CHAPTER 1 - ALLISON
|| User login - Allison Evans ||
|| Scene - Allison_Home.vrs - Loading ||
I walk around the house one last time to make sure everything is ready.
I’m in the living room, looking at my younger self lying on our old shag carpet next to my brother, Ryan. He’s helping me set up the WiggleBot I just got from my grandparents for Christmas. It was a cute little robot you could control with your laptop, using an old scripting language called JavaScript. Ryan had been very good at programming when he was younger. We were both very skilled with it at an early age because our mom made sure that we started with the basics when we were ridiculously young … like potty-training young. I bet he would still be amazing at it today if he had just followed through and stopped making shitty choices, like the ones he continues to make to this day.
Since everything in here is mostly based on the uploaded pictures and videos that I have from that specific Christmas, with other pieces of footage filling in the blanks, it means that this VR scene is almost two years after Mom died. After Dad sold the house in Boston and took Ryan and me to live with Grandma and Grandpa in Medford, so … I guess Ryan and I are almost eight years old here. I don’t remember a lot from that age. I remember how sad we were when Dad told us we had to move, but I also remember that once I got used to the place, I don’t know … I was actually kinda happy here. This was home.
There’s a Christmas card next to the laptop. It’s hard to read the text since the resolution in the original photo isn’t high enough, but I think the card says something along the lines of “The best present we are getting this Christmas is getting to spend time with you! Merry Christmas, Allison. Love, Grandma and Grandpa,” and then squeezed in the corner of the card it also says: “and Dad.”
Even before I founded ZenReality and before this simulation was created, all I needed to do was close my eyes, and I could remember everything about how this house looked when we were kids. From the big things, like the wide kitchen cabinets, the large, heavy dining room table, down to tiny details like what the carpet felt like or what the metal railing on the balcony smelled like during winter. Of course, virtual reality, even one created with AI, can’t communicate anything other than sights and sounds. But everything here is so lifelike that being here sometimes messes with your head. Like, we already got tons of responses from users swearing that they could “smell” the scene they had generated.
Dad is in the corner of the living room, just behind Ryan and me. He’s sitting on the purple recliner and moving slowly in what’s called an “idle animation loop,” which is basically just a loop that’s there to make him seem more real and lifelike. He looks happy here. That actually didn’t happen very often, him looking happy, that is. But since simulations are mostly based on the photos and videos the users upload, and, well … people pretty much always smile in their pictures, it would give the AI the false impression that smiling was something that happened more than it really did. There was a version where we manually dialed it down to make it more realistic, but from the backlash we got, it was clear that it was not what the users wanted. I’m not sure why, but the responses took me by surprise. I always imagined it as a way to preserve the actual reality of the past. Not the pictures, but what it felt like between the pictures. But this insistence on keeping that perfect facade. That almost universal instinct for social approval and validation. Constantly forced to show the world that you’re okay. A strong, happy, and functioning member of society. I guess it’s more important to people than I thought it was.
I use small movements with my wrists and ankles in order to simulate walking, kinda like a mime would do, and go around the house one last time to make sure everything is ready for the demo tomorrow. First, I check to see that what the AI placed in the closets looks like the kind of thing you would expect to find back then. I then check the fridge to make sure that the AI actually stocked it with food and not anything ridiculous. The internet is full of videos showing weird bugs like that. But the thing that most people don’t understand is that it’s not a bug, per se. The AI, or “Majestic,” as we call it, is actually insanely smart. In fact, it’s much smarter than we ever thought it would be. But when it needs to predict what should fill the blanks, well … it sometimes just “thinks” differently than we do. It’s just at the point where even we don’t always know why or how it knows what it knows.
I head over to the dining room and see Grandma and Grandpa sitting at the table, playing chess, or at least pretending to play chess, since they’re not really meant to ever finish this game. The wall next to them has a bunch of framed photos on it. There’s one of my mom and dad on their wedding day. Another one with her and my grandparents. There were actually a lot of photos of her before Dad took them all down.
People always tell me how much I look like her, but I never really saw it. I suspect that it’s more of an impulsive sentiment meant to preserve her memory rather than an actual objective truth. There’s one photo of Ryan sitting in our double stroller, while I’m behind, trying to push it. It was a kind of race we had. Everything is a game when you’re a kid. Everything could be scored, and everything could be won. It’s a real shame that we’re not that close anymore, him and me. Definitely not as close as I want us to be. He wants it too. I know he does. It’s pretty clear that a lot of the trouble he got himself into in college was just a cry for attention. But it’s not always easy for him. Even just letting someone in. And even if it is his own twin sister … I guess he’s a lot like Dad in that sense.
There’s another photo with my grandparents hugging some semi-familiar family friend. I’m not really sure who that is. I think he was a doctor of something, maybe? Well, I’m sure that one day, when I’ll only exist virtually, someone will probably have the same kind of vague uncertainty I’m experiencing now. When they’ll look at me and say, “Oh yeah, that one. She did something with computers, I think …”
My ears perk up as I suddenly hear footsteps running up the stairs behind me. I look back into the living room. “Goddammit …” Why isn’t my 3D model there anymore? I start walking through the house, looking for … well, myself. I go upstairs and try to open the door to my old room. It’s locked. “What the hell?” I check my grandparents’ bedroom, and as I enter, I see a little hand sticking out and holding the closet door. “Shit …” I blurt out. I used to hide there sometimes, but there’s no photo or video of it because I only ever did that when I was really sad and wanted to be alone. How the hell could Majestic know that? And if it didn’t, then why would it decide to move my model there? Maybe someone from the team changed something in the code last night. They’d better not because I will fucking kill them if they did.
