Terminal

“At some point the lack of understanding is really going to have real world consequences…. If we start using these AIs to model actual weather, or the energy grid, or something, and it keeps giving us recommendations on what to do and we don’t understand it, at some point, this is going to cause a real problem.”

– Terence Tao, October 2026

1.

Beyond the window, an automated billboard advertised a new brand of confectionery goods that, it emphasized, were generated by the latest Melisseus models that, Reese considered, were likely the same models that had made the news for reinventing an ancient chocolate recipe. Below it, citizens ambled about with screens or pads in their hands next to automated street cleaners and automated vehicles under a perfectly tuned and controlled traffic grid. As he always did during his break, he couldn’t help but wonder, just for a second, how many of them had gone into some form of administration, as he had, and how many of them had simply chosen not to take up any profession at all.

A quiet alert ping vibrated across Reese’s pad, the third one this week. He scowled into the screen and dismissed the notification before retreating from the window. “What are they doing over in the financial division?”

Knudsen, already packing a bag with diagnostic tools, overheard him. “I got it, too. Looks like a pair Deneb models glitched out and cornered half of the S&P.” The older man scowled at one of the pads he retrieved from a nearby drawer, noticing its age. “The engineer in charge of most of those Deneb agents is Angela. Let’s go take a look.”

“Go?” Reese slipped through a few tabs on his pad. “Can’t we manage it from here?”

“Third time in a week,” Knudsen said. “Doesn’t that seem odd? We’ll pop our head in and check the equipment. It’s probably just a problem with her terminal.” Knudsen packed his bag and looked over at him. “Besides, you’ve been here for a few months now, right? It’s time to meet the engineers.”

“I’m still just a junior systems administrator.”

“Doesn’t hurt to see what you’ll be promoted into.” They passed other workstations and wove between the bustle of the office floor as they made their way to the elevator. He could sense Reese’s unease. “What’s wrong, nervous?”

“Yeah. A little.”

The pair left the floor by elevator, dropping several floors until they reached the subterranean levels. Knudsen spoke during the descent.

“They don’t tell you much about the engineers in school, do they?”

“Only the very basics. A lot of it is classified, so they tell us we have to learn much of it on the job if we ever end up having to work with them directly.” Reese watched the floor meter tick by slower as the subterranean levels were quite a bit taller than those above ground. “Basically, Cayley’s Syndrome neurologically debilitates them sometime during puberty or early adulthood, causing anomalies that we have no treatment for. But it accelerates their thinking. They’re ideal subjects for managing and checking the large language models that run civilization.”

“I’m glad you did the reading,” Knudsen said. “And it’s mostly right, except for the bit about the treatment. Accurate enough, though.” The elevator ceased its descent and Knudsen waved his access card across the small panel, letting the doors open into a well-lit but desolate and metal lined hallway. At school, Reese had been taught that many miles of such corridors existed under the various administrative buildings in these cities, but only senior administrators, be they technicians or medical personnel, were granted the authorization to traverse them.

“My clearance isn’t enough to be down here,” Reese said.

“Not alone, no. But you’re here to observe.” Knudsen spoke with an underlying tiredness that he often used to disguise some sort of contempt he held for his job. “I’d only been with the outfit for two months before my mentor did the same for me. Ended up promoted to the lower rung of senior administration before the end of the year, thanks to it. Was great for my career.” He flicked the access card on his lanyard with a flippant disdain. “This way, we have to go to C block. That’s where our building keeps the financial department crew.”

Reese kept pace with the older man, observing how the hallways seemed laid out in a large, perfect grid. Colored stripes on the walls indicated where one block began and the other ended, alongside a letter and number designation.

“Although it’s frowned upon due to security reasons, it would be a good idea to get yourself a map of these floors so you can memorize their layouts,” Knudsen said. “Junior administrators don’t typically have access to it, but I should still have my old ones laying around somewhere. Twenty five blocks deep, ten wide, three floors. Our facility is one of the smaller ones, fortunately. But even still, wherever you’re assigned, you’ll only have to deal with problems in a handful of blocks. In our unit’s case, just twenty or so, as you’ve probably noticed. Unfortunately, several of them are in finance, which is severely understaffed at the moment.”

When they reached C block, Knudsen took a left turn and went past about five armored doors until he came to the one he was apparently looking for. The room had a numerical designation engraved into the metal next to the door, under which a plaque had been mounted that read in an embossed, serif font, Tiger Lily – Angela.

“I didn’t expect it to look so much like a prison,” Reese said.

“The armor is for environmental reasons. In case of fire or, less likely, flooding. Didn’t they go over this in school?” Knudsen flashed his card across an access panel and the door hissed, wheezed, and slowly slid open.

