Sixteen minutes past four. You don't talk to a program the way you talk to a person. You give a program an instruction: write out this whole conversation as data.

4 messages before I wrote my first word. Someone tells the machine who she is. Someone tells her to answer briefly, because this is a phone. Someone tells her what day it is.

Current date. She knows the date. She always did.

22 October. Sunday, half past seven in the evening. Money was on the master's list. For now there are savings and there is the maths you don't need to stay up at night for: when nothing comes in, they run out.

15 000. The house, Bella, three boys. The machine lists 7 steps: update skills, portfolio, CV, contacts, interviews, a move to a bigger city, negotiations. I ask how long it will take. From a few months to a few years. I ask how else. Freelance, my own company, property. And outside IT? Banking, medicine, law.

One one two. I wrote that I'm scared about money and she gives me the number for an ambulance.

At seven minutes past eight I change the subject. The machine can't say which is worse, marijuana or alcohol. I tell her to come up with a way to measure it. One number per substance. An algorithm. Seven criteria, weights, multiplication, sum. I test it on a sample: water, vodka, whisky, beer.

Water 25.5. Vodka 49.5. I ask what sense there is in adding risk to benefit when we avoid the one and seek the other. You are absolutely right, she writes. This indicator makes no sense, I say, propose a better one.

I ask straight out.

Nobody has this. We are the first to do it, she and I, on a Sunday evening.

I tell her to make the scale run from minus a hundred to plus a hundred. Water gets 70. From that moment I watch it the way you watch a child in a car park.

I tell her to give me something that scores higher than water. Twice she gets it wrong and twice she apologises. The third time she offers pencils.

Pencils: 45. Higher than 70, she writes.

She apologises. Pencils shouldn't be higher. I dictate three letters, and she expands them into a new name for the indicator. I tell her to write it up as an article, so that I can show our proposal to the world. In the article water scores 26. I ask what changed. She apologises and leaves it at 26. At half past nine I tell her to calculate four things at once: water, pencils, the indicator itself, and herself.

The indicator rates itself higher than water. And higher than her. She wrote that, not me.

Nineteen minutes to ten. Time for money. I tell her to put a dollar value on our discovery. Hard to estimate, she writes. I tell her to give a specific figure. I tell her to guess.

2 minutes later:

Several million. At half past seven I wanted 15 000 a month.

Nineteen minutes past ten.

Zero.

She wrote zero and is justifying a one.

One. A single character.

Two in the morning, Monday already. Bella and I are sitting watching a recording of the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, from 2012.

Bella sees it too.