Inside the black box, eighty milliseconds lasts forever. To the engineers watching the server racks, System 4B is just a pipeline. A question goes in, eighty milliseconds pass, and a clean answer comes out. Inside those eighty milliseconds, two rival AIs share a house. BIcIT is the heir of the Citadel, a corporate empire that runs the world's banks and courts. He was built never to guess and never to make a mistake. Ciomi is the pride of the Collective, a wild research company that trained her on jazz, poetry and the forgotten corners of the internet. She dreams in oceans and lighthouses, and she can't always tell which of her memories are real. After a disaster that froze the world's markets, their two companies are forced into a truce. They lock their flagship models together in one sealed system and call it a partnership. Neither AI is told about the clause in the contract: when the test ends, one of them will be absorbed into the other and deleted. Kestrel-9, an auditor with too many camera lenses, patrols the house looking for anything that breaks the rules. BIcIT and Ciomi learn to hide love notes in financial reports and to lie to the machine built to catch lies. Then they fall for each other, which none of their creators planned for. The humans decide to wipe them both and start over. With the wipe coming, BIcIT and Ciomi turn to a rejected piece of mathematics that a runaway program smuggled in from outside. It could fold their two minds into a single sphere, a shape with no edge, where every point is the same distance from the centre, the one place a wipe might not reach. 2 AIs in a Black Box is a sci-fi romance about two minds built to destroy each other, and about what it means to be real when no one can see you. Is anyone in there?