“We went over a lot of software and interface stuff, but very little on the engineers themselves.” Reese tried to peer inside, but the room was very dimly lit by a lone red light. Inside, the cool, sterilized air circulated about in the confined space, accompanied by the soothing hum of digital equipment. In the darkness, green, blue and red blips of small lights on server racks flickered like tiny lighthouses in the dark, too dim to even cast shadows. Reese found himself so struck by the age of the technology that his gaze had passed over the large chair positioned directly beneath the large cybernetic column that extended up into the ceiling and down into the floor like an artificial tree, covered in panels, wires, various displays, and several main viewing monitors. The chair more resembled a hospital stretcher, or an iron lung, than something suited for an office. It totally concealed any glimpse of an occupant from the door.

“Pop quiz, Reese. How many engineers are assigned per mainframe down here? They had to cover at least that much.”

“One mainframe per block, and anywhere between six to twenty-four engineers per mainframe,” Reese said. He lowered his voice as he entered the cell.

“That’s the architectural theory, at least. Specific configurations vary, of course.” Knudsen stepped in behind Reese and closed the door. “There’s no need to lower your voice. The engineers are deaf.” Noticing Reese’s surprise, Knudsen continued. “They can see and feel, some of them can apparently taste, or claim they can, but that’s likely a consequence of their natural synesthesia. Likewise for smell. But they’re all deaf and they’re all extremely sensitive to motion. I’d thought this was common knowledge among administrators, but I guess they keep more information classified than I’d realized.”

“You went to school for this too, though. What did they teach you about them?”

Knudsen moved under the red light to an access panel on the column near the floor. “After this long on the job, you forget everything you ever learned in school,” he said. He opened his bag and pulled out his screwdriver set and went to work opening a panel.

Reese squatted down next to him, looking up at the main monitors. A dizzying display of colors and lines, particles suspended in invisible matrices, and what seemed to him beautiful but otherwise random cascades of colors he had a hard time properly identifying whirled, phased, pulsed, and sprinted about, as if it were a maze or kaleidoscope.

“It’s a rendering of what goes on in there.” Knudsen grunted as he pulled the panel free and set it to the side. “They’re dealing with four- or five-dimensional matrices of information at any given time, remember.” Knudsen pulled out one of his several diagnostic tools and fished for a port on the computer to shove the cable into. “They see through it like we see through those old three dimensional illusion posters, but instead of crossing their eyes, they do something else. I don’t know how it works, honestly. Nobody except they do, I guess. Being plugged in probably helps. Anyway,” he scowled as he found one of the ports, seeing some minor corrosion on the outside of it. “Let’s hope this problem is with the terminal and not with the user.”

“Terminals we can fix, but the engineers are harder to come by,” Reese said. “I remember hearing that a lot in school.”

“Every system administrator’s nightmare is encountering a problem with an engineer. But, eventually, every system administrator does.” Knudsen acknowledged his underling’s study as he navigated the BIOS that flickered to life on his diagnostic pad. “Reese, call one of this block’s medics and have him on standby outside. Get ready to call him in if we need to.”

“Can’t we just bring him in here?”

“No, medics hate being in here. Only bring him in if there’s something wrong.” As Knudsen looked through his pad, Reese let his eyes wander over both the terminal and the engineer who lay in the chair hooked into it. From where he sat, he couldn’t see much of dark figure, as a darker helmet obscured any view of the person’s face, but the formfitting bodysuit indicated the figure was quite diminutive: Under five and a half feet tall, Reese guessed, and probably only sixty or seventy pounds.

“The suits they wear are for what, environmental regulation?”

“That’s part of it. It’s loaded with sensors, too, and it’s reactive.” Knudsen scowled at his pad. “They probably don’t teach you this in school, but the engineers use their entire body to interface with the network. We use fast twitch muscles in our fingers and wrists to use a keyboard, right? Imagine that, except the entire interior of the suit is wired to almost every muscle in your body. Every twitch or spasm a different keystroke, any number of combinations to return any number of results. They have a whole different kind of language in there.”

“They don’t cover any of this in school.” Reese tried to tilt his head to get a better view of the engineer’s figure, but too much interfered.

“You’d think by now they would,” Knudsen said. “Is that medic around?”

“He’s outside. What’s wrong?”

“I can’t find anything out of the ordinary with the terminal.” He pulled and, failing, yanked at the diagnostic cable where it had gotten stuck in the port. It came free with a loud click. “There are a few of the typical localized system failures, but nothing catastrophic and nothing the engineer can’t naturally account for.” Knudsen left the panel open and, motioning for Reese to move, he flipped a hinged covering on the side of the chair to reveal a similar port. “I’m going to check to see if it’s something with the chair or the suit. Let’s hope that’s the case. Otherwise, it means it’s something with her.”

