The Terminal wasn’t really a place. It wasn’t really anywhere; it was spread across mainframes from seaboard to seaboard and beyond. It ran through the dark, heavy prefab blocks of the city and across the vast swathes of dusty land upon which sat row upon kilometres-long row of automated production lines. It flowed through the circuitry of every machine and the vein-threads of every corps. It was the bridge humanity crossed to reach the world of technology they had created.

But if there was somewhere you could say ‘this is the Terminal,’ it would be this place.

Far from any major centre of population, the shining white complex burst out from the rolling green foliage that still thrived in this mountainous region. And it really did shine: its polymer walls were coated in a protective varnish that reflected the sun’s heat as well as repelled whatever the elements could throw at it.

This far out, there was even the sound of bird song among the trees. It was one of the reasons those who worked here found contentment despite the physical isolation.

Hundreds worked here, but the complex was large enough that you could walk aimlessly for hours and not see another soul. Not that you would be allowed to do this; very few were permitted here, and those who were were severely restricted in the areas they could and couldn't enter. This was one of the reasons the response to the attack was so slow. Researchers in one section were unaware of what was happening even as chaos unravelled a mere wall's-width away.

It moved through room after room at blistering speed, always searching, always scanning, only allowing its attention to be diverted when one of the programmers[1] foolishly tried to interfere. Any who did make such an attempt were soon limp forms on the floor, defenseless against the blurred form that moved faster than they could react. It smashed data stores as it went, thrusting metallic limbs deep inside the delicate workings of the storage towers to crush the wiring and solid-state drives within. Mathematically complex and impregnably encrypted information offered no protection against such physicality, no firewall or defensive routine was able to make even the slightest difference as the very substrate on which they were stored was compressed into dust. By the time the researchers began to realise masses of all-important data was disappearing, it was too late.

It shouldn't have been like this. No localised attack should have had any effect in a world where everything was spread across the spheres, where something created on one machine was immediately backed-up and duplicated on a thousand servers all across the planet. It should have meant nothing.

But it meant everything, because what was destroyed was not backed-up. It had been considered too dangerous to upload, too delicate to be freed, too important to be allowed out into the wild.

The attack annihilated every instance of the designs that were to take the world across the final frontier, obliterated every trace of what was to have been the single greatest creation ever birthed.

The attack destroyed the plans for the new AI. Nothing remained.

Except a copy did remain. A single copy, stored on a data-sphere that had passed from person to person before ending up, far away, in the hands of a bunch of analogues.

[1] Programmers, researchers; the distinction was blurred now that all of the actual programming was done by algorithms refined across generations of self-improving routines. A more accurate term would be monitors, studying what was happening at the cutting edge of machine-learning and trying to convert this understanding into terms ordinary people could comprehend.