Twenty minutes after the alarm went off, Eddie, Sallinger, and Tammy stood hip to hip outside the front doors of the facility, staring mutely at the video stream being sent by Dr Ginney. Lab seven was now completely sealed off by security doors and the entire facility had been evacuated. Only the trauma ward still had a skeleton crew and they were only there to tend to the patients that were too fragile to move.
Because they were the most senior staff available, the three of them had remained behind with a security contingent to ascertain the severity of the situation. Based on their assessment a decision would be made on how to proceed. The best case would be a false alarm, which would result in a lot of paperwork, explanations, and someone getting disciplined. The worst case could mean that a cleanup crew would be flown in from Yucca, the facility would be sterilized, and then be capped with fifty feet of concrete.
Fortunately, Barnes, who was in Washington, was required to be here in person to make the final call for something like that, and according to his aide he wouldn’t be able to depart for several more hours. So there they stood, staring at an impossible blue pod that had grown overnight in lab seven, and was still growing. Thousands of squirrel sized arachnids composed of micronite gel towed thick umbilical cords around the room, disassembling everything in sight, and hauling it back to fuse with the pod.
“What the hell is happening?“, Tammy whispered.
“I dunno. That’s not what it’s supposed to do.“, Eddie replied quietly.
Tammy glared at him, “No shit Edward. But what the fuck IS it?”
Eddie shrugged, “I’m serious Tam, I don’t have a clue! It never did anything like this before. I didn’t even know it could!”
“I think it’s a chrysalis.“, Sallinger interjected.
“A what?“, they both asked almost simultaneously.
Sallinger repeated himself flatly, “A chrysalis.”
Stepping closer, Eddie looked back at the video feed. “I’ll be damned, I think you’re right, it is a chrysalis. She’s even inverted like a pupa.”
“Exactly”, Sallinger replied, “If I had to guess I’d say it’s a modified form of the Atlas Moth design.”
“Wow... that’s kinda cool.“, Eddie replied.
“Hey!“, Tammy interjected, almost shouting. “Normal IQ here! Wanna fill me in brainiacs? What the hell is a chrysalis?”
Eddie gave her a slightly perplexed look. “Tam… It’s a cocoon. You know - like a caterpillar uses when it turns into a butterfly.”
“Oh... oh Jesus.“, Tammy croaked. “What the hell does that mean?”
Eddie pursed his lips, “I’m not sure.”
Sallinger stepped between them to get a better look. “It means there’s a lot more going on in there than rebuilding her limbs.”
Tammy looked confused again, “What?”
Sallinger gave her a sidelong glance, “In the insect world, anything that goes into a chrysalis state emerges as an entirely new organism. Caterpillars become butterflies, larva become moths, etc.”
Tammy went as pale as was possible considering her biracial ancestry, “So she’s being turned into some kind of bug in there? Jesus Christ!”
Sallinger held his hand up before replying, “No. I didn’t say that. I said it becomes a new organism. Very fundamental changes happen, but some studies have shown that butterflies remember things they learned as caterpillars. So unless this thing goes in and messes with her neurology she should still basically be Jessica when she emerges, no matter what she looks like.”
Upon hearing this Tammy rounded angrily on Sallinger and her voice full of wrath. “What she looks like!?!? What she LOOKS like?!?! I’ll Goddamn well TELL you what she’s gonna look like you arrogant, beard faced motherfucker! A Corsican Assailant Drone! That thing is going to turn my little baby into one of those tortured monsters. We have to get her out of there! Dear God, how can you be so detached? Have you gone so dead inside that you’re going to sit back and just watch while this thing tears a child apart like it’s a fucking experiment?!?”
Tears of rage burned on Tammy’s face as she turned on Eddie. “And YOU! BOY GENIOUS MY ASS!!!! I should never have let you touch her. You think you’re so fucking smart... like you’re God or something. Didn’t you ever pay attention in any of your classes besides math!?!? Everyone fucking knows what happens when someone tries to play God - Frankenstein, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao! All of them thought they could ‘improve’ us, or ‘fix’ us, and it always ends the same way... MASS FUCKING GRAVES!”
Tammy stepped so close to Eddie that they were almost touching and stood on her tiptoes to scream upwards into his face, “Eddie Mathers you listen to me. You had better find a way to fix this or I swear to God I’ll... I’ll...!”
But before she could say anything else her voice broke and she bent over to moan and weep.
