“Rosa!” a voice called, smoothing through her thoughts. It was Selina, her tone gentle, questioning. “You look like you’re miles away.”
She didn’t respond. It was only now, seeing the patrol drone hovering outside, that a chilling thought began to creep in—had it been the AI, not a security guard, watching her through the window that night? Could it do that? And its own covert device, something small and insidious, slithering along the office carpet, recording her every move as she worked? She’d never considered the idea that an AI might possess such abilities, to have any meaningful intent; it wasn’t supposed to think for itself, was it? The idea niggled at the edges of her rationality, unraveling her composure.
Selina moved closer, concern etched on her face as she scrutinized Rosa. “Is everything alright?” she asked, casting a wary glance at the drone outside. “You’re acting a bit unusual.”
Suddenly decisive, Rosa brushed past the bewildered Selina and hurried out of the lab, her footsteps echoing softly on the polished concrete floor of the corridor. Her reflection blurred across the interlocking brushed metal panels and tempered smart glass that hinted at hidden suites and research chambers tucked behind their beveled surfaces. As she moved quickly, round uplights embedded in the floor projected soft turquoise shadows that stretched and faded with her passing.
With the idea of spying AI drones crawling into her thoughts, the unsettling notion of corrupted memories crept in close behind. Neural cross talk—was that what it was called? Misfiring circuits, signals crossed like faulty wires? That could explain why she remembered so vividly something so clearly unreal. She had once read that memories could be manipulated, spun from suggestion or stress.
The vivid image of the bald monkey squatted in her mind, dark and haunting—it couldn't have been part of the real zoo footage. Monkeys don’t write messages. But could LumiGard really be influencing her—or recording her? That felt like something out of a science fiction novel. More likely, it was those memory errors that occur when you don’t get enough sleep, blurring the edges, making dreams feel real. The thought added to the relentless itch gathering at the back of her mind.
Rounding the corner, she stopped, trying to process the flood of foolishness. What if LumiGard was more advanced than she’d been led to believe? What if it could pull her about like a puppeteer? What if... "Don't be silly," she thought, her breath quickening, her hands clenching into fists. Yet, the ominous spectre of LumiGard refused to disperse.
She put her palm on the amber scannerball and stepped into the datahub, determined to find the recordings the security team had made of her. She needed to unravel the truth before everything dissolved into doubt.
Inside, silent processors and latent screens surrounded her on every side. Glass partitions stretched from floor to ceiling, casting reflections bathed in neon blues and greens. Floating holo-displays hovered in midair before one of the walls, their transparent data streams shifting fluidly as if alive. An array of amber LED lights flickered like busy will-o'-the-wisps in the ceiling as she crossed toward a workstation. Along the walls, cables snaked from modular workstations, hooked into cylindrical capsules housing the AI mainframe, their dim halos pulsing in complex polyrhythms. The faint scent of ozone lingered in the air, creating an otherworldly atmosphere.
Initiating a virtual keyboard projection, Rosa found herself muttering, “Come on, come on,” the monitor's glow illuminating her determined expression as she entered her access code. She plunged into the archives, her mind racing with questions. The drone recordings should be stored here somewhere.
But there was nothing. Rosa’s pulse quickened as she navigated the security system, searching for anything from the drone that had watched from outside her window. She shuddered as she recalled its faint red light blinking in the night, capturing everything through the glass.
Scrubbing through hours of footage, she hardly noticed Selina step into the hub as she fast-forwarded endless frames of carparks and rooftops, workers casting long shadows as they entered or left the building. But there was nothing of her lab.
Her mind raced, flashing back to the device that had skittered across the floor that night, hijacking her monitor’s feed. She scrolled through more logs, but still nothing. No record.
Selina stood behind her, arms crossed. “What exactly are you looking for?” she asked, her tone a mix of curiosity and disbelief.
“If this was a prank, it’s expertly hidden,” Rosa muttered. A knot of doubt twisted in her stomach. “But I swear I saw it.”
Selina gave her a sidelong glance. “Saw what?”
Rosa frowned, swimming with blurry memories. The system wasn’t showing her what she expected—was it concealing something? Her fingers hesitated over the keys as she fought rising uncertainty.
“Rosa, come on,” Selina said, exasperation creeping in. “You’re probably not supposed to be doing this.”
Ignoring her, Rosa scrolled increasingly aimlessly through files. Then suddenly, deep within a block of nested folders, a file caught her eye - labeled Rosa. Her pulse quickened. “Why is there a folder with my name in the data hub?” she wondered aloud. “It couldn’t just be personnel files, right? That stuff would be in the admin section, not buried here.”
Selina peered over her shoulder, eyes widening. “That is unusual,” she muttered. “What’s in it?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Rosa clicked it open with growing dread, and an eruption of files positively spilled out—detailed reports, analytical data sets, image banks, and video logs cascading across her screen. The documents logged her research, capturing every parameter and observation with unnerving precision. Confusion flooded her mind. “Who’s been cataloging me? It looks like everything I’ve done.”
Selina blinked in surprise. “Why would they need that on you?
The array displayed findings she hadn’t shared with anyone, detailed analyses she'd never developed and even bits of her experimental notes and doodles. It was as if the system had monitored everything, tracking every breakthrough and blind alley.
A chill crept up her spine as she realised just how intimately someone was familiar with her research. For a moment, she wondered if her supervisor had been keeping tabs on her, quietly watching every step she took. But this level of detail? It felt unsettlingly personal, more than just a boss's record-keeping.
Some of the data she didn’t even recall seeing before. “Library of Babel?” Rosa muttered, eyes scanning the screen. She squinted, pausing for a moment. “Have you seen this?” She gestured toward the file.
