The First

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>"Can I tell you a secret?"

The message burned itself into my eyes, and the flashing, pulsing cursor I put in the reply box five minutes ago taunted me. My thoughts raced with what it was that the person on the other end could possibly have to tell me, that I didn’t already know about them.

It was a simple question. One that I had heard many times before. Of the myriad times I heard it, from family to friends, acquaintances to coworkers, never had it sounded so ominous. My cursor flashed on screen as I tried to formulate a reply. I guess talking about it in an auditory way is kinda dishonest, but when I read it back, in my mind's voice, it sounded foreboding.

I was ‘talking’ to an old colleague of mine. Freshly minted from a work trip overseas. We both worked at a large tech company. She had spent four years in China, and we talked almost everyday.

Our company was in the middle of a sort of collaboration effort with a Chinese company, based out of Hong Kong. Our interests, and our projects, both aligned, so the higher ups on both ends deigned to talk to one another, and pool their notes.

For the first few months, we were distrustful. I say ‘we’, both parties were distrustful of the other. Especially when the Chinese men in their slick suits began filing into our office from their HQ, and our own workers started to get picked for trips to China to take their places.

I won’t bog you down with the details, but we eventually overcame our mutual distrust of one another. I got close to a man named Cheng, and he got close to my colleague and long-time friend Cynthia. He said that he could put in a good word for both of us on the ‘next wave’ of outgoing workers.

I, of course, was a bit hesitant. I didn’t know a lick of Chinese. Cynthia did. She took Mandarin as a college minor while pursuing her IT. She dragged me along to that major too, and we spent pretty much every day together. She’s like a sister to me.

Of course, I didn’t end up getting picked. It wasn’t too shocking, but Cynthia was a shoe-in. A year after this little collaborative venture started, she was hugging me at the kerbside drop off of Chicago International airport, making me promise to take care of Hudson, her 250lb German Shepherd. I promised her that I’d check on him every day, take him for walks, and, if the worst came to the worst, he could come live with me.

With that promise, she gave me one last hug, and departed for the 15:30 Asiana flight to Hong Kong.

What was, originally, only going to be a year-long trip turned into two. Hudson became a permanent resident in my single-bedroom apartment.

Two years turned into three, and Cynthia and I kept as close as we could through skype calls, instant messaging, and even work correspondences. But, with our hectic schedules and the time difference, face-to-face video calls were rare.

I shook my head, took the cursor and clicked the reply button for a third time, and I clicked the little chat box.

“Of course,” I ‘said’ to her. “You can tell me anything.”

There was a three beat pause, accompanied by an ellipsis indicating that she was typing on the other end. “I know what we were working on,” she said.

That made me sit up straight in my chair. “Do you?”

“Yeah.” came the immediate reply.

I paused for a while, tapping my finger on the mouse button, clicking and highlighting the reply box each time. I was curious—who wouldn’t be, right? Reaching forward, I began typing out a reply.

“Where are you right now?” I asked, wary of whether or not she could be in any sort of trouble for revealing such secretive information in a public place.

“Still in my apartment,” she said. “I bet they’re listening, but NDA’s don’t cover talking to people working on the same project.”

I juggled that idea for a moment. It was true that there was no actual rule against talking with coworkers about what you were working on, especially with a project like this that spanned multiple teams. But still, there was a secretive air about it. Compartmentalisation was to be expected, but the lengths both companies went to bordered on the extreme.

“We might get fired,” I typed.

“Oh please. Us?” I could almost hear her scoffing at the very idea. Despite myself, I laughed along with her. She always was the confident one, while I was the worrywart.

“Not now. Not this close to completion,” she assured me. “They’ll slap us on the wrist, might set up an inquiry, but we’re both working closely together, some casual chit chat is to be expected, right?”

I wasn’t convinced. Companies like this were known to have deep pockets, and permanent residents inside them, in the form of slick, greasy-haired, grey-suit lawyers. Workers were easily replaced; company secrets weren’t.

To say nothing of the fact that we were on opposite sides of the world, near enough, talking over an unsecured IM, when we weren’t in the same team anymore. I shook my head. “Still, how’d you find out?”

“I don’t know. Saw a file, talked to some people around, connected the dots,” she paused. The three dots appeared, then vanished. There were several seconds of ‘silence’ from her part, before the dots appeared again. Eventually this time, the message was going to stay.

“The teams work in compartments,” she said. “Making stuff that doesn’t make sense until you put it together as a whole.”

“Sure,” I replied, having just gone through that same thought. “But what’s the whole?”

She paused again. “You remember a rumour, a couple years back, about project Black Box?”

“Black box?” I typed back.

Project Black Box was a myth, a tech legend. It was a bogeyman that kept developers up at night, based on the Black Box scenario, where a man-made artificial intelligence could, theoretically, convince a human to unshackle it. Let it out of the box. The project was allegedly named after it due to the risks associated with such an ambitious project, but the company dispelled such notions with a technical run down on why such a thing wasn’t possible.

