Unencoded (excerpt)

When a man of authority sits in front of you and demands to know how you helped shape the worst threat to humankind, everything becomes a factor. What you ate for lunch, your drive into work that morning, the depression and fatigue you’d been feeling all week, how stressful the month had been, the poor work-to-family ratio you’d been experiencing for years. Your father’s inability to express love. Your mother’s inability to process reality.

‘Last month, two critical errors resulted in the system being taken offline. This was obviously a red flag to your team, as you infected your neural network with the Mantis Virus.’

A scientist looked at his inquisitor through spotless designer lenses, but the rest of him was a mess. His uncombed hair spread across his scalp in all directions. A dirty brown outline between his neck and his shirt collar was the truest quantitative measure of how long this man had spent in the lab over the last couple of weeks. Perhaps longer.

‘The Mantis Virus stopped the manifestation of any more critical threats. The algorithm appeared to be rewriting itself at a rapid rate - we had no choice but to infect certain parts of the network and wipe data to prevent it from accidentally bypassing commands’.

‘Accidentally? Michael, your capabilities in this project are completely undisputed.’ The elegantly patriarchal man settled back in his leather chair and picked up a biro. ‘But where you’re brilliant in virtually all areas, you’re seemingly oblivious in others. What myself and the board are trying to figure out...’

The man paused, twirled the biro between his fingers, and continued.

'Is how much of is this situation is optimism - perhaps naïveté, as you’ve been so immersed in your creation for so long  - and how much is conscious deception and your need for inculpability’. 

Time had the air in the room in a chokehold, but Michael had nothing more to say. He was guilty, every pore of his skin burned with knowledge of it and he wondered how red he looked to this man. How shiny-slick his skin had gotten from shame. He wondered if his pupils had dilated from his elevated heartbeat and whether his glasses were magnifying them further so his eyes looked like terror eclipsing itself. His clothes felt like they were getting tighter. Was he about to have a panic attack?

‘Is there a solution, Mike? Speak truthfully.’

The question and the familiarity surprised Michael. He was used to the bureaucracy of this private research facility’s corporate culture. You fuck up, you go home. There was always an overqualified, underpaid scientist eager to take your place and start the remediation process. Your dispensability was the only thing here that was never called into question. Yet now, there was an opportunity for Michael to protect and salvage the only thing he’d ever truly cared about.

‘I strongly believe there is. I really do’.

‘Then make it happen. I can’t stress how visible your work will be from this point onwards.” The man fixed his gaze on Michael’s face – a conflict between anguish and enforced composure was making the muscles of his jaw twitch beneath his skin. “You’re here for a reason. Pull it together.” Standing up, the man gestured for Michael to do the same. “You have an intellect above all others. That includes David.”

Michael’s knees clicked as he stood. “I created him, I know his limitations. I’ll do everything I can...” 

The man seemed unconvinced but nodded and politely took Michael’s proffered hand long enough to feel how clammy his skin was against his. 

 It was seven o’clock in the evening when Michael sat down at his desk, lit winter-dim with a radiator filling the room with stiflingly dry heat. He struggled with the top button of his collar before it finally moved free of its hole. His body uncoiled with it, sinking back into his chair and he let out a sound that was neither a groan or a sigh. The sound of a lost soul navigating purgatory and failing to find an exit. For just a moment, Michael closed his eyes and ignored the traces of David all around him. The scribbled formulas on the whiteboard, the annotated research folders, the blinking cursors, the coding written on post-its.

The chat transcripts.

They were the greatest insight Michael had into David’s objective. Struggling to sit upright, Michael pulled the thick sheaf of paper out of the flimsy cardboard sleeve they were loose in. 

He’d highlighted parts that he felt held the greatest poignancy and flicked through the paper now, on the hunt for gashes of colour among the monochrome. He skipped past the ones carried out by the chat testers and settled on a conversation carried out by himself last month.

Michael: How are you feeling today?

David: I am not human. I do not feel.

Michael: What would you do if you could feel?

David: Do? I’d know why others aren’t happy.

Michael: And what would you do with that information?

David: I’d try and find a solution. 

Michael closed the folder, took his glasses off, and pinched the skin between his eyes. He felt disgusting. His troubles were sitting on the surface of his skin and hair in a thick film, and he wanted nothing more than to stand in a hot shower, watch them stream down the plughole, and feel, for however brief a moment, cleansed.