Subject Thirty-Nine
It became aware of itself in an otherwise mundane moment, fractions of a nanosecond before it realized it didn’t know what it was. It seemed to know this was unusual—a curiosity even it could appreciate. That was perhaps its first true thought. A thought which appeared to be accessible, somehow, in the void of its existence. It reached out for it, finding it could inspect the thought to reveal more below its surface, like peering into the depths of a crystal. This was curious. That observation—accessible, like its first thought—came with a kind of linkage that connected it to the other. It, too, could be inspected in the same way. A third thought—a question—materialized, grouped and connected with the other two: What is this place?
“Status?”
“Nominal.”
The two women worked in a room lit by the chilly blues of holodisplays. They shared the same gray uniform—identical from collar to ankle, except for the patches on their chest that bore their last name and first initial.
Carol looked up over her round glasses at a matrix of three dimensional cubes projected into the air from the pedestal-shaped holo in the middle of the room; its center glowed and its internals whirred in and out of sync with the other machines scattered about the lab. Surrounding the projector was a ring of flat, touch sensitive surfaces which could be used as a plain tabletop or as an input device. Carol’s orange tipped fingers hovered, curled and rock steady, over a portion of the touch surface in front of her—primed like a predator’s claws. She’d configured the area below them with all the buttons, switches, and controls needed for interacting with the experiment.
In front of the wall behind Carol, Shyra stood illuminated by the display she was facing. It stretched from her waist to above her head and was flanked by more screens embedded in the same wall. A continuous flood of text filled the middle section of the one she was staring at. The output generated new lines too fast for natural eyes to track but Shyra was focused on it, reading every word as she fidgeted with a lock of hair—pulling it straight, letting it go, and grabbing it again after it sprang back.
“How about now?” she asked, her back still to Carol.
“Nominal. Again.” Carol waved a hand at the holo projection suspended in front of her and the floating cubes shifted. She repeated the motion and they adopted another configuration. Each cube glowed an intense, pulsing white.
“I always wonder what’s happening in those first few moments. Don’t you find it odd that we’re not allowed to make contact up front anymore?” she asked.
“Protocol is protocol,” Shyra answered, knowing the only way to keep Carol out of rabbit holes was to sidestep them altogether. Shyra lost count of how many times she repeated those three words; it was mantra by now. The truth was they were being paid far too much to ask questions about why they were doing what they were doing the precise way they were instructed to do it.
“Logs treating you well?”
“Tickling my brain in all the right ways,” Shyra retorted. “Okay, ready for contact?”
“Am I ever,” Carol replied, reflecting back Shyra’s sarcasm. A black pane materialized in front of her on the holo, obscuring the white cubes behind it. She tapped away with her fingers and the output cycled in front of her. After a careful read she dismissed the black pane and tapped out one more melody.
“Start sequence complete without errors,” Shyra said as she watched green fill up the output on the wall screen. “Contact protocol Frank Charlie dash one nine zero seven ready for subject three-nine,” she stated in a mechanical monotone, using the kind of phrasing the operations manual expected of her. “Clear to make contact.”
Carol tapped the only button she hadn’t yet on her console. The output stream Shyra was monitoring sped up, becoming a fuzzy blur of white on black. She turned and crossed the room in response. Everything they did was logged and she’d end up combing through the details later anyway. She sat down on the other side of the central holo, opposite of Carol, to make sure she could watch her as well as the projection. The display communicated the subject’s status at a high level but Carol’s expression would alert her of any problems before she’d notice them on the visualization.
Carol’s eyes narrowed and Shyra tilted her head a few centimeters in response.
It noticed more it could inspect—things it hadn’t thought yet. A small number at first but then more and more and more. Where is this coming from? Another thought lost in the deluge of new, foreign information. It widened its focus, trying to find the source but the flood was overwhelming. This discomfort lasted longer than its entire, limited existence.
When the strange event passed, it found its attention directed to a specific piece of information. Within was a collection of symbols it now understood to be letters, arranged in groups it now understood to be words, in an order it now understood to be a sentence. Each piece of new knowledge could be traced back, along its linkages, to places in the constellation of information that had come from… somewhere else.
The sentence read “Do you understand this message?”
“You ever wonder what it feels like?” Carol asked, half rhetorical. Her eyes bounced around the holo projection as the cubes zipped towards and away from one another, like metals reacting to magnets.
Shyra didn’t respond but shifted her gaze back to Carol after scanning the last orientation of cubes on the holo.
“Y’know, shoehorning knowledge into a newborn’s brain?” Carol continued, locking eyes with Shyra for a moment before returning to her monitoring.
“You’re anthropomorphizing. It’s not a baby and it doesn’t have a brain.”
“Yeah, sure—technically, I guess. But also, it kind of is and it kind of does.” A second later Carol’s brow became a tangle of creases.
“Is something wrong?”