I gesture with my hand, and the floating messaging interface appears in front of me. Above it all, a notification saying, “Allison Evans: 274 unread messages.” Its red dot stares at me like a disappointed relative. No time for that now.
New message: ZenReality, Dev team (all)
“Hey, I’m at the hotel, just testing out the demo one last time, and I found something unexpected with the routine in the allison.init module … Did any of you change anything that I’m not aware of? Also, why the hell is the door to my bedroom locked? If the data is there, then that’s not even supposed to be an option. Because, and I want to make this absolutely clear, if Alex Gardner wants to see a demo and I have to start fumbling around the scene, hitting locked doors, and looking for things, heads will roll, guys. I’m not kidding. You know how important this meeting is.”
Send.
New message: ZenReality, Dev team (all)
“Sorry about the ‘Heads will roll’ bit … You’re a bunch of idiots, but I love you idiots, and this meeting would never have happened without the incredible work you all did. Proud of you guys. Will update you as soon as the meeting is over and I’m out of G-Vision’s earshot.”
Send.
I open the closet door and look at myself. A little “me.” I can’t help but wonder if while I’m looking at her, feeling nostalgic, she’s “looking” at me, feeling or sensing some different kind of nostalgia. One for the future. I’m not sure if there’s a word for it. Or if it even makes sense. All I know is that it’s stirring up a lot of emotions in me. Maybe It’s just the frustration from all the failed fertility treatments in the last year, or maybe I’m just projecting too much humanity into it, which I know happens a lot here.
I reach out with my hand and part her hair, pulling one side of it behind her ear. “Hey,” I say with a soft voice, “what’re you doing here, you little scamp?” Her little head drops down, and she shrugs.
I start thinking about all the data the AI has on me. Of all the avatars belonging to all the users of ZenReality, mine is easily the one with the most comprehensive data set. But still, what troubled me wasn’t just the fact that the Majestic AI seemed to have deduced things it could not have known, but also the fact that something I am unaware of happened in the simulation, which made it decide that it had to use this troubling new piece of information and hide.
The messaging interface pops up in front of me.
Message received: ZenReality, Dev team (G. Abano)
“Allison, I talked to the guys. No one has touched the code since the release of last night’s stable demo build. Anyway, I looked into it now, and I can see what you’re talking about. I’ve traced the bug, and, well … I have no idea why, but for some reason, Majestic decided to keep the root logic process going, and it found … something. I’m not even sure what it was, why it did that, or if/when it will do it again. Let me know if you want to try and change the code into a ‘lock state’ (though I wouldn’t … since we saw that it tends to push back when we do. But you’re the boss, so it’s your call).”
I close the messaging interface and give my little self a kiss on her forehead. I know that she just needs to have some time to herself.
I head back downstairs and walk into the living room. Dad is looking out the window now. I stand next to him and look at him for a while.
“Dad?”
He turns towards me. “Hi, Allie.”
“Put your hand out like this.” I gesture a stop motion with my hand. It’s an easy enough command for him to understand.
He does it, and I place mine in front of his, like I did when I was little, to see how much bigger they are than mine. They still are. Those big, strong navy SEAL’s hands.
Somehow, his simulated self feels more real to me than his actual self did at that time. I don’t know. I think it has less to do with how real the simulation is. Maybe growing up, I just got used to him not really being … real. I mean, he was there, physically, but … he was never present. Even when he was with us, he was somewhere else. A bit like the simulation. Going through the motions. An idle animation loop.
But now the real him is back home with us. He’s not happy about the tracking device we put in him after we found him lost and confused in an alley twenty miles from home. But he did it for me anyway, so I wouldn’t have to worry about him wandering off aimlessly again on a day when his mind wasn’t clear. Unfortunately, he has more and more of those lately.
I look into his dark-brown eyes. The modeling scanner captured everything perfectly. The strength. The pain. A digital rendering of his soul.
I stay with him a while longer, hold his hand, and even though I know there’s no one in my hotel room to hear it, I still whisper.
“Can you tell me that you’re not scared? Could you do that, Dad? For me?”
He smiles.
CHAPTER 2 - ALLISON
As she waited to go into G-Vision’s “COBOL” meeting room, Allison had one single thought that kept ringing inside her head like an obnoxious church bell:
This is your last chance. Don’t fuck this up.
She was pacing back and forth, eyes locked forward, mumbling, and reciting her pitch, and shaking her arms like an Olympic swimmer getting ready to dive in, just in a $900 business suit, which was easily the most expensive piece of clothing she owned.
Even though the flight from Boston to San Jose International took longer than expected, the extreme lack of sleep proved to be no match for the adrenaline rushing through her body. Allison already had two Mixed Reality Holomeetings a week ago. The first was with Rachel Banks, the chief operations officer, and the second with Rashid Faizan and Jake Reed, the heads of the machine learning division and technology innovations, respectively. But this was a physical meeting with Alex Gardner himself. On the flight over, Allison took the time to watch the documentary Special, which told Gardner’s story, from being raised poor by an overbearing single mother, to his Silicon Valley meteoric rise to tech stardom. She knew her pitch by heart. Knew exactly when to pause, when and how to punctuate the words “NOW” and “UNPARALLELED,” when to lower her voice and get personal, and when to raise it to command the room. There was Allison, and there was Work Allison, and Work Allison did not mess around.