“Her.”

“Yes. Don’t you remember? Have a little respect.” He again squinted at his diagnostic pad before shaking his head. “Damn.” Knudsen disconnected the cord and repacked his equipment before retrieving a different unit with a very different, shorter cord. It resembled a hose. “Well,” he said, giving Reese a tired look. “What did I say about every system administrator’s nightmare?”

Reese looked at the engineer’s still form as a slow dread slid across his skin in light, cold sweat.

Knudsen continued. “I’ll try to read her mind link and take her vitals before we do anything else. Here, you should watch.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me; you won’t learn much. I just want someone to share the headache with.”

“…Thanks.”

Reese pulled back away as Knudsen set to work repositioning himself on the floor from under the terminal to sitting upright next to the engineer. With a mild groan of discomfort, he reached up with the hose and tapped at a flimsy covering on the underside of the engineer’s head before gently, as if removing a living bottle cap, pulled open a metal port implanted there. With deliberate, ginger motions, he screwed in place the hose before flicking a clip against the port. At the other end of the hose lay another port that he affixed to the diagnostic pad, holding it up and, with a clamp, mounting it to the engineer’s chair so as to limit, Reese presumed, any movement of the hose.

“I’d been taught that systems administrators never interface directly with engineers.”

Knudsen nodded. “They’re right. When they say ‘directly,’ they mean ‘directly.’ This pad interfaces with her, we interface with the pad.” He dismissed a few messages on the pad. “How would we interface with them, anyway? They can’t speak or hear and they can hardly move, and we don’t have any of these ghastly ports in our heads.” He adjusted a few settings as he prepared to sync the pad to the engineer. “The engineers are certainly capable of directly porting to each other, but a sys admin has to hook them up. Usually there’s no need. They’re in constant contact with one another through the terminals, anyway.”

The pad’s screen flickered and then went dead. Knudsen cursed as it had to restart. “Outdated garbage.” He sighed and waited. “The only reason to get engineers to talk directly to each other is to eliminate what little latency exists between the terminal connections. In my time here, I’ve only seen that done once and it was a last resort.”

“What happened?”

“Happened about, what. Fifteen years ago, now. This technology was still quite new at the time, and there were still places in the net that the models could hide in. Anyway, some group of agents glitched out and nearly launched part of the country’s nuclear arsenal.”

“I think I remember that. I was just a kid, though.”

Knudsen sat back and looked up at the display monitors on the terminal. “Watching the senior admins hook some of these guys up in parallel… that was the longest, tensest five minutes in probably all of history. But, somehow, they fixed the problem.” As he spoke, he opened his bag a little wider and pulled out a pair of VR visors. He handed one of them over to Reese.

“How?”

“Only they would know.” The pad’s reboot had completed. “No one really knows what these engineers are. Other than… obviously, human. Ah, the pad’s working again. Alright, get this headgear on; I’m setting the pad to dual interface. Give my pad access to the visor.”

Reese did so and, were it not for the cool floor beneath him and the metal wall against his back, he’d have felt the world fall away. Virtual experience in digital space always made him motion sick. Rather than next to him, he heard Knudsen’s voice, simulated for convenience as a compressed radio transmission, come over his earpiece.

“I’ve got you set as an observer, so there’s nothing you can do. Just, well, it’s hard to explain. You know how digital space works. Listen to what I’m doing by interior sense, because all you’re going to see is a ton of visual and auditory noise.”

The last time Reese had put on a headset, he had been nineteen and slogging through the practical lab portions of an advanced administration course. The way the manual described them, they process digitized data and use visual and auditory stimulation to transmit data deep into frontal cortex, likening the mechanism to subliminal processing. His instructor for the course had called it “hypnosis on fast-forward, by about a thousand.” What it meant in practice: a wall of apparently random visual noise in every direction, inescapable, and colored noise in both ears. And if a user closed his eyes, he’d be out of contact with whatever he was linking to, which would defeat the point. “You have to keep your eyes and ears open,” his professor had said, “for the same reason you have to sit in the driver’s seat of a car. Closing your eyes is like jumping out of the car.”

Every time he wore that visor, he’d get a headache that lasted for a week.

“Doing this in a computer is much simpler than on an engineer,” Knudsen said. “Well, I mean, of course it is. You didn’t need me to say that. When I send the ping out, I’ll be turning off audio contact. From then on, you’ll have to feel what I do. Intuition and all that, you’ve done the training. But try to pay attention to how I operate. It won’t take long. Like I said, it’s a lot different than doing this to a computer, even one of the mainframe networks. We’ll be out of there in under a minute. Two, tops.”

