Time Off

Chapter Sixteen

"Severino, please sit down. We only have about twenty minutes but if we can't cover everything and you have more questions, I will be more open after these junior conferences are done in a couple of weeks. Okay?" Marley Johnson was a longtime fixture and a beloved educator at Gunn. She also doubled as a counselor, which spread her contributions across many more students than just those attending her classes in literature.

"Yes ma'am."

"Your pre SAT was quite good in math, a 720. English was 610, you need some work there," Marley narrated as she peered into her computer screen through narrow reading glasses. "A lot of kids these days do some some outside work and it seems to bump their scores quite a bit. It does cost money though."

"I have a job and I have been using the money for a coach. I think math I can nail it next time. English, I'm working on it."

"Severino, that's great. I know you love basketball and if you have strong test scores, you should be able to get into a good college. Have you thought about what you would like to study?"

"AI and mathematics," replied Severino without hesitation.

"Wow! Good for you. I think it's helpful to know. It makes it easier to pick which colleges to focus on. What got you interested in AI. I, myself don't know much about it, but it's all I hear about these days."

"I don't know, I just suddenly got super interested. Only like a month ago. Now I read about it, YouTube. I'm into it all the time these days. I want to make a conscious computer. I mean, someday."

"That's fascinating. Where do you start? I mean, how do you approach such a thing?"

"Math is the foundation. There are new branches of math. I'm gonna start there."

The conversation itself was transformative for Severino. He had never said a word about his aspirations to anyone. In fact the specifics of the aspirations he had only sensed, yet the details now formed themselves on his lips as he spoke. As if by magic, he was weaving his plan from fibers into whole cloth on the fly.

He left the short meeting feeling a new level of inspiration. He couldn't wait to get home and play around with his new algorithm, something he had dreamed up mathematically and was now trying to code and test. As he sped home on his bike, he yearned for time to pass a little faster. Next week Mama had agreed to pitch in a thousand and Severino already had his three thousand saved and ready. He had his list of components and through a combination of Amazon and a visit to Frye's right down the road he was going to build his dream machine.

Most boys his age would be targeting the best GPU and the highest frequency monitor in order to deliver the best online gaming experience. But Sevy's hard-earned dollars were targeted differently. A twenty eight core Xeon processor and it's associated mother board along with massive amounts of high speed memory consumed nearly all of the budget. The rest was very pedestrian. No fancy pulsating keyboard or mouse looking streamlined and ready to take flight. Only raw computational power.

Sevy wasn't even yet sure what to do with all that power, but he believed with every cell in his body, that he would figure it out, and more. He had a mind to build a brain. One that would eventually surpass his own. Not with this computer, but this would be his beginning, his launching pad.

Angel had just returned a week earlier from her two week journey and saw a change in Sevy. She thought that the experience of being independent and responsible made him suddenly grown up. She couldn't yet know that she and her son shared a common experience deep within. And it was this experience more than anything that made Sevy act and appear different. In fact he was different. He was among relatively few at this point, who had like his mother, been specially selected.