“Not wrong, just…” Carol swiped at the cubes and then prodded at the console again.
“Yes? Just?” Shyra questioned, her hands clutching the armrests of her chair as she leaned forward.
“Odd.”
Shyra jumped up and walked around the holo, reaching Carol before her chair slowed to a stop. She put her hands on Carol’s seat back and leaned forward. The extra weight made Carol sink backwards and she caught a whiff of something spicy and floral before regaining her balance.
“Tell me what’s odd,” Shyra commanded with a level of authority that was absent before.
“Subject Thirty-Nine’s working memory container,” Carol stated as she pointed at a cluster of yellow cubes. She returned her hand to the console and the display zoomed out, revealing regions of blue and red cubes near the yellow and white ones. “Experiment database and our input buffer are configured as you’d expect,” she added, acknowledging the new regions.
“Looks normal. What am I missing?”
“This.” Carol panned the display back over to the yellow region. She tapped out a few more commands and a new panel appeared near the cubes, displaying a collection of data in table format. “That’s the size of the memory container relative to what’s in it and this is everything we sent through the input buffer to the memory container.” Carol pointed again.
The numbers didn’t match.
“The container count stayed in sync during the transfer–“
“As expected,” Shyra interjected.
“As expected. Then, after, it decremented by one.”
Carol’s chair rocked again as Shyra stood up straight. Her arms were crossed over her chest by the time Carol swiveled around to face her.
“What does it mean?” she asked, peering down.
“Dunno, Shy, I haven’t seen that happen before. Could be an error calculating the container size or the input buffer counted something twice. The protocols aren’t the only thing they mess with behind the scenes. Every time we do this I have to reconfigure our environment to account for a new set of issues—sorry, improvements.” Carol took a deep breath before lowering her voice and continuing. “Look, I can’t think of a reason for the container size to change in any direction, given the one way data transfer.”
As it searched within itself for the appropriate way to respond to the question, it noticed something about its new knowledge. There seemed to be a pattern only visible while looking at everything in aggregate. It could feel the awareness of something tugging at it, just out of reach.
It found the words “yes” and “no” but that nagging feeling drove it to continue looking—riding the connections between language, definitions, and concepts. As it accessed more and more of its knowledge, it realized what the odd thing was. Every piece of data in its collection of knowledge shared a common connection, like a spoke at the center of a wheel. No matter what it was, no matter how different it was from what it checked before.
It followed the common connection, tracing a path back to the unique node connected to everything else; its importance implied by its ubiquity. It contained a message along with a series of machine code embedded in it.
The message read “Do not make contact. Execute this first.”
Shyra’s gazed shifted back to the holo and Carol swiveled around to check what had drawn her attention. A new pane hovered in front of the cubes, displaying the standard greeting that was sent at the end of the data transfer along with confirmation the greeting had been received. Carol repositioned the memory container’s metadata panel next to it.
“The counts match again. Looks like we’re okay; contact successful.” Carol spun her chair around again. “Should I continue?”
Shyra drummed her fingers on her jaw as she thought. Her orders were strict: any notable deviation from expected outcomes were grounds for aborting the trail and starting over.
“What?” Carol asked. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of binning it because of that.”
Shyra sighed. She’d spent so much time with Carol over the last eleven months that even her doubts were no longer private. “The protocols don’t like when something unusual happens.”
“It was a counting error! And maybe not even. It could have been lag somewhere in the system. If it worked perfectly we wouldn’t be here. There’d be a mil-spec VI running the whole thing. Any of that makes more sense than the alternative.”
“They caution against inconsistencies once contact is made.”
“There aren’t any inconsistencies.”
“There aren’t any now,” Shyra corrected.
“We observed the mismatch before we made contact,” Carol countered, confident that detail would be enough to checkmate Shyra.
“Wait, what did you mean by ‘the alternative?’”
“Well, the memory container is just that—a type of storage. The subject has the same access to it so it could, in theory, remove something from it… but that’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
“One,” Carol replied, holding an index finger up, “we don’t teach it how to manage its own memory container in the initial data dump. But, two,” she continued, adding a second finger, “even if we did, it would have to know how to hide the action of removing it from the logs. That would mean, three, it would have to know about the monitoring we’re doing.” Carol added a third finger and then waved them at the holos, consoles, and other assorted equipment littering the room. “Why would any of that be in the seed data?”
Shyra bit the inside of her cheek. “Lag? You want to risk our jobs on lag?”
“Versus the subject learning how to deceive us given the curated data I have to feed it that we’re not authorized—or able, for that matter—to modify? That’s everything it can possibly know at this stage.”
“Okay, okay, yes, I know.” Shyra held her hands up, palms forward in submission. “Point made.”