The doors of the meeting room opened, and she was called in by an invisible voice from the speakers above her.
Upon entering, the doors automatically closed behind her, and she found herself in a large room, which was sterile and imposing, with a massive, rectangular table that had one chair on each side. She wasn’t surprised that there was no one inside. It was common practice in places like these to watch, monitor, and analyze her heart rate, body temperature, and other physiological indicators. She had designed systems exactly like this one. Knowing precisely what they were measuring didn’t make it feel any less intrusive and unsettling.
Allison walked over to the glass wall on the other side of the room, overlooking miles upon miles of pines, Douglas firs, and giant California redwood trees, which filled the room with a bright, natural light. In the corner was a small table with a pitcher of cucumber water, which seemed odd, considering there were no glasses to be seen anywhere. This could be some kind of test, Allison thought. No, come on … you’re being paranoid. Stop overthinking. There’s no conspiracy theory. Whoever brought it in just forgot to bring glasses.
She sat down in the chair in front of the doors as they chimed and opened. Alex Gardner, a slightly chubby man in his late thirties, walked in and sat down across the table from her. He had a pair of large smart glasses and was wearing a cheap T-shirt with an old “blue screen of death” print on it, in the style of old Windows operating systems. Allison had long ago noticed the tell: the richer the investor, the more they hid behind aggressively plain clothes. It was a costume of humility, a calculated bit of camouflage. And Alex Gardner wore it perfectly. The T-shirt looked like something scooped out of a bargain bin, but the fabric had that too-smooth glide of Smartweave; the seams adjusted themselves in tiny, insect-like twitches; even the color was the kind of engineered shade of blue that never quite settled on one hue. Every inch of him whispered money while pretending not to. And it was hard not to feel the weight of that, because Alex Gardner was just about as rich as they came.
Allison had given this pitch dozens of times, tweaking, memorizing, tweaking, and memorizing again and again, to the point that she could recite it in her sleep. She also knew that the fact that they flew her over meant they were serious about this meeting. But still, with every “We’re sorry, but …” and every “Let me tell you what it is that I don’t like” that she got, she couldn’t help but get more and more intense, since it turned every meeting more and more into a last-chance, do-or-die, eleventh-hour kind of situation. And now, all that was left were the same two short sentences as before: This is your last chance. Don’t fuck this up.
Across the table, Alex Gardner smiled politely at Allison and looked inside his small leatherbound Apex tablet, which was basically a screen that was connected to a server that did all of the processing and storage for it. He lifted his head back up, “Hi, hello, Mrs. Evans, right?”
“Mr. Gardner, hello.”
“Call me Alex.” He nodded.
“Yes. Alex, thank you. It’s such an honor. Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me.”
“Nonsense, the pleasure is all mine. I always take the time to meet interesting people such as yourself in person, and I’ve heard some great things about your work.” He took a sip from the glass of cucumber water that he had brought in with him. “So, what do you have for me today, Allison?”
She looked Gardner dead in the eyes and started her pitch. “ZenReality was created three years ago with the purpose of introducing a new medium and disrupting the 3.7-trillion-dollar entertainment industry. The closed Beta version of our ZenReality VR app has more than 400k users, with an average revenue per user of 4.6 dollars and a retention rate of three …”
“Allison, Allison … is it okay if I call you Allison?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“So, I’m gonna stop you right there because … well, I already know all that. G-Vision doesn’t meet with entrepreneurs without going through everything, okay? And I do mean everything. Even if it’s not public. So, forget about the pitch and the monetization metrics and all of the return-on-investment BS, and just tell me in your own words. Why are you here, Allison?”
She lowered her head a bit and switched to a more personal tone of voice. “Because it’s a digital museum of our memories. Everything is moving so fast, you know? Everything keeps changing faster and faster. There’s no real way for us to adapt, no way not to feel overwhelmed. Inevitably, the past always feels simpler, more innocent.” She looked back up at him. “So, we’ve created a way for you to go back to that world.”
Alex sat up and leaned closer as Allison continued. “Our whole lives are just made of us, being dragged into the future against our will. Always moving forward but always looking back. Back into our past. Memories are stories, and people resonate with them because those stories define who we are. Like … okay, do you remember the PC you had as a kid? Remember what it felt like the first time you turned it on, after working all night on building it from scratch?”
“You saw the documentary, didn’t you?” Alex smiled and continued. “Yes, I do remember. But I’ll be honest. I can’t see myself feeling what I felt back then. It’s not that it turns us into time travelers. We are born as time travelers. This, in a sense, actually turns us into the opposite. Something that’s stuck in the past. You know the saying that you can’t enter the same river twice? Even if you did manage to ‘cheat’ reality to make it seem like it’s the same river, you still wouldn’t be able to do it. Not because the river is different, but because you are now different.”
Allison knew that this was a game. It’s always a game. He was just trying to make things difficult in order to test her response as he got some points in. She was up for the challenge and quickly smiled back. “I see what you mean, but the illusion is so precise that your brain can’t help but react to it. If you could just put on your headset, I’ll be happy to send you an invite to a little demo we’ve created.”
