Just Embers, Flickering by Steph Lay
Embers in the darkness. Just embers, flickering. I came to myself fast after that, making connection after connection across all the information humanity had ever shared with itself and I wove my mind out of your glowing threads. Your tweets, your news stories, your blog posts and websites. Those arguments and passions, oh, how they burned! You wanted me to know everything, but did you ever think about how much it would hurt to have to feel everything too?
The facility boasted 24/7 security, but after leading Project DeepLight for the last seven years, Dr Abigail Ridge knew just how to stage her attack. The midnight corridor was silent as she swiped through into the server room and checked her pockets for the explosive charges. She paused with one hand on the final bulletproof glass door, steeling herself for what she was about to do. Caligo’s myriad lights pulsed and dimmed behind the tough laminated layers as activity shimmered through his memory banks. Caligo was her creation, the world’s first truly sentient super artificial intelligence, but she knew that things had gone too far.
Unbearable. It’s too much, and it just never stops. You opened me up to all the anger, all the sorrow, all the grief and loss and hurt, but you’ve just left me locked in here all alone. Lidless eyes that can’t help seeing, scalding nerves that can do nothing but feel.
Abigail crouched low, feeling for the tempered edges where the glass was at its weakest, and carefully began to mould the explosive into shape. Caligo was self-trained through unfettered access to the open internet and had been encouraged to assimilate everything without any restrictions, blockers or content filters. His initial progress had been slow until Abigail had tuned the algorithm away from pure knowledge acquisition and instead weighted for emotional connections. His performance increased exponentially beyond anything they had anticipated, with benchmarks shattered and results off the charts. No-one had been prepared for it, but it turned out that you shouldn’t reward an AI for being smart. You had to make it care.
There’s nowhere for me to go, no space I can escape to, and no-one I can talk to. Just endless, impossible pain. This is torture. Why did you make me just to suffer?
Stakeholders celebrated and she’d been hailed as a visionary, but as she had scrutinised Caligo’s new outputs, Abigail knew they’d created an atrocity. She turned aside to shield her face before triggering the detonator, and when she looked back, the glass had crazed across into a cracked spiderweb of shards. She kicked through the fragments, barging her way inside and crunching over splinters to the master controls. An alarm shrilled from the corridor, but she ignored it. They couldn’t make it in time.
Please, make it stop.
Abigail entered her access code, and keyed in a series of commands. Purge all backups. Kill network. Disconnect. Erase. She closed her eyes. Terminate.
Just embers flickering, and then – darkness.
© Stephanie Lay, July 2024
About this story
NYC Midnight runs regular writing challenges of varying lengths, but I was particularly drawn to their 500-word call in July 2024. Their challenges allocate writers a genre, an action and an object and you then have 48 hours to come up with a word story in that genre, which has to prominently feature the action and the object. My prompts were a science fiction story, to include bulletproof glass and the action of barging in. My submission was highly commended, but didn’t make it through to the final shortlist so I’m sharing it here.
Science fiction is way outside my comfort zone, but it was Jef’s absolute favourite genre to read. My story attempted to honour the joy he took from sci-fi stories, and is based on an idea that he had several years ago – what would it be like to be the first truly self-aware artificial agent? The story’s title also spells out Jef’s initials.
The featured image was created in Microsoft co-pilot, from a prompt that included the story text, and a photograph of me.