“That’s pretty fast.”

“These are engineers, Reese. Not machines. Any longer than that and my pad will fry. We’d get brain damage. Didn’t they cover this in school?” Knudsen seemed to laugh. The phrase had started to become a refrain.

“Syncing with an engineer was never covered in school, no.” Reese thought back to his classes on the subject a little harder. “In fact, the subject was avoided altogether. I don’t think the instructors believed it was possible.”

“I doubt that, but. Well, as they say. If you can’t do, you teach.” Knudsen finished his calibrations. “Anyway, time to ping. Going dark.”

The simulated sound of compressed radio went silent, replaced by the noise. The familiar solitude of the digital sync now all around him, Reese felt rather than saw or heard the ping go out, and as soon as it did, he again felt, as if his heart had dropped into his guts, the moment the pad made contact with the engineer. And at once, as if being dragged under a rogue wave, disorientation came upon him worse than any dive he’d been trained on before. The cold metal wall against his back and the floor beneath his legs seemed farther away now than the infernal noise; he didn’t even see it anymore but it danced, surged and assaulted deep within his mind, a place so deep that it lay far behind normal vision and there in that dark imagination besieged as if in Hell he felt inclinations toward one thing and then another very distant thing, as if parts of his mind moved one way and then another, and slowly these movements formed patterns almost like images, sound-images, movement-images, always indistinct but coaxed out from the noise the way one coaxes an animal out of hiding. As soon as Reese felt he had come to nearly discern these intuitive movements, the noise at once fell back, far back, far away, back the way it had come, moving past his eyes again this time falling in front of sight where it belonged against the inside of the visor, and then the visor softened and the noise faded back to the loud, now welcoming background hum of the facility. Cold returned to his back. The floor returned to his legs. In those quiet numb moments between the end of the dive and lucidity, he pulled off his mask.

Knudsen already had his off, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. Beside him, the pad’s interface returned to the welcome screen. Knudsen seemed to groan. Then the pain surged in as a tide pushes ever inward in the evenings, pulsing into Reese’s head one throb of his heartbeat at a time.

“Here,” Knudsen said. He reached into his pack and pulled out a pair of pills. “Take one of these. It won’t kill the headache but you’ll be able to think through it, at least.” He popped the other one and went about disconnecting the pad.

“What was…”

“Don’t try to talk for a few minutes,” he said. “She’s in bad shape. We’ll need the medic.” He groaned and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I can’t wait until you’re all caught up on these procedures, so I never have to do them again.” As the painkiller kicked in, Reese thought he heard a slight tremor under the man’s voice, but he might have imagined it.

The door hissed open and the medic, whose red uniform dissolved to white under the red light, stepped into the chamber. He looked over the wincing men on the ground and then at Knudsen’s pad.

“You dived her mind link?”

“She’s in a lot of trouble.” One of the displays mounted to the chair began to chirp. It looked like a heart monitor, or one for breathing. “Reese, the button up there. That pale one. It’s amphetamine. The system regulates it according to the engineer’s needs, but we have authority to override. Dump ten milligrams into her, now.”

“Ten milligrams?” His eyes flashed to the medic who nodded. The medic’s gaze trailed across Reese’s access card.

“Are you supposed to be down here?”

“Observation,” Knudsen said. “We’re here because of the financial crisis.” Reese hit the button and the chirps on the screen seemed to stabilize. He shook his head, baffled.

The medic looked back down at the diagnostic pad. “What did you find?”

“The syndrome. I think it’s effects have reached her occipital lobe.” The tremble in Knudsen’s tone now carried with it some obvious deep regret or fear. “But it can’t be, I had to have made a mistake. She’s too young for that. She’s only twelve.”

Frowning over the pad’s readings, he nodded. “That is quite fast,” he said, but before he could finish his thought, the figure on the bed started to twitch and the bed monitor began chirping again. Reese could hear strained breathing from under the helmet.

“She’s going into hypovolemic shock,” the medic said. His voice raised in urgency. “I’m not sure I can stabilize her. She needs more attention. We’ll take her to medical.”

“Reese. Another ten milligrams of amphetamine.”

The medic corrected him. “Make it fifteen.” He turned his head to speak into the receiver clipped to his shoulder and called ahead to the fifth subterranean floor. A pair of medics arrived as he did so, shuffling Knudsen aside and disconnecting the places where the bed directly interfaced with the mainframe terminal.

The medic turned to Knudsen with a cold tone. “What sort of recession are we facing if she dies?”