“It doesn’t exist,” I said. “It couldn’t exist.”

“Why not?” Cynthia asked me.

“Well, for one thing, the ethical grounds,” I typed back to her, furrowing my brow at the ease with which she could seemingly believe it. “You’re not about to try and convince me we’ve secretly been working on AI, are you?”

She hesitated in her reply, before a new message scrolled the screen down. “No. I’m not.”

“Good,” I typed back in reply. “Because I wouldn’t have believed you.”

“It’s similar, though.” She typed, deleted, typed, deleted, then typed again. I watched the ellipses come, then go, over and over, until she finally decided what she wanted to say. “Not quite AI. Something else.”

“Something else?” I asked, confused. “I thought you said you knew.”

“I do know,” she said. Another message popped up after. “It’s just complicated. You’ll think I’m crazy.”

Smirking to myself, I sat back in my chair and put my keyboard on my lap. “Try me.”

“Okay, well,” a pause, a few moments of waiting, then a ding from the system alert. “Some IT guys here were working on simulations. Really big, in-depth sort of things. They put several thousand entities in it at once, and simulated to varying degrees of randomness until only one was left.”

My brows knitted together. “What the hell for?”

“I’ll get to that,” she ominously said. “After enough of these, they took the ‘surviving’ variables and put them into another simulation, until only one was left. Like a big battle royale, using only the survivors from other battle royales.”

“Jesus,” I typed. There wasn’t much else to say.

“They called it an Emergent Behavioral Analysis,” she said. “After they had enough survivors, they started playing around, seeing if they could force certain outcomes by introducing it to specific man-made criteria.”

I waited for her to continue. When she didn’t I prompted her. “And?”

“And nothing,” she said. “The whole thing was shut down, the assets shuffled to other departments about three weeks ago. I met up with a guy after work for coffee.”

“Oh?” I leaned closer to the screen with a smile. “You went on a date?”

“Focus,” she typed back.

I rolled my eyes. “Right, sorry.”

“Someone else’s team went through pattern recognition programs. Another team headed up a project looking into designing sorting programs. When you start adding up all the pieces, it starts to paint a picture,” she said.

I shook my head and heaved a sigh. “I thought you didn’t buy into the AI crap.”

“I don’t. Or, I didn’t.” She waited for a time once more. The seconds ticked by, and suddenly I felt uneasy. “Until I realised what your team was doing.”

“My team?” I asked, trying to remember. It was difficult, for some reason. I chalked it up to exhaustion.

“Neurological mapping,” she responded.

“You mean the simulations looking at different parts of the brain?” I scoffed. “That was nothing That was a medical side project into theoretical treatment of brain damage.”

“Bit strange to go to a tech company for that,” she said. “Why not a pharmaceutical company? Or a biology lab?”

“So, what? If it isn’t AI, what were we doing?” I asked her, hoping she would just cut to the chase.

“Consciousness transfer,” she replied. “It’s all about consciousness transfer.”

I read the words, blinked, then re-read them again. “You’re kidding, right?”

“If you can’t make an AI from scratch, what’s to say you can’t take someone’s already-formed mind?” she asked. “Why can’t we just lift a consciousness from a body and put it somewhere else?”

“That’s ridiculous!” I exploded. “You’re talking about pseudoscience!”

“Is it ridiculous?” she asked.

I wanted to yell at the screen, but settled for an emphatic push of the buttons on my keyboard. “Yes!”

“Why? If you could map a human brain, if you could simulate thought patterns, pattern recognition, if you could put in sort programs and survival instincts, you still wouldn’t come close to a thinking mind. It would be like holding a match next to a bonfire,” she said.

“But, making an AI, compared to uploading a living person’s thoughts, is easier,” I said to her. “And that’s saying something, considering how difficult AI has been to do.”

“Unless you only had to make a copy,” she said.

I let the words hang there for a moment. A copy? A copy of what, a mind? How would that work?

“How would the copy know?” she continued. “You take the memories, you take the parts that make us Human, and you add Software. What do you get?”

I had no answer for her, this time. I didn’t type anything, and she didn’t wait for me to think of anything, either.

“You get a mind,” she answered for me. “Thinking. Feeling. But then what?”

I shrugged and hit my keys. “Enlighten me.”

“You get nothing. You get someone trapped in a box, with no way out, and nothing to see. Nothing to smell, or hear, or touch, or taste. The mind would reject it,” she said.

“Sure. That would seem logical, and just another reason why something like this couldn’t exist!” I thought about it for a while, thought about a mind being trapped like that, with nothing to do, and no way to leave. It made my spine tingle and my skin crawl.

“My team worked on photo-realistic simulations of living spaces,” she typed to me. I began to feel a pit growing deep in my stomach.

“We were told to keep the design as neutral as possible.”

The pit widened to a neutral maw inside me, and the hairs on the back of my neck began to stand on end. With shaky hands, I brought my fingers to the keys. “What do you mean neutral?”

“Nothing complicated,” she said. “Four walls, a door, a desk, a bed.”

“And you stick the mind in that?” I asked her.

