: he truly was an absolute master of the field.
    He also made no effort to talk down to the students, leaving most of them scrambling to try to decipher what he was talking about.
    Except Lisa, who lost a great deal of sleep, dropped ten pounds off an already rather skinny frame, got sick regularly, and came dangerously close to a nervous breakdown more than once. But dammit, she followed every single word Barr spoke in that arrogant tone that was peculiar to Brits.
    On her final exam, he wrote the following on the back:
    â€œMiss Addison, I commend you. You have tremendous drive and a willingness to apply yourself to the task at hand. You also have a stick-to-it-iveness that one does not see in the younger generation much anymore. One might admire you for your perseverence in pursuit of understanding of this subject.
    â€œHowever, you will not number me among those admirers. All you have proven is that you are able to parrot back the works of greater intellects. The fact that you had to work so hard to comprehend this class merely proves that you lack the creative spark yourself. You are, in fact, precisely the sort who will become the type of corporate drone that I despise. The only difference is that you will be much much better at it than most, though to my mind that is akin to being the best muckraker in the cow farm.
    â€œNevertheless, you have performed the tasks you were given in the class, and I would be dishonest if I did not give you fitting reward for that accomplishment, even if it is less of an accomplishment than I might desire.
    â€œA.”
    In later years, Lisa would admire Dr. Barr’s ability to fulfill her every wish and destroy them all at the same time. Back then, however, she was up most of the night crying.
    Now here she was, ten years later, having fulfilled his prognostications by spending her career as a corporate drone—even excelling at it, as he had also predicted—only to find herself providing security for his latest and greatest system.
    The Red Queen.
    Barr was currently working in Umbrella’s London office, working on some new system that would be even better than the Red Queen, but for now, this AI—which was about a decade ahead of any other computer systemavailable on the open market—was the best possible.
    This was a computer system that was in many ways the holy grail of AI: it was adaptable, flexible, and even had a personality.
    For some inexplicable reason, the personality he gave to