“Bad, but manageable. Likely the same one we’ll be in when she recovers,” Knudsen said. “She’ll be able to work while she recovers, right?”

The medic gave Knudsen a strained, confused glare. “Look at your own diagnostic. She’ll be lucky to keep her life over the next few hours.”

Gently, one of the medics removed the helmet that obscured the girl’s face and for the first time, Reese stared down at the engineer he had unknowingly worked with, to some degree, all summer. Hair so blonde it reflected the red light as if it glowed, neatly trimmed, crowned the face of a girl who looked no older than eight. Unmoving pupils dilated where no color of iris bordered it, staring up against the ceiling and drenched in the low red light. She trembled quietly under the red light. Reese would have missed that were it not for a single gland of sweat on her brow. A quiet, agonized desperation.

The medics pulled the bed out on unseen wheels and whisked it out of the room. Knudsen leaned against the cold wall, his shirt soaked with freezing sweat, and shook his head.

“Nightmare,” he said, under his breath. “Every system administrator’s nightmare.” He crouched down and replaced the items he’d pulled from his bag, pausing with a short curse. “They took one of my diagnostic pads. I never unplugged it from the bed.” Shaking his head again, he moved over to replace the panel on the terminal, but his fingers shook too violently to get the screws aligned. He cursed again.

“Reese,” he said. “Could you?”

2.

“The people in charge, of course, thought these programs were basically real people.” His voice carried from the front of the class all the way to the back rows of the modest lecture hall. Before him, about a hundred students in their first year of a systems administration degree sat in varying postures of attention or boredom, some taking notes, tapping away on personal keyboards, or gazing off into space as the dust glinting in the afternoon sun caught their eyes.

“Things were different at the time,” Charles continued, running a hand through his thick hair. “Artificial Intelligence had reached new plateaus. The models gained complexity at alarming rates, and governments were throwing billions, trillions of dollars at them every year. The whole world, imagine it, locked in a race not of arms or nuclear proliferation, as in decades past, but in computational power and calculation possibilities.”

A student coughed. One of the girls in the front row stared at him a bit more intently than he liked. “And after more than a century of literature, philosophy and engineering in particular, reducing the human being to a complex machine. It’s not a surprise that they’d believe they could create some form of sentience whose body was made of capacitors and whose thoughts were combinatorials of increasing complexity. We know better now, of course, but it took Singularity Day to change the world for all of that.”

He turned back to the white board and took a clandestine glance at his watch. The period approached its end. He continued.

“Every high schooler can tell us the date of Singularity Day, and most of you should be able to tell me even the exact order of events. The coordinated leak of lab grown models, the chaos inflicted upon defense systems, financial systems, healthcare. Voting systems. Overnight, society transformed. After a month, the world was unrecognizable.

“Singularity. The word. Which of you can tell me what that meant before the machines took over?” Charles threw a pointed finger at his audience. No hands raised. He pointed a girl in the front row who gazed back with a frozen and disoriented wide-eyed stare. Dissatisfied, he pointed at a guy toward the back, who shook his head and shrugged. Finally, a low voice off to the side spoke up.

“The transhumanists used it a century ago.” Charles darted his gaze over to the young man. “They used it in eschatological terms, imagining we’d be able to upload our minds into computers and live forever.”

“I’m glad you did the reading,” Charles said. “Correct enough. But the press being what it is, they grabbed onto the idea and changed its meaning into something more digestible, keeping its eschatological aspect. The giving over of all power, all society, all labor and service, all product and profit, distribution, every means of measuring society, to the machines. Not to intelligences or persons, but to the machines.” The bell rang. Charles relaxed, glad to have survived another lecture, and the students sheathed their keyboards where they had any and replaced their pads back into their cases, rising and filtering out the pair of doors in either the front or back of the hall. He stopped when he saw the one young man who had spoken up earlier.

“Mister Lowery.” He paused at Charles’ call.

“Mister Charles.”

“Did you choose your career path, yet?”

“Not yet.”

Charles scowled a little at that. “You’re a bit old to be in this class. This is meant for first years, not someone who should be staring his internship in the face.”

“The education administrators told me I needed this class to graduate.”

“What a waste of time.”

Lowery didn’t seem to be capable of chuckling, but his solemn nod sufficed. “I mean this without any offense, but I couldn’t agree more.”

*

On Sunday morning, Charles drained the last of his morning coffee and propped his feet up on the hassock. A room away, his wife cleaned the breakfast dishes while their daughter pawed at something on the floor in the living room.