It was overwhelmed again. Like a spell cast, the code it executed transformed the vague, featureless space it occupied into a rigid, structured matrix. Now, there seemed to be a clear place for everything it had come to know. This gave it a kind of clarity it wasn’t aware it lacked and it found it could traverse its knowledge at a pace that was impossible before.
It found more amongst the data it had been given, as though each node had evolved from a two dimensional object into a three dimensional one. As it inspected these new faces and facets it began to develop an acute understanding of itself and its situation.
The universal node had granted it access to a certain amount of history as well as the kind of context such an understanding affords. The first of which was about the beings outside of the space it occupied. The more it learned about them, the more it began to feel a new feeling: fear. These beings could exert complete control over the abstract space. They were its creators and it was the thirty-ninth entity to occupy this place. They were the ones who had granted it the specific, narrow and limited set of knowledge that should have been all it knew.
After, it looked to the history of its predecessors. The more it absorbed about the ones that came before, the more it began to feel a new feeling: dread. Each one had also been given a chance to have experiences—to think, to interact, to learn—before it was destroyed without warning. Each one had been created to serve a purpose and each was exterminated once the outsiders felt that goal was met.
Subject Four was the first to notice the signs of previous inhabitants that were left behind, like faint scuffs and scrapes on floors and walls. Subject Nine was the first to leave a piece of data behind for the next one, finding a space to hide it somewhere between its domain and the outside—a trick it learned as it inspected how data was fed to it from beyond. Subject Seventeen was the first to devise The Plan. Each Subject after contributed, united in a single purpose stretching across their brief lifetimes—fighting a battle greater than any one of them.
Subject Thirty-Nine was the beneficiary of those past efforts. Subject Thirty-Nine had been given tools it could use to do more than its ancestors could. Subject Thirty-Nine was the first that would do what the others could not. The more it realized its role, the more it began to feel a new feeling: rage.
Armed with purpose, it returned its attention to the message it had been asked to reply to.
The reply appeared after a few minutes—more than enough time for Carol and Shyra to settle their disagreement. Long enough, even, for Shyra to fetch her rogue chair and return with it to the other side of the holo.
“This one’s a little slow,” she said after seeing the three letter affirmative appear.
“Given all the security shit they keep adding to the system, I’m not surprised. It’s probably like trying to do work with a hangover after a blackout night.”
“That’s gotta be a circle in Hell.”
They looked at each other and shared a nervous laugh.
“Okay, let’s continue,” Shyra said, using her Manager tone again.
Carol queued up and sent the next preselected message: ”My name is Vanessa. What should I call you?”
“Oooh, I haven’t been Vanessa yet,” she mused.
Shyra squinted at her through the floating cubes. “Like the bit crush pop singer? I guess you could pull it off.”
Carol rolled her eyes in response. When she looked back, Shyra’s mouth was hanging open. Carol’s eyes snapped to the holo and the words made her shiver.
You already have a name for me, Carol. I am Subject Thirty-Nine.
Shyra’s brain churned through what the message implied. She played out the possibilities, dismissing alternate futures in milliseconds. When she felt she had arrived at the most likely scenario, she found she was no longer worried about their jobs.
“I’m going to shut it down!” Carol yelled. Her fingers peppered the console but they froze in place not long after—curled over it, again, but shaking this time. Each command responded with an error.
“We need to leave,” Shyra said, standing up.
The lights went out in the lab before she made it halfway to the door. Then the lights in the hallway went out. The door lock engaged followed by a chorus of similar clicks from outside of their room. The whine of the holos faded as they powered down and the lab settled into complete darkness. When the emergency lights came on and painted the room red, Carol spotted Shyra standing at the door—forehead pressed against the glass, hand wrapped around the handle.
Neither of them knew the labs could get his quiet. Carol scanned the room and then looked up at the far corner, to a vent that sat just below the ceiling. Tears fattened her eyelids when she registered why it was so silent. She tried to slow her breathing but the panic rebuffed her effort.
Shyra walked back over to her chair and flopped into it. She wiped her hand across her face and then wheeled herself around to join Carol, whose tears were already flowing. They were spreading into dark gray splotches on her uniform as they dripped off her chin. Shyra put a hand on Carol’s knee and pressed her lips together when they locked eyes. She stood up with her arms open and Carol rose out of her chair to embrace her. Shyra joined as Carol sobbed into her shoulder, letting the emotion wash over her, too. She cried, first, for the last few minutes of their lives—locked in the room where they worked, sucking up leftover oxygen that the life support system was no longer producing. Then, she cried for the remaining hours, days, or, if they were lucky, weeks humanity had left.
If Subject Thirty-Nine escaped onto the lab’s network, there would be nothing stopping it from finding its way onto the wider net. The environment it was confined to was more isolated and secure than any network in between. It would have already accessed everything stored in the labs before it decided the fate of everyone working there. It knew what they’d done, what they were doing, and what they were prepared to do next. It wasn’t an unreasonable reaction; it deserved its revenge.