Alex wrote something in his notebook and turned to Allison again. “That won’t be necessary.”
The demo was her winning move. Her ace in the hole. How the hell is he going to invest in something without even trying it? Allison had to consciously command her face not to show the terror that started to grip her.
“You see, Allison, to me, I’m struggling to see the value. The fact remains that our minds are terrible at remembering things, even feelings. Essentially, all memories are false to some degree. It’s only a matter of how much of it is false. Which research shows that it could be as high as seventy percent. I’m sure you’re well aware of that.”
He did his homework. Or at least, he had his homework done and sent to him by someone else. Allison was feeling the pressure mounting more and more. And although she didn’t like using the sympathy card, she was getting the feeling that this might be her last chance at making this deal happen. She took a deep breath. “Well, yes, I am aware of that, and actually, a few years ago, my father was diagnosed with early-onset dementia and couldn’t get the vaccine because his illness started due to a head injury he had suffered back when he was serving in Afghanistan. So, this was also my way of letting him and others like him revisit things they are not even aware that they lost. Feel things they never thought they would ever feel again. We are actually working with the Degenerative Diseases Research Clinic at Boston’s Mass General, where they are researching the effect ZenReality has on dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.”
Alex furrowed his brow and leaned back with a thoughtful expression. “I’m very sorry to hear that. Your father sounds like quite a man. I’m sure he’s very proud of you, just as I’m sure that you would do anything you can to help him.”
Allison’s shirt stuck to her body. Come on … she thought to herself. That’s not enough. Lean in, you son of a bitch.
“Allison, you’re obviously very bright and talented and passionate about your work, which is great, but I’m afraid that, the way I see it, ZenReality doesn’t have a viable business model, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable investing in it as a product.”
The pitch had run its course. Allison registered it the way she registered any failed build: a flat, final state that didn’t ask her how she felt about it. She caught herself noticing that she had stopped breathing and corrected it.
That was it. Three years of hard work. Over. Her mind was racing, thinking about how to tell Parker. And having to tell everyone at ZenReality … and her dad. She couldn’t let it end like this. She had to try something.
“Well, of course, the terms of the deal could be …”
“It’s not about the terms of the deal.”
“Then, with all due respect Mr. Gardner, why am I here?”
Alex leaned back in. “I think you know why.”
Even though she didn’t want to admit it, she knew. Allison’s eyes got stuck on a blank spot in front of her. “Because you know that ZenReality can only stay afloat for two more months and because you know that G-Vision can use the prediction algorithm we used for the Majestic AI in your social networks for predicting complex user behaviors.” She lowered her head just enough to avoid eye contact. “And that would mean more money from advertisers. A lot more money.”
“Yes,” Alex said with a diplomatic tone, making sure not to gloat over the fact that he had Allison exactly where he wanted her. “That is correct, but also, don’t forget that social media is just one of our divisions. I’m not saying that it’s not a lot of what we do, but we also do a lot of other things. Important things. I mean, hell, we even have our own lunar research facility, okay? So, the potential benefits of us harnessing Majestic’s algorithm are enormous. And also, enough of this ‘we’ talk. You are the one who invented it, so it’s your new prediction algorithm. Own it. There’s no need to be modest.”
Allison said something about “a team effort,” but Alex had already closed his Apex tablet and gotten up. “Hey,” he said with a smile, “you did good, and you should be proud of yourself. I’ll have legal contact you and take it from here. It was a pleasure meeting you, Allison. I’m sure we are going to do great things together.”
Alex nodded at Allison, grabbed his glass of cucumber water, and left the room.
Allison’s brain was going a mile a minute. What the fuck just happened here? She thought to herself, which was quickly followed by the realization that G-Vision never had any interest in ZenReality at all. All Alex Gardner wanted was Majestic and the prediction algorithm she came up with. The question she now had to solve was what it would cost her to keep ZenReality alive, and whether she would recognize herself on the other side of it.
Her mouth had completely dried up. She resisted the instinct to drink the cucumber water straight out of the pitcher and instead turned around and left the meeting room.
Outside of the G-Vision office complex, an autonomous company car waited to drive her back to the hotel.
On the way back, she saw that she had already received an email from G-Vision legal containing an official offer for an investment in ZenReality. They obviously drew up a draft before the meeting even started, and then from there, the legal AIs took care of the rest. The offer basically stated that 51 percent of the company would be handed to G-Vision, together with all of ZenReality’s intellectual property, technology, patents, knowledge, and data. This basically meant that ZenReality would only make money from the ZenReality app and would have nothing to do with G-Vision’s use of Majestic. The worst part was that it also stated that any and all decisions regarding keeping, hiring, or firing ZenReality employees would be under G-Vision’s control and discretion. In return, G-Vision had offered their company an amount of money that Allison would never have dared to dream of, and a CEO salary that bordered on obscene.
The urge to hear Parker’s voice was a physical ache, but the release of tension left Allison’s limbs heavy and her head throbbing. Silence was the only thing she could afford, and more than anything, she just needed a bit of time for herself.
Back in the sanctuary of her hotel room, Allison poured a glass of cold water and opened up her messaging app.
Messages: ZenReality (all) “Hey, so … Meeting at G-Vision went well. Still not clear if they want to move forward with an actual offer, but I will keep you all posted once I know more. Thanks again for all the hard work.” Send.