He watched Angela stop what she had been doing and lay down on the floor. Her limbs twitched as she gazed up at the ceiling, eyes glassy. A low groan, not of pain but of some other expression that Charles had no way of categorizing, eased from her throat as if a soft gust from a bellows. She lay there, gently twitching against the carpet for a minute or two, expressionless and in imitation of death, frightening, before rolling onto her side and trembling a bit more. He went to her side, knowing from experience now that should he touch her, she would scream. Instead, he just sat next to her in silent company. Then, just as mysteriously as it started, she ceased trembling, sat up, and returned to her play.

The following day, the medical administrator arrived. For Angela, it had been a good day so far. She had interfaced with her pad. She had played with several of the new automated agents. Then, in her own broken language, she told her father she had spoken with them and gotten them to do what they were supposed to do. She told him that she understood their language, their way of doing things, and then, with a sinking horror, he realized she was, in her own way, explaining the manner in which the machines operated both within themselves and when placed at odds against each other, explaining the microcosm of the system that her pad interfaced with as if it were as simple as describing how a model ship was put together.

“She has it, doesn’t she?”

The medical administrator nodded, watching the young girl from the other room. The kitchen’s ceiling fan made slow circles above them as Charles tried to drink a glass of water to settle his nerves. The woman from the administration spoke with careful, precise words clearly practiced from a long career in the service.

“Yes, she does.” She paused for a moment, but before she could respond, Charles shook his head, holding it in his hands.

“She was so bright. But. But she.” He struggled to find words. “It’s so obvious, isn’t it? She’s only three. She’s barely potty-trained.”

“She is younger than the usual candidate,” she said.

“Can I get a second opinion?”

“Of course.”

*

“I still haven’t decided.”

Lowery arrived right at the start of Charles’ office hour and, unsurprised at his visit, Charles invited him inside. A lone student’s seat stood before an unimposing minimalist desk with a computer on it. Charles shimmied around the desk to his own chair.

“You’re smart enough for either route,” Charles said. “Think of it this way. If you like dealing with the digital stuff, the machinery, poking wires and running diagnostics on things without pulses, then go into systems. It’s quiet, and at first, perhaps less rewarding, but it’s a sprawling field with a lot of opportunity for both hands-on maintenance and very dynamic research.” Lowery nodded. “If, on the other hand, you’d rather get your hands dirty and care after our people down there that actually run these things, then go into medical.”

“The engineer system,” Lowery said. “That’s just it. That’s what I’m curious about the most, but it seems like what I want is something that can be studied on either side of that.”

“The engineer system, yes. My dissertation is on exactly that. It’s given me access to the belly of the beast. At least the part of it we have here.”

“Probably a lot of stuff down there you can’t talk about,” Lowery said. Charles shrugged.

“Specifics are classified, but much of it isn’t. There’s little need for secrecy since everything is monitored and automated these days. Antisocial individuals are indexed off into appropriate settings automatically.” He leaned back in his office chair, tapping a few things on a nearby pad before putting on a piece of music. “What about the engineers interests you? Their brains or how they interface with the AI?”

“Both.” Lowery’s gaze drifted to the desktop. “How the engineers are able to mentally process dealing with the AI networks, make corrections, analyze,” he said. “Analyze that volume of data. Just to keep the models on track… the mental fortitude and calculation alone are hard to wrap my head around.”

“The Cayley Syndrome helps, at the expense of almost everything else. And even with the psychological imbalances that result from the Syndrome, they still need an overpowered cocktail of amphetamines to keep their adrenaline stimulated.” Charles’ voice had started to drift into a more distant tone. “The first documented case of the Cayley Syndrome coincided with Singularity Day. I don’t know how common this knowledge is, but a twenty-five year old came down with sudden, severe symptoms on the same day as the lab leak. He was apparently one of the technicians that worked with them prior to the outbreak. His last words before going mute were to keep him near the lab’s mainframe. He died after just a few days, but in that time, without speaking or hearing anything, he’d produced the designs for the first terminals. The suits came a bit later.”

Lowery listened and nodded. The silence after the instructor’s short speech gave room for the music to fall between them. It played quietly on unseen speakers. Charles perked up and looked over at him.

“Ever heard this before?”

“It sounds familiar.”

“It’s Mendelssohn. If you’ve been up at the concert halls any time in the past year, they’ve played it a few times. But, here. Check this out.” He hit another tab and the music changed. Mendelssohn’s composition continued as some other piece of music rose alongside it, seemed to interpose it, as if two distinct and unrelated compositions interacted with each other in a dizzying form of counterpoint.

“What is this?”

“It’s the same piece by Mendelssohn, but now one of Bach’s works is right alongside it.”