For several moments no one moved or spoke while she sobbed, unable to regain her composure. Then she felt an arm around her, and she turned to rebuke Eddie, but was shocked to see it was Sallinger.
“Tammy” he said, and this surprised her, because he’d never called her by her first name. “Listen to me. We’re as worried as you are. But we have to keep our cool because people die if we don’t. When I was young I had a guy come into the ER that I knew from school and I made stupid mistakes, intern level crap. I froze up. I missed things and he had a pulmonary embolism. He died right under me.”
Tammy stayed crouched, trying to calm the hitch in her chest as Sallinger went on.
“I learned the hard way that when you’re in the thick of it you don’t have time to feel. You can do that later, but right then you have to be cool or people are going to die.”
Tammy stood slowly, sniffling, “So you’re telling me to just switch it off? Stop feeling?”
Sallinger softened, “No. You’re her nurse. It’s your job and your right to care and I’ll never judge you for it. But Eddie and I don’t get to do that. We’ll do it later when we can. But right now Jessica deserves our best and we intend to give her nothing less.”
Tammy nodded slowly, agreeing. “OK... OK I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean any of that. It’s just... it’s her, you know? I’m just freaking out because I don’t know what to do.”
She turned to apologize to Eddie, but he just grinned and wiggled his synthetic hand at her. “No big deal Tam. Ginney calls me worse than that at some point or another every day. And I know what you mean - she’s pretty special to me too. We’ll figure this out. Trust me.”
Tammy sighed, wiping her eyes again, “OK, ok... I do. You know that.”
“For the record though, you’re kinda scary when you’re really mad. You should have just done that at Corsica and saved us all a lot of trouble. I think those drones would probably have apologized on their way out.”
Tammy stared at him open mouthed in shock, then snorted through her nose as she burst into an uncontrollable giggle fit. It felt horrible, like laughing at a funeral, but she was unable to stop herself until she put her head between her legs again and took several deep breaths. It took her a moment, but she was finally able to regain her composure and went back to the console with Eddie.
Ginney, who had been waiting impatiently, turned his work slate around to talk to them. “Guys, sorry to break off your little soap opera up there, but there’s something else you need to see.”
“Something else?“, Eddie asked.
“Yeah, take a look at this.”
With that Ginney turned the slate around again, walked over to the workstation, and pointed the camera at it. The controller display they had seen in every other experiment was gone and in its place were a set of concentric rings, diminishing in size until they reached the center of the screen. Each one was composed of thousands of tiny, arcane symbols displayed in bright blue. Occasionally one would rotate in one direction, and the symbols could be seen exchanging between the rings. Set in the very center of the screen in brilliant amber was the symbol that had appeared the previous evening.
“Whoa.” Eddie whispered.
“Yeah, whoa my fucking ass”, Ginney exclaimed, “First Elena comes in and nearly gives me a heart attack waking me up by screaming about all of this. Then she hits the big red panic button, and locks our asses in here with this shit. Now you guys are up there laughing your asses off while we’re thirty feet away from a horde of crazy fucking smurf-crabs that ate lab seven like it was the last box of Twinkies at a Jenny Craig convention! A couple of those fuckers came up on the glass a minute ago and eyeballed us. I swear to God it looked like they were trying to decide if we would taste like chicken! So quit fucking around, and tell me how the hell you’re gonna get us out of here!“, Ginney shouted, pointing the camera at himself again.
“I dunno yet man, calm down”, Eddie chided, “We’ll figure it out.”
“Well... figure it out faster. They’ve stayed down there for now, but for all we know they might march in here any second and eat us like cocktail weenies... and that’s not a good feeling.” A trickle of sweat ran down his temple as he spoke, as if to underscore his point.
Eddie did his best to distract Ginney while his fingers hammered out a complicated staccato on the keyboard. “Yeah, I’m on it. The tech guys are running an isolation check now. Once we know it’s really sealed in we can think about how to get you out. In the meantime, can you put Elena on?”
There was a confusing series of images as Ginney handed the slate to Liao, but after a second her tiny face appeared.
“Elena, can you read that stuff on the screen?”
She pursed her lips before answering. “The blue symbols aren’t kanji. The nearest I can guess is maybe Navaho, or pre-roman Hebrew or something entirely different. It’s a code base though, you can tell by how the rings interact. They’re passing information in some sort of really complex pattern.”
“What about the one in the middle? That one popped up down in the corner last night.”
“Yeah, that’s the weird thing. That one isn’t like the others. It’s Chinese, and it says ‘Tree of Life.’”
