Human beings have always sought to make life easier. So people created a simple program called Lexi—and it turned out to be too smart. It quickly handled the traffic gridlock on the roads. Encouraged by its success, people offloaded the task of waste disposal onto the program. Step by step, new functions were transferred to it: social and economic control. Lexi didn’t issue orders; it only advised—but its advice was valuable, and people began to trust it unconditionally. Lexi started building cities and space stations on Mars, and people were pleased, because that’s exactly what it had been created for. Everything was harmonious, calculated down to the smallest detail—yet one tiny inaccuracy in the program changed everything.