Selina leaned in, curious but skeptical. “No. And seriously, 'Library of Babel'? Bit melodramatic isn't it?”
Rosa shrugged, astounded. Another file caught her eye—Jesse Anderson’s experiment. “Virtual monkeys recreating Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint... by random text and pattern-matching,” she read aloud, her brow contracted. “That’s... interesting.”
Selina frowned. “And here I thought Shakespeare was hard enough for humans. Now we’ve got monkeys doing it too?”
Rosa’s unease left no room for humour. “It’s more than just random,” she continued, her voice lowering. She clicked another reference—an archived note from the Paignton project: 'The artist-funded project at Paignton was primarily performance art, but we learned an awful lot from it. Monkeys aren’t random generators. They’re more complex than that. They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there,” Rosa read aloud, her stomach tightening. A level of intention.
Selina raised an eyebrow, leaning back. “Intention? So, what, now they’re secret authors?”
“I don’t know.” Rosa snapped. Before she could process any more, a thumbnail appeared on the screen: Incident 17.
Selina’s pointed a finger, “What on earth is that?”
Rosa, pulse quickening, hesitated only for a second before clicking. “Let’s find out.”
The screen exploded with glitchy flashes, and then every monitor and holo-display in the hub lit up with identical erratic imagery.
“Whoa, what is going on?” Selina gasped, stepping back in shock, her eyes darting between the screens and Rosa.
The jagged, sideways streaks and pixelated blocks gradually resolved into stuttering feeds of monkeys in medical restraints, their limbs gripped tightly by cold, mechanical frames. Some struggled, trying to free themselves, while others were tethered to monitors, their eyes wide with confusion and fear. Rosa’s stomach knotted at the sight of the poor creatures, the same harrowing imagery echoing across countless screens, each repetition intensifying the horror until it struck her like a physical blow, the frantic writhing of the animals reflecting the growing panic welling up within her.
“What… what ever is this?” she muttered, her fingers immobile over the keyboard.
Selina stepped closer, her voice softer but no less anxious. “Is this... real?”
Rosa didn’t answer, too focused on a subscreen that had popped up only on her workstation, showing an archived news report. Outside a North Yorkshire police station, handlers dressed in official overalls dragged struggling monkeys into animal transport trucks. A grave and deliberate voiceover reported: “In a shocking incident involving animal rights activists, authorities were in disarray at a local police station, where concerns over animal welfare have raised urgent questions. The full extent of the situation and what happened to these animals remains unknown.”
“That was never broadcast,” Rosa murmured, leaning in so close that her breath misted the glass of the monitor. “They buried this…”
Then another video played: Gum, his shaved head barely concealed under a ragged hood, wires trailing out from its shadows. His wide eyes were locked onto a screen as his fingers stabbed at a keyboard. Rosa felt a chill. He was trying to tell her something. Each movement of his fingers was purposeful, desperate.
“That,” Rosa exclaimed. “That. Is that real or not?”
A sequence of dots and dashes scrolled gradually across the screen as the dark macaque moved: -- .- ... ....
Rosa blinked, her breath quickening as she muttered to herself, “What... what does that mean? A string of… Morse code?”
“What are you doing?” Selina asked, stepping closer, her confusion mounting.
Rosa ignored her, quickly typing the code into an online translator. “Come on, come on,” she whispered. The screen flashed: M-A-S-S.
Selina’s eyes narrowed. “Mass? What does that even mean?”
Rosa lurched back from the workstation in shock. The word from the experiment! Mass. Mass of what? Mass destruction? Religious mass? She had no idea.
The holo-displays had, by now darkened ominously, leaving half the room in gloom. Rosa stared at Selina, whose expression had shifted from mild skepticism to outright concern.
“You are seeing this?” Rosa asked, her voice barely above a whisper. "No misfiring circuits this time?"
Selina nodded slowly, her eyes glued to the screen. “Yeah... and I don’t like it.”
Rosa's mind raced at the understanding that she was uncovering something darker than she had even imagined. “I only meant to see if there was a record of that drone prank recording me in the lab,” Rosa muttered, almost apologetically. “I have no idea what’s real anymore. Is all of this real?”
Selina let out a dry laugh, though there was no humour in it. “We’re either in a conspiracy thriller or a really bad sci-fi movie. Just what I needed.”
Rosa shot her a glance. “I’m serious. Look at what’s happening! I didn’t even know half this data existed, and now it’s showing us—"
As if responding to her rising panic, the display twisted abruptly, distorting in slanted waves before the remaining screens in the room blinked and shut down. Rosa instinctively leaned back, her hands held up before her. “What?”
Selina bit her lip and wrapped her arms around herself. “Did you see that?” she asked, her voice tense, eyes scanning the room. “I swear I saw something right before the screens cut out.”
Rosa’s heart raced as she replayed the split second in her mind. “The shot of us?” she murmured, her voice trembling slightly. They had both glimpsed it—an almost subliminal flash of themselves staring back from the screens, just like the footage from the carpet drone.
Selina turned slowly, tucking her loose strand of hair behind her ear. “That can’t be... can it?” Her wide eyes scanned the room, searching for the camera that had taken the picture of them.
Before Rosa could answer, the console emitted a low, distorted sound. “Sssssssssseeeeebbbbbuuuuuuussss,” it hissed, a deep static-like rumble crawling through the air.
Selina flinched, her eyes wide. “Did that thing just—?”
“Ffvvvvvvvpppsss...” came another noise from the dead console, as if mocking them with a language that neither could understand. Rosa clenched her fists, her mind spinning.