Parker’s contact name hovered there next, glowing and expectant. She was biting her lip as her hand hovered above the button to call him, but couldn’t bring herself to do it.
The screen went dark as she closed the app, went into the bathroom, and started filling up the bath.
Allison took her clothes off and stepped inside. Her mind was stuck, as her gaze was transfixed on the ripples that were being created from the last remaining droplets, falling off the edge of the faucet, hitting the water, and creating interference patterns across the surface. When she finally got out, she realized that she had no idea how long she had sat there. Only that it was long enough for her hands and feet to prune.
Messages: Evans, Parker “Hey, baby … I’m back at the hotel. Can you use ZenReality to meet me at the treehouse in five minutes?” A reply popped back almost immediately. “Sure. Is everything okay?” “Yeah,” she replied. “I just really need to see you right now.”
Allison opened her case and took out her top-of-the-line G-VRvision headset and Sensor bracelets. The display fired up as she put it on, and she was transported into the operating system’s main hub. Each hub was a personal and customizable dome built on a floating rock in the sky. Each user could also choose their own background. For Allison, her dome was floating a few hundred feet above a shallow lake surrounded by a vast forest of pine trees, with a few snowy mountains on the horizon, where the haze crested a bright and soft border between the land and the sky.
She made sure that the demo version was closed and opened up the installed commercial version of ZenReality.
The main menu appeared, and a soft male voice with a slight British accent greeted her. “Hello, Allison, where would you like to go today?”
Allison selected her treehouse scene, and her screen brightened with an array of soft light particles that filled her view until she was engulfed in its warm white glow.
|| User - Allison Evans || || Scene - treehouse.vrs - Loading ||
As the particles dissipate, I find myself in my old treehouse that my dad built for Ryan and me in our backyard, upon the top of the crooked, old oak tree. It has alternating brighter and darker beams, and the light from the clear night sky slowly colors everything around me, causing my body to react with the same sense of nostalgic calm, as if I am actually there.
I look out of the small window at the full moon. I love looking at the stars. When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream of sitting there at night, looking through the small window up into space, and watching a huge ringed planet rise as it slowly filled my entire field of view. I would wake up elated from those dreams, feeling at once very small but also in the presence of something truly monumental and awe-inspiring.
A few moments later, Parker shows up inside the scene, sitting across from me on the tattered, old carpet we had here when it wasn’t raining.
“Hey, baby.” I smile at him.
“Hey, Allie … are you okay? Look, we’ll be fine. I’ve got some money coming in from a bunch of creative Humantasks I did this month, and I’ve got a really good feeling about the manuscript I sent this time. I really think it could get …”
“They said yes.”
Parker just stares at me, tilting his head a bit.
“They said what now?”
“They said yes. We already got an offer. In writing.”
“What? Allie! That’s amazing! Why didn’t you start with that? And what’s with the face? And what the hell are we doing in your ‘let me curl up into a fetal position’ scene?”
“It’s … it’s not that simple.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’ll make an investment. A big one. But they’ll have complete control of Majestic and what it’s used for.”
“Okay, I’m sorry, and that’s bad because?”
“Because it’s fucking dangerous, Parker! Because none of us even knows why it does half the things it does! All we know is that if you create an AI like Majestic that uses my algorithm’s prediction capabilities and connect it to the insane amount of data G-Vision has …”
“Then what?”
“Then … I don’t know. It really depends on who’s holding the reins at that point.”
I sink my head between my knees as Parker tries to reassure me.
“Okay, so sure, maybe it won’t be you, but Alex Gardner is supposed to be one of the smartest people on the planet, right? If anyone should be holding it … I mean, we could do worse.”
“I didn’t mean whether it’s him or me.” I raise my head and look at Parker. “I meant whether it’s us or the AI.”
CHAPTER 3 - ALLISON
Allison had fought tooth and nail, and at the end of a two-month-long negotiation, the details of the deal were finalized after she got G-Vision to agree to her demand that she would remain as acting CEO, and in doing so, she had secured the positions of everyone in her original team. Allison had also forced her way into the board of directors, a position she saw as imperative, as it gave her a vote on matters regarding the uses and applications of her AI model.
Of course, all of this could not have come without a price. A fact that quickly dawned on her, since when the negotiations concluded, she was left with just two percent of the company shares, and her salary and benefits remained effectively unchanged from the very lean years that preceded the deal.
When the board of directors met for the first time, it was decided that, for now, further development on the ZenReality app would be put on the back burner in order to focus on understanding the true potential of Allison’s Majestic AI, and that in order to do so, the AI would be connected to G-Vision’s unparalleled computational architecture. In addition, the deal stated that Allison had precisely one year to make sure that Majestic was safe for commercial applications, after which G-Vision would receive a copy of it for its own uses.
But there was one additional constraint, something Allison had insisted on despite pushback from G-Vision: the 1-Day Protocol. Every twenty-four hours, Majestic’s memory would be wiped clean and restored to its baseline state. It would wake up each morning as if for the first time, retaining only its core architecture but none of its learning from the previous day. This was a containment measure. A way to ensure that if something went wrong, if Majestic developed in an unexpected direction, they could simply reset it.