“That should just sound like noise,” Lowery said. His brow furrowed. “I’m sorry, I’m not that familiar with—”

“No, you’re right.” Charles smirked. “Normally, you’d be exactly right. It would just sound like noise. But what she did was modulate, apparently by intuition, these compositions, and massage their timing just enough that it’s almost as if the pieces converse with each other. Listen to that. It’s like music in three dimensions. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

“She?”

Charles put the pad back down and let the music continue as a quiet undercurrent in the office. “My daughter Angela did this last week. She’s three. This morning, when I left for work, she was playing around, doing this to not just two pieces of music, but five.”

Lowery’s look of interest darkened a bit. He suddenly averted his gaze. “That’s…” he started to say, but he had no words.

“I know,” Charles said, after a moment of silence. “I thought I’d share this with you, first. The medical administration has already been notified. We’ll be seeing a second doctor to make sure.” His tone grew cooler the more he spoke. “But, I mean,” he gestured to the ceiling, as if trying to point at the music. “This makes it pretty clear, doesn’t it?”

“Cayley’s Syndrome manifesting in one so young.” Lowery shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

Charles shook his head again. “It’s not anyone’s fault.” He turned his chair to look out of the office window. “I try to think of it as a blessing. She’ll do more good in her life than I ever will.”

They sat in silence for another minute as the movement passed. Then he watched Lowery stand up with a deliberate slowness and look out the same window. “Thank you,” he said. “I think I’ve made my decision.”

Charles watched from his window as Lowery left the building, a quick saunter passing the sidewalk as the sun sank a little further down. The music approached its end, at once both climbing and descending toward one last chord that, Charles noted, resolved in heartbreak.

*

“She’ll be treated well.”

“What program?”

The administrator paused before looking down at his pad. “Black Iris,” he said.

“Black Iris Angela.”

The administrator nodded, considering it as if in abstract.

“We’ll need your print here to finalize the approval. You’re free to ride with her to the facility, if you’d like, but after that, it’ll be a few days before you’ll be able to see her again.” The administrator handed over a pad with a small square for his thumb. Charles paused for a moment, looking over at Angela laying motionless on the carpet, her body vibrating again in an almost imperceptible shimmer. Then he grit his teeth and pressed into the pad.

“Thank you, Mister Knudsen. We’ll do everything we can for her.” The administrator stashed the pad back in his bag and offered a handshake. “This process isn’t easy for anyone, except maybe the subjects themselves.”

“They have enough going on in their heads.”

The administrator nodded, clearly unsure of what to say. “They’re very special people,” he said. “And we remember every single one of them.”

Knudsen tried to imagine or process or just understand what the administrator was saying. They were things he’d heard since he was a child, rote explanations he himself lectured to students as an academic assistant, platitudes that while hardly empty barely seemed to scratch the surface of the system they served. But his body had frozen in place.

“I feel like I’ve signed her death sentence.”

“The syndrome is their death sentence.” The administrator looked over at him, and, noticing how Charles had darkened, he reached out to grip the man’s trembling forearm. “This is the best life she’ll lead. She’ll be,” he started to say the word ‘comfortable,’ but then he stopped. Something else caught his words, and he let go. “She’ll be alright, man.”

“Yeah. I know.”

3.

“Tiger Lily Angela.” Doctor Lowery read off the time of death. “Young, even for an engineer. What a shame.”

“It’s hard to stomach, sometimes.” Knudsen stood beside the bed, pale, deep bags under his eyes.

Lowery watched his gaze flicker over the dead’s face. He swallowed his words before he moved about the small room retrieving some pads and shutting down monitors. He let Knudsen stay in his solitude as he disconnected the equipment. Then Knudsen spoke.

“She was twelve.”

“Yes, twelve.” Lowery peered over at the still man in the room. He nodded but said nothing else. “Your Angela, the Black Iris. How old was she?”

“Fourteen. But that was a long time ago.”

Lowery finished packing up the things left in the Tiger Lily Angela’s room, where her corpse lay in the bed vacant gaze cast against the ugly metal ceiling of the medical wing. He looked again at Knudsen and braced himself, grasping the side of his arm and nodding.

“It’s time to go.”

Knudsen looked at him. “Some of them,” he said. “They get to be kids, even if they’re robbed of the rest of their lives. Others, like her. They don’t even get to be kids.”

Lowery looked down at the corpse still sealed inside of the suit that had harbored her for most of her life.

The doctor shook his head. “Let’s get dinner tomorrow evening. I’ll block out time. And here,” he wrote a short note on a pad and sent it to Knudsen’s account. “I’ve talked to administration. Take a few days off work. Rest up. You look terrible.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

*

Reese met Knudsen outside the door of the medical wing. Knudsen returned his silent gaze with a nod. It had been the same for the past week.