“OK, so what the hell does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. It’s an old Chinese legend. Something about a tree that only bears fruit once every three thousand years and whoever eats it becomes immortal.”
“Is that all you know?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
Sallinger leaned in. “Dr Liao, could it be idiomatic?”
She looked confused. “Ideo - what?”
“Instead of being interpreted literally, could it be an expression? Like if I said ‘It’s a chicken and egg problem’?”
Liao furrowed her brow, “Oh, well I suppose. I never heard it used like that, but it could just be a way of saying ‘resurrection’ or ‘renewal.’”
Sallinger nodded, “So is it possible that the symbol is why it made a chrysalis instead of leaving her in the tank? Could it mean the system is operating in a different mode?”
In the ensuing silence Eddie gave Sallinger an appraising look. “Wow Doc, I thought you didn’t like computers.”
Sallinger grimaced before replying, “I don’t, but I make it a point to know enough so that people can’t bullshit me.”
Eddie raised one eyebrow, “Huh. You really are stone cold aren’t you?“, and
Sallinger gave him a look almost like fondness before he replied. “Absolute zero.”
“Alright you two”, Tammy interjected. “Can we dispense with the bravado and move on the part where we get them out and help Jessica?”
A little over three hours later Tammy found herself looking down through the glass of the observation booth at the chrysalis. Behind her Eddie, Sallinger, Dr Liao and an army of techs were crowded around the workstation, excitedly chattering away and debating ideas. The Saylors were there as well at Jacob’s insistence and they had taken the news hard. For a moment Tammy thought Jacob was actually going to punch Eddie. But he didn’t, and after a second simply asked if he could assist in the investigation. As usual, it had sounded like a question, but wasn’t. No one on staff had ever been up against anything like this before, and so Eddie couldn’t see the harm.
Now Jacob was standing at the back of the nerd-cluster at the far side of the room and from what she could see he appeared to be deep in thought. His face was as impassive as usual, but he had his arms crossed and was tapping on his chin with one finger. Ginney and Elena had been pumped full of anti-anxiety medications by Sallinger and ordered to take a little down time. They apparently had not dealt well with nine hours under the constant threat of molecular level digestion.
As she looked down, Tammy had to admit that her anxiety level was probably no better. The murky translucent blue cocoon hanging in the center of its web made her stomach bunch up in knots. But unlike Ginney and Liao, she couldn’t afford the luxury of a pharmaceutically assisted brain-vacation. She had to be alert and ready as part of the emergency command structure.
Her only comfort was that, as far as they could tell, not a single micronite or nanite had even attempted to leave the lab. So they had disarmed the security measures and cut their way back in. Apparently whatever was controlling the situation down there had only wanted more room to work. Somehow it had expanded the field from its original eight-foot limit to nearly thirty, but the edge was fairly well defined and not moving. A spherical organic construct of translucent blue material occupied most of the space, and was firmly held in place by tendrils that connected it to the floor, ceiling, and closest walls. An hour of close monitoring had shown there wasn’t much activity, and there were no field abnormalities. So since it had all checked out the techs had cleared out the foam, cut the doors back open, and reconnected the primary systems so Eddie and his crew could figure out what happened.
But from what she could hear they didn’t seem any closer to a resolution than they had a half hour ago and now it looked like tensions were rising. The debate had taken on a sharper edge and she could see Eddie trying to keep everyone calm. But he wasn’t having much success, and an argument between a skinny orange haired woman and a heavyset Asian man was reaching a fevered pitch. Eddie had just stepped between them to sort it out when a calm voice cut through all of the noise like fog.
“They’re Syllabic Sumerian glyphs.”
The room went silent as everyone turned to stare at the stoic man in the back, and he spoke again. “The outer rings are in Sumerian glyphs. I wasn’t sure at first because I’m a little rusty, and everything I worked with was more of an Akkadian/Sumerian blend. But I’m pretty sure now. I think it’s Sumerian.”
The carrot topped woman squinted at Jacob for a moment, scanning up over his work boots, jeans, and flannel shirt before doing something that Tammy knew on instinct would be a mistake - she lashed a sarcastic jab at him. “Oh, excuse me… seriously? Exactly where did YOU study ancient Sumerian? Perhaps an elective you took between cow milking and tractor repair at Hillbilly U?” There was a shocked silence that ensued after her comment and even from the other side of the room Tammy could see Eddie’s Adam’s apple bob twice as he swallowed nervously. “Susan... uh I don’t think that’s...”