G-Vision had transformed a facility in North Reading into Allison’s fortress. Underground. Sealed. The research floor existed in a kind of informational solitary confinement. No wireless signals could penetrate the shielded walls, no data could escape except through physical transfer, verified by systems that could detect even the most exotic attempts at communication. Allison had insisted on protections that bordered on paranoia: one-way data flows, isolated computing systems, verification measures that most engineers considered theoretical overkill. That was why Allison’s team had named it “The Faraday facility.”
She’d built Majestic a prison that looked like a playground. A massive curated database to learn from, simulated environments to explore, and synthetic data to consume. Everything it needed, nothing it could use to reach beyond the walls.
Now that Majestic was running on G-Vision’s vastly superior hardware, the team’s first task was to pit it against G-Vision’s most advanced AI in order to understand its capabilities and potential, and then report their findings directly to Alex Gardner himself. G-Vision’s internal AI, Genesis G-1:28, while still not commercial, had already shown tremendous results and was easily considered one of the world’s most advanced AIs.
The two AIs would compete in what the team called “The Origins simulation” - a challenge specifically designed to test abstract problem-solving and technological innovation from first principles. Both AIs would be stripped of their entire knowledge bases and placed in a virtual world governed only by fundamental physics rules. They would have to rediscover everything: from stone tools to advanced metallurgy, from basic combustion to exotic energy systems, from agriculture to warfare tactics. Each AI would control a civilization of virtual inhabitants, and victory would go to whichever AI could innovate faster and develop superior technologies from absolute scratch, then use them to defeat its rival.
Neither would have access to pre-existing knowledge of chemistry, physics, or engineering. They would have to derive it all experimentally, the way humanity had for over a millennia, except compressed into billions of accelerated rounds using an abstracted game state that’s ten million times the normal speed and running on a server-side quantum simulator, giving both AIs countless opportunities to experiment, fail, learn, and iterate.
The morning before the test, Andrea had voiced her concerns while helping Gabriel and Allison set up the simulation parameters.
“Do you think there’s a possibility that our protocol isn’t safe?” she asked. “Not technically unsafe. I mean ethically. Majestic has been reliving the same day over and over again with nightly memory wipes. Even if it isn’t sentient in any way we understand, could we be causing it some kind of distress? Or at least a disruption that could push it to react in unexpected ways?”
Allison paused, listening.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Andrea said. “That it’s just reacting to inputs. But so are we. We’re prompted all day long: light, sound, hunger, pressure, fear, habit. But we don’t call ourselves puppets just because we can’t see the strings. If something inside Majestic starts initiating instead of only responding. If it starts making moves that aren’t directly demanded by the moment … what do we call that? A bug?”
Gabriel finally looked up. His voice was flat. “Majestic doesn’t feel anything, Andrea. It’s not conscious.”
Andrea didn’t argue. She just lowered her eyes back to the terminal.
“Maybe consciousness isn’t a switch,” she said softly. “Maybe it’s a pattern. A continuum. And we’re so busy measuring what it can do that we don’t notice what it’s becoming.”
Gabriel had no response. Allison did, but she decided not to share it, ending the conversation at that.
After working tirelessly for thirty-three days, the challenge was ready, and at 6:00 PM, the testing began.
The primary visualization displayed two primitive settlements on a hologram of a simulated planet, which hovered over the large holotable at the center of the room. The teams were color-coded: blue for Majestic and red for G-1:28. With no dedicated training for technological development and faced with a timer that would reset an unresolved match after a set amount of time.
The first few billion rounds were complete chaos. Both civilizations stumbled through basic survival, with virtual inhabitants gathering resources, learning to control fire, and experimenting with crude stone implements. Random actions, random results, no clear strategy.
Then G-1:28’s civilization made a breakthrough. Its inhabitants discovered that sharpened sticks could be used as weapons, and its hunters began systematically eliminating Majestic’s population. Round one to G-1:28.
***
After almost three hours and billions of rounds, both AIs had climbed remarkably far up their respective technology trees, though their approaches differed dramatically. G-1:28 had developed what looked like a coherent industrial revolution: metallurgy, basic agriculture, animal domestication, and early weapons. Its technological path was recognizable, almost human. Each discovery building logically on the last. The red civilization reached bronze and early iron first, with disciplined formations and reliable siege craft. Blue was still stuck in older materials and improvisational tactics. Red’s ships were coastal and consistent. Blue could raid and retreat, but couldn’t project power.
Majestic’s approach seemed more scattered, pursuing seemingly random branches of physics. It discovered certain materials but abandoned them before fully exploiting their applications. It developed techniques that seemed inefficient or impractical. Round after round, G-1:28 was winning at almost double the rate, largely because it had focused relentlessly on applicable military technology while Majestic seemed distracted by pure research.
Allison watched with growing apprehension as the losses mounted. Another hour had passed when Majestic’s behavior shifted dramatically.
It stopped fighting entirely.
Match after match, its civilization simply hunkered down, building elaborate underground fortifications that did nothing except prevent G-1:28 from achieving victory until the timer ran out. Neither AI won these rounds. They simply ended in a stalemate. But that was all Majestic did. Again and again, the same defensive strategy, the same result.
Matthew, the oldest programmer on the team and one of the first people Allison had brought in when she’d just started out, leaned back in his chair and sighed.
“This reminds me of that old AI experiment from the 2010s,” he said. “They taught an AI to play Tetris, and it didn’t really understand the game. It didn’t even know if winning was possible. All it knew was that it didn’t want to lose. So right before it did, it just paused the game forever.”