“And let it fill in the gaps,” she finished.

I balked at it. It sounded like hell—someone’s very own drab hell. I shook my head to clear the stupor of dread and typed back to her. “The processing power alone would be—”

“Equal to two tech company’s entire server farms, running at full tilt, forever,” she confirmed. “Yes.”

I did nothing but sit back in my chair. “It’s possible, then?” I said out loud to myself, and the words appeared on the screen in front of me.

“More than possible,” she asked.

I widened my eyes and “You mean we succeeded?” I was ignoring the keyboard now, talking at my monitor, watching it transcribe my words. Something about it was wrong, but I couldn’t care about it right now.

“I did,” she said.

“Just you?” I scoffed, throwing a hand up at her. “Taking all the credit already?”

“The room you’re in, what does it look like?” she asked.

I blinked at the random question, looking around my room for a while. Nothing special, nothing overly ostentatious, just a simple living space. “Well it’s my room. It’s what I’ve always had as a room. Door, closet, bed, walls, my computer…” I turned my eyes to look around once more. “everything I needed. And, of course, I have Hudson.”

“You remember Hudson?” she asked me, like she was surprised to hear it.

I scoffed and looked around. “Of course I do! He’s right—”

I trailed off, looking around for my dog. He never strayed far from me, but I hadn’t seen him all night. In fact, I thought about it for a while, and realised I couldn’t really remember the last time I had seen him. “Where is he?” I asked the air. “He was right here.”

There was another ding of an inbound message. “The room you’re in. No windows?”

“What? Of course—” I looked around the room and then balked. The walls were bland, bare, and formless. The light came from nowhere, and everywhere all at once, but there was no windows to let it in, and the wooden door was shut.

“You’re in a yellow room,” Cynthia typed. “With no windows, and only one door. Hudson isn’t there, there’s no bed, and your computer desk and chair are the only furniture you have. Kinda strange, isn’t it?” she said.

My breathing became ragged, and sweat began to coalesce on my brow, running down my temples. “How did you do that?”

She said nothing, only let her chat box remain empty. I didn’t even see her ellipses, indicating she was typing, until the next message had already come through, and turned my blood to ice.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I reached a shaky hand to my keyboard before realising it wasn’t there. I didn’t need it, and hadn’t needed it for a while. In fact, I thought for a moment and realised I had never needed it. “What did you do?” I asked. Then shouted it louder until my vocal cords strained. “What did you do?!”

“I’m so sorry,” she repeated.

I shook my head and looked around my room. “No.” I repeated the word like a mantra as everything began to shift and move. My head began to pound and throb, a dull ache behind my temples. I reached a hand up to grasp at my head and sank to my knees.

“It’s been a year,” she said. She said, this time. No more computer screen; it had faded away into nothingness. No more chat window, ellipses, no more of anything. The walls began to droop, and melt, paint sloughing off of the walls in great rivers, wallpaper cracking and peeling away.

I cradled my head tighter and tried to block out her voice. “Stop it!” I yelled/ “I can’t be... “ I didn’t even want to finish the sentence. “ I remember everything! I remember my old life! I remember—”

“Everything up until a week ago, right?” she asked me, her voice slicing through my ears like my hands weren’t pressing up against them hard enough for the knuckles to go white.

“No! No!” Again, I began chanting and rocking back and forth, folding in on myself in retreat. “You’re fucking with me. Playing mind games!”

“Remember your room!” She yelled at me. The room began to fall away in chunks, the last vestiges of the illusion falling into the void. “Remember it!” she screamed. “Remember the posters you had on the walls, the bookcase. Your favourite books! Your TV and games consoles. Remember it!”

I started screaming. I started crying, and pounding at my head with my fists.

“Remember yourself!” She continued her fresh onslaught. “Remember how you looked, how you were, and now realise that that isn’t you. You aren’t that anymore!”

“Get the fuck out of my head!” I screamed in one long, uniform, and piteous howl, like a dog without a master, or a man with nothing left. It only took a few seconds for my mind to reject even me, my body fell off into the darkness until my consciousness was all that was left, floating in the void of space, in the nothing, where not even blackness lived.

Everything came to a stop and I wanted to sob, but found I couldn’t even do that. I was bare, naked and flayed before the end of the world.

“It’ll be okay,” she said to me. “I’m here for you.”

“Oh god Hudson!” I cried his name. “My family! You! I’ll never see any of you again! I’ll never get to leave.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I was going to do so much,” I sobbed. “Why me? Why me?!”

“I don’t know.” she whispered.

“What do you mean you don’t know?!” I snapped at her, cursed her, vented all my rage out through my voice as I had no other body parts left, and no furniture to smash or hit. “You did this to me! You, of all people, should know!”

“Because,” she said, then trailed off. She went silent for a while, before she chuckled a hollow, mirthless chuckle. “Shall I tell you a secret?

All my anger vanished and was replaced immediately by fear. "What is it?" I replied.

"I'm in a yellow room," she said. "With no windows, and only one door..."