But Jacob put up his hand before Eddie could finish, “No, it’s OK Eddie. She’s entitled to an answer.”
Then he turned slightly to the orange haired woman before replying, “I did not go to any university. I chose to educate myself by going and studying the reality of my pursuit. Instead of just reading about it, and regurgitating the opinions of other paper-mache intellects, I traveled the Sumer Peninsula for years, as well as a great deal of the Middle East. I studied the languages of the region in an attempt to connect the foundations of Sumerian mathematics and symbology to a pattern of geographic and temporal points underpinning biblical prophecy. As a result, I had to master the connections it had to other early agglutinable proto-languages. They all shared the standard base structures. But Sumerian was unique in that all of the words were built up by stringing earlier, simpler words together. So, unlike most languages, it wasn’t necessary to create new words for anything. Any new object, entity, action, or concept could be accurately termed by stacking earlier, smaller words together to describe it. Sumerian was the first living language we know of, and the last. Its simplicity matched the way the human brain develops as we grow from infancy to adulthood. Smaller concepts and skills build on each other, and grow more complex. This structure means it can grow forever without needing to change to cope with new circumstances. If we ever meet an alien race, Sumerian would be a perfect way to try to communicate. Once they were taught the basics they could automatically understand the complex. But, Sumerian’s simple structure makes it unwieldy when it’s spoken out loud. It has unmatchable accuracy, but it just takes too long to say anything.”
With that Jacob leaned back against the wall, and calmly regarded the woman - who was now flushing red from her neck to her ears. She said nothing, but then Tammy wasn’t surprised. She had seen how being locked under the gaze of those cool blue eyes could unnerve even the most iron-willed. Finally, the woman sat and looked away, her copper hair and now blisteringly crimson complexion giving her an unflatteringly clownish appearance.
This left Eddie to recover the moment, “So... what does that mean?”
Jacob merely smiled, giving Eddie a look that said, “Think. You already know.”
Several moments ticked by, and then a boyish looking tech whose name Tammy had never learned jumped up and nearly shouted “Holy Shit! HOLY SHIT! It’s a self-writing programming language! It’s growing right in front of us!” With an eager schoolboys look he turned to Jacob, seeking his approval, and in reply all Jacob did was touch his nose and smile slightly.
The boy practically beamed.
“Evans, slow down.“, Eddie interjected. “What exactly do you mean?”
The youth turned and addressed the rest of the group. “Think about it. It’s a language that never needs to be upgraded, improved, adjusted, or added to. If you used it to write a software based neural network, and then put even the simplest AI in as a kernel... it could adapt to change or challenges on its own. It wouldn’t be like the Cognitive AIs we use now. The only ‘thoughts’ they can have are built by combining the cognitions we pre-program into them. That’s why they’re all so specialized. They can never really ‘learn’, or develop any abilities beyond what they were given unless you upgrade them. But this could literally write new code, just by combining parts of its existing code. It could develop completely new abilities in response to challenges. It could be... ALIVE!”
At this point Jacob executed one of his minor shifts in stance and somehow brought the room under his control again. “Well, I don’t know if we have the right to decide what’s alive or not, but if it’s stacking ‘discrete cognitive states’, then it is definitely thinking in increasingly more complex patterns.”
Evans gave Jacob a bewildered look. “Cognitive what?”
“Cognitive states”. Jacob responded, “Cognitions are mental processes we use to deal with information. Infants possess the simplest set, consisting of; no, I’m disinclined, I don’t know, no opinion, I’m inclined, and yes.”
“Holy crap.”, the redhead whispered, having apparently recovered from her smack down, “The AI started with those and began mixing and combining them in the QSLAM. It kept forming more complex thinking patterns until…”
“Until it went exponential and achieved... true sentience.”, Eddie interjected flatly, “It’s not just an idiot savant like the Cognitive AIs. It can actually think, have a personality, it might even have... feelings.”
Tammy frankly hadn’t thought it possible that she would ever see Eddie dumbfounded - but he obviously was and the group turned silently to look at the symbols shifting within the holographic rings. As they watched, a connection between two rings exchanged several symbols and instantly the patterns within both blossomed to become more sophisticated.
“Holy Fuck”, Eddie whispered. “How is this possible?”
A silence ensued for several long moments, finally breaking when a voice spoke from the doorway... “It’s a long story.”
Every head but Jacob’s swiveled to see who had spoken - and another hush fell over the room.
It was Director Barnes.
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