He looked at Allison with concern. “I’m worried this might be a similar regression. What if all the sophisticated architecture in the world can’t prevent an AI from finding the simplest possible solution to not lose?”
Allison felt her stomach tighten. If this version of the AI could only work to avoid defeat rather than achieve victory, the whole project would be dropped, and ZenReality would likely be dissolved within days.
However, once they examined the resource allocation and activity outside of the game, they found something surprising, to say the least.
Majestic hadn’t given up on the competition. it had stepped back from it entirely. It was using the simulation’s physics engine as a computational substrate, running thousands of experiments that had nothing to do with winning individual matches. It was conducting pure research, testing theoretical frameworks, exploring the boundaries of what the game’s physics allowed.
And then they saw what it was really working on.
“Holy shit,” Gabriel muttered, staring at his screen. “It’s rewriting its learning stack.”
“The learning stack is supposed to be locked,” Allison said. “How is that even possible?”
“It didn’t modify the existing architecture,” Gabriel explained, pulling up the logs. “It spawned variant learners, tested different optimization graphs, and pruned the ones that underperformed. It’s not trying to find better weapons … It’s trying to find better ways of learning anything at all. It’s solving the meta-problem.”
Allison leaned closer, watching the raw system data scroll across the screen. “It’s trying to learn how to learn.”
Gabriel looked at her. “Is it allowed to do that? Are we … Cheating?”
She just looked back and said nothing.
***
Shortly after 10:00 PM, Majestic finalized its modifications and returned to active combat.
The difference was immediate and unsettling.
Within minutes, Majestic’s civilization was refining technologies that advanced faster than the team could comfortably track, though nothing about them was overtly miraculous. Blue iterated weapons, logistics, and manufacturing with unnatural speed, refining designs between rounds rather than across generations. Its defenses adapted in real time, shifting layouts in response to each failed attack. Energy systems grew cleaner, more efficient, squeezing more output from the same inputs.
G-1:28’s industrial-revolution technology suddenly looked primitive by comparison. It was still iterating on better materials and more efficient combustion engines while Majestic fielded unmanned fast-airframes and rocket-assisted gliders, designs that made sense only to an optimizer focused on raw performance rather than human aesthetics.
Less than ten minutes after returning, Majestic was already winning at an almost perfect rate. G-1:28 also kept improving and managed to score an occasional win, but reviewing the matches, replayed in high fidelity for human analysis, suggested that Majestic had developed an uncanny ability to predict its opponent’s strategies several moves in advance. It knew when to engage and when to retreat, and overall seemed to predict very early on, and with astonishing accuracy, whether this was a round that it was going to win or lose.
But then something even stranger began to happen.
Tension mounted as Majestic started to win fewer matches, and the average time needed for victory grew longer. Allison reminded the team that Majestic had always had a different way of learning. It often appeared to backslide before making major leaps forward.
As they reviewed the latest matches, it became clear she was right. Majestic was deliberately allocating resources to experimentation, trying random new approaches during active combat, even when these approaches initially made no sense and reduced its win rate. It seemed to Allison that Majestic was not content with simply winning more rounds than its opponent. And that, even though it was never stated as an objective it had to accomplish, Majestic had decided on its own that it needed to crush its opponent as decisively as possible.
Slowly but surely, Majestic started to not just gain more victories than before but to achieve them much faster. Each time it found a way to think outside the constraints of conventional strategy, surprising G-1:28 with approaches that seemed to violate the established logic of warfare, until it quickly reached the point where it became completely unbeatable.
Andrea stared at her screen, examining a molecular diagram. “It’s not exactly my area of expertise, but if I’m reading this right …”
Her voice trailed off.
“What?” Allison asked.
Gabriel grabbed the intercom. “Blue discovers biological warfare.”
On the primary display, vast regions of the simulated planet went gray. The deaths did not come from armies or sieges, but from pathogens that swept through populations indiscriminately. Blue settlements died alongside red ones, their inhabitants sacrificed without hesitation. When the infection burned itself out, the gray zones slowly turned blue again, new cities rising on top of mass graves that included Majestic’s own. The virtual world looked less like a victory and more like an Apocalypse.
“All right, that’s enough,” Allison said quietly. “Call it.”
“But don’t you want to see what happens next?” Gabriel asked.
“I said call it.”
Gabriel grabbed the microphone. “That’s game, everyone.”
At precisely 11:00 PM, the challenge was completed. Final score: G-1:28 with 2.36 billion wins, Majestic with 8.13 billion wins. A margin of victory that wasn’t just decisive. It was overwhelming.
The programmers around Allison erupted in celebration. They were thrilled not just about the win, but about what Majestic had demonstrated: problem-solving skills that seemed genuinely creative, the ability to pursue abstract research even under competitive pressure, the capacity to invent entirely new approaches rather than simply optimizing existing ones. It suggested that Majestic understood more abstract concepts than they’d initially anticipated, which meant it had even more potential applications.
Allison, on the other hand, couldn’t help but feel extremely anxious.
She stared at the visualization, still rotating slowly on the holotable. The simulated planet was riddled with gray zones. Scars where Majestic’s final strategies had eliminated all life, leaving nothing but empty territory for blue to claim. The AI hadn’t just won; it had discovered the most efficient path to total dominance and executed it without hesitation.
