In Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, becoming a "ghost" means running afoul of the state. In this excerpt, a secret agent discovers it doesn't take much. True diligence is I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after. For a long time I wrote in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn't secretly wish to be a spy? We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear--when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in--but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

Tiffany Ceasor works for Microsoft in Seattle, where she is in the process of transitioning from a data scientist role to becoming a software development engineer with a focus on data science. She is a student at Florida Atlantic University, working towards her PhD in computer science with a specialism in applied artificial intelligence. Tiffany also studied at Florida Atlantic for her bachelor's degree in international public health and public health before taking her master of science in management information systems and business analytics there too. "Diversity in thought, culture, personality, life experiences and beliefs are what make the world an incredible, dynamic and beautiful place. In technology it is especially important because, as artificial intelligence advances, it is imperative to prevent eminent biases from being trained into models that will in turn potentially determine the future of the way we do things."