"Cortex HQ," she said, and the craft rose to the aerial lanes. Cortex, the company that ruined the world. What did she know about them? Alice opened a terminal and read the latest press releases, but there weren’t a lot of new details. Their founder, Charles Shin Takamatsu, was a genius to match Newton and Einstein. The only son of a Manhattan real-estate billionaire, he founded his first synthetic intelligence company while studying at Cambridge University. Then, a few months later, he visited London’s science museum and saw Charles Babbage’s difference engine. The Victorian clockwork computer inspired him to develop the so-called Babbage circuits. Those first iterations were huge, brass cubes inches across, but he used his father’s fortune to shrink them to atomic scales. His true genius revealed itself when he designed their interconnects. The Cortex Pathway, as it was called, finally enabled his machines to cross the Turing threshold.