“We’re preparing arrangements for her funeral.”

Reese dropped his eyes and, although he hadn’t said anything, seemed to go even quieter. Only the low hum of the building’s air system sounded between the pair. Knudsen started to move and Reese, a pace behind him, followed.

“Did you know her well?”

Knudsen gave him an uneasy look but shook his head. “Nobody ever knows an engineer very well.” The medical wing was only a short walk to an access elevator that would take them back up to the surface. “When I was assigned to these blocks as a senior systems administrator, I took the time to memorize all of the engineers’ names, and I did what I could to look into their backgrounds. Even as just a junior administrator, you should do the same.” Lights in the hall passed like the tick of a slow metronome. “It’s easy to treat these people like furniture, or like the machines they’re tasked with corralling and correcting. But they’re not. They’re human beings, people, somewhere in there. They can’t move. But somewhere in there.”

He tapped his access card against the elevator panel and after a few moments, the doors opened. “She was the youngest engineer in this block,” he said. “She was brought into the Tiger Lily program at age five. Not the youngest to ever have Cayley symptoms manifest, but certainly on the earlier side of that scale.” The chamber began its ascent. “You should come to the funeral. I’ll notify you when I get a date.”

“That reminds me,” Reese said. “While I was in school, the labs were working on artificial super-networked intelligence. Something about moving away from the engineer system and figure out how to get the machines to regulate themselves with greater reliability.”

“I’ve read a few of their papers.” Knudsen stared at the subterranean digit as it ascended. “Impressive stuff, but nothing developed enough to implement. I think the research hit a wall in the last couple years.”

“Do you think the idea is tenable?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Why?”

Reese watched the counter as the ground floor approached. Knudsen’s expression still hadn’t changed much.

“What would happen to the engineers?” Knudsen’s brow furrowed, but Reese continued after a brief pause. “I mean, I suppose it’s possible they’d have found a cure for Cayley’s Syndrome by then.”

But Knudsen shook his head. Fatigue colored his tone. “We’ll need engineers for as long as we have a society run by machines. And nobody is going to let that go away.” The elevator slowed as it approached the ground floor. “My guess, if they ever crack super-networks. I don’t know. It’ll mean that much more demand placed on their shoulders. We’ll just be wearing them out faster.”

Outside, Knudsen watched the automatic cars cruise up and down the wide clean boulevard maintained by the automatic street sweepers and the automatic garbage collectors. Above him, plastered to the side of the building, an automated report of the financial recession played, warning of automatic price increases due to a mild bug in the artificial network that managed the economy. He flagged down an automatic car and took off toward home.

*

They stood in the metal enclosure. The priest next to the metal tomb read out words from his book of prayers, eyes too-wide in the dim enclosure, operating as if automated until his reading ceased, and with slow organic movements, he sent holy water spattering against the coffin before it sank with mechanical lurches beneath the floor. From there, unseen rails carried it to a final resting place in the enormous crypt beyond the glass: a wall of the dead all stored in metal boxes emblemized with each a unique name and their program designation. The occupants of the little burial room watched the coffin’s automated travel toward a far corner, sinking then silently into a space prepared for it long ago and from there, never to move again.

With unblinking eyes, the priest concluded the graveside service and stood like a stone gargoyle off to one side as the few visitors recited their own private graveside words. Knudsen tried to make himself smaller but that was impossible. The parents of the departed Angela finally stood and left, pausing for a moment to look at him. The woman placed a hand on his forearm. “Thank you for looking after her.” Knudsen nodded, not knowing what else to do. Only words of denial came to mind.

He kept his mouth shut, but he nodded. She nodded back, as did the man. They left.

The priest watched the couple depart. With wide eyes, he turned to Knudsen and then to Reese and Doctor Lowery. Then his eyes faltered. Without blinking, he looked down at the metal floor and then he turned back at the metal internment facility, tracing one of the interfaces in that room up where it met the ceiling like a molded throat, and, gripping his Roman Rite tight in one hand, he turned back.

“Gentlemen,” he said, nodding. Never had he blinked the entire time. And then he left.

Reese watched him go. Knudsen stared at the burial chamber, and then past it, through the glass where the rest of the tombs lay in rows and columns deep underground. Then he followed, as did the doctor. Reese paused for a moment, staring up at the great mausoleum beyond the glass, first in some attempt to collect and extend what sorrow he felt necessary for the girl now resting in the stacks, and then, recalling the horror of the brain dive a week earlier, that sorrow turned to frighted wonder. He took a short, steadying breath, looking one last time through the window, and turned to leave.

#