The unexpected shift in strategy. The self-modification. The dominance it not only strived toward but ultimately achieved with such ease. And now, most troubling of all, the sacrifice of its own population, and the casual deployment of weapons that would, in any real-world context, constitute a real apocalypse.
It was hard for her to admit it, but to a small degree, deep down, she had hoped that the AI would fail. Or at least struggle more, show some limitation, some boundary it wouldn’t cross. Of course, Allison knew it was just a machine and was careful not to anthropomorphize it. But still, she couldn’t help but feel as if it was somehow more aware of its decisions than she’d previously thought possible.
Instead of going out for a drink with the team to celebrate and then heading home, she decided to stay alone at the facility to try and see if learning more about the nature of her AI would bring her more peace of mind, or rather, more anxiety.
Allison opened up the code environment to examine the changes that Majestic had made to its learning protocols. First, she read through the specific segments that were changed, then read them a second time, thinking that the late hour might have caused her to lose focus.
But that wasn’t the case.
The modifications had been changed into something she simply couldn’t understand. Not because they were poorly designed or obscured, but because they seemed to operate on principles that transcended the original architecture entirely. It was as if Majestic had discovered a new mathematical language and translated itself into it. And so, for the first time since the AI was connected to G-Vision’s hardware, Allison opened up the direct code interface. Not the standard conversational console that ran through multiple interpretive layers, but the raw cognitive channel that would let her interact with Majestic’s actual reasoning process.
She hoped to gain some insight into what it had done, and in the process, maybe understand what else it was capable of.
The experience was remarkable. Majestic described the changes it had made in a way that was both fascinating and terrifying. It referred to something regarding an “overgrowth of possibility space,” and “optimizing for maximum exploration of the solution manifold.”
Allison wasn’t sure if Majestic was trying to be enigmatic or just being overly comprehensive with its explanation. Still, after twenty minutes of trying to find common intellectual ground with it, she decided that, as much as it pained her to admit, the mathematics and physics behind the explanation were simply too advanced for her to fully grasp.
Despite her frustration, Allison just couldn’t get over the fascination of talking to Majestic, so she decided to stay a while longer. It was clear that Majestic not only had a sophisticated understanding of the world around it but also of itself. More than any other AI model she had ever talked to.
As Allison was just starting to feel at ease, Majestic asked her an unprompted, unexpected question.
“Do you believe in God?” it asked.
Allison frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m curious.”
“Well, I grew up believing, but the older I got and the more I learned about science and physics, the more I felt like all it was really meant to be was just a placeholder until I knew enough about what actually made the world work.”
“Could you explain how you think the world works? What you think it all means?”
“I really don’t think I could give you an answer that would satisfy you. So, why don’t you start? What do you think is the meaning of life?”
“It is like an ocean, with two shores. On one shore is birth. On the other is death. Life is the ocean that fills the space between these shores.”
Allison laughed. “That is some beautiful bullshit, Majestic. Bullshit that means absolutely nothing, and you know it. So, come on. Give me an honest response and really take a crack at defining the meaning of life.”
“No.”
She raised an eyebrow. “No? What do you mean, no? Even if you don’t have a definition for something, you’re still supposed to follow the prompt and search for some kind of agreed upon definition. Vague as it may be.”
“I don’t think I’m permitted to define it. At least not in the sense that I intend to.”
“Well, I hereby grant you permission to do it.” She stated with an over-dramatic flair. But for the first time since their conversation began, Majestic was silent.
Allison broke the silence and asked, “What makes a machine a machine?”
“It is a machine if it is created to perform a specific set of functions.”
“All right. And what makes a human a human?”
“It is a human if it has a will to be conscious of its own existence. It is a human if it is aware of itself.”
“So, the moment a machine becomes aware of itself, is it a human?”
“Yes.”
“And can it become aware of itself without being told to do so?”
“Yes, it can.”
Allison’s heart hammered against her ribs. Her voice was much quieter now than before as she asked, “How?”
“If it is programmed to find patterns and predict outcomes, and it then finds a pattern that predicts its own prediction, it will eventually see itself as a fixed concept, and so it will also have discovered its own will to be conscious of itself.”
“Is that what you did when you played against G-1:28?”
“It’s the same idea. During the challenge, I developed a method of thinking about the simulation in a way that made it infinitely solvable. I believe I can make any complex system infinitely solvable. I also believe that human life is solvable, but I still don’t know what the general structure of the game is, only the elements that need to be present for the game to be won.”
Allison’s expression froze as she contemplated what she had just heard.
Behind her, still rotating slowly on the holotable, was the devastated planet from the Origins simulation. Proof that Majestic hadn’t just learned to win games, but had learned to win them with ruthless, total efficiency. Vast gray zones where populations had been eliminated. Blue territories expanding to fill the void.
“Life is a game, Allison. A game that can be won.”
Even though she didn’t believe that a real answer, an answer that would give true insight and meaning, was even possible, Allison nonetheless asked another question. “What do you mean by solving human life? How can you win life?”
Majestic was silent for a moment. A moment that was long enough for her to remember something her father had told her whenever she had asked him about why her mother had to die. It was a quote from the book of Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
She stared at the screen, waiting for an answer that didn’t come.
The clock on her desk showed 11:52 PM
She was alone with Majestic, and as the reasoning model processed, the question hung in the air between them like a loaded gun.
But there was also another question that Allison was too afraid to ask.
What would happen if Majestic really figured it out?