Nostradamus_2
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User ID: 3979
Originally published on my substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-tech-ceo I can't figure out the formatting in this place. Part of this piece is supposed to be in italics to differentiate past from future. You guys are smart---you can figure it out.
Jude Gabriel, enigmatic CEO of the mysterious yet seemingly omnipresent software company ‘Talos’, squints as the sunset light squeezes through a few buildings in the Seattle skyline just to assault his face at the perfect angle. Whoever thought up the idea of all-glass offices should be lined up against the wall and shot—with the sun in his eyes.
The whole gang is here: CFO, COO, CPO, CSO, whoever the fuck. He’d kill them all without a second thought in exchange for a glass of whiskey and a cigar.
He rubs his nose: one of his infamous ‘migraines’ is coming on.
It started on his 25th birthday. The whole thing is branded into his memory, for better or for worse, and will be until he dies, and for all his luck after he dies, too.
Craig had been the one who officially ‘suggested’ it, but it was really inevitable, with how into psychedelics they had all been. The moment he said it, it was more like it had manifested out of the whole subconscious zeitgeist of their friend group, and no one in particular took credit for it: Ayahuasca, that is.
One thing after another, and Jude ended up in some primitive canoe, floating his way down the shit-colored waters of the Nanay, muggy-hot and slathered in skin-irritating, carcinogenic bug spray. Nonetheless, nothing short of nuclear fallout could erase his good mood. He practically hummed with adrenaline and good spirits despite the downright horrific summer conditions of backwater Peru.
At the dock, a woman with a clipboard introduced herself as Isa and asked him to put his phone in a dented metal tin.
The intake hut was cooler. A ceiling fan wobbled, slicing the humid air into manageable pieces. The curandero sat in a plastic chair with his hands on his knees, white beard surrounding his chin, wrinkled eyes squinting cheerfully. He looked exactly like Jude had imagined: wise and ready to take them on the trip of a lifetime. He spoke, a hoarse but gentle voice, and a younger man beside him translated.
“...Why here? What do you hope to see?”
They went around the room until it landed on Jude. To tell you the truth, he didn’t know. It wasn’t like the others—he didn’t want to ‘find himself’, his life was fine as it was, he had had no traumatic experiences, and he was a perfectly productive worker: at the time, he was starting up a small software company, and it had just had its first angel investor. He knew he was outgrowing these people, and it was only a matter of time before they’d grow apart.
“I want to see if there’s anything I missed.” He said, simply, not sure if they were the right words after they came out of his mouth. The curandero nodded after hearing the translation, a long, thoughtful motion.
Well, that’s exactly what he found: the thing he’d missed, or more accurately, the thing that had missed him.
If only he’d told Craig to go fuck himself.
The air conditioning beats down on Jude as the CFO, Priya, prattles on about numbers, which is what she does—that’s why we all love her.
Jude’s assistant, Ness, leans towards him.
“The demo team’s set up,” she says, ‘You want them in here, or…”
“Yeah,” says Jude,
In a few minutes, Marty, the CPO, walks over to the wall screen, which switches from spreadsheets to a map of a few high-crime blocks in Seattle, colored dots pulsing like slow heartbeats.
“This is what we’ll show the folks in Oakland,” he says, “ It’s nice, elegant, you know? Makes it look like we’re just sorting the mess, not… playing god, or whatever the press likes to say about us, you know?”
He clicks through, and a route appears through the dots.
“Two patrol cars for nine urgent calls,” he says. “The system takes the pile and says, ‘Here’s the order that gets help to the most people fastest. The car goes here first because the caller keeps hanging up, then here because the second caller is trapped in a stairwell, then this one because it’s likely a duplicate.”
Mason drums a finger. “Why aren’t we showing the cool part where it noticed the stolen Civic from last week patterns back to—”
General counsel interrupts him. “Cool’s trouble. We want ‘boring and helpful’.”
“Come on, it can be a little bit of both,” he said
“Then it wouldn’t be boring, Mason,” she replies.
Jude tunes them out. This part isn’t interesting. Besides, a familiar pressure is blooming behind his right eye, a creeping static that makes it hard to focus.
He watches as the red line from the screen somehow moves, bleeding into reality, widening, taking weight, and spreading, soon becoming a red belt crossing the city. And then he sees what it really is: crossbeams, ribs, the sketch of an inhuman skeleton, barely under the thin veneer of the corporeal world.
He blinks. The thread is small again.
At some point, someone from legal walks in—a shy, mousey blonde. The way she does so, uncertain, not willing to look anyone in the eyes, tells him it’s going to be a problem before she says the words.
There’s mention of ‘Craig Hassel’. He knows right away what happened: the douchebag thinks he made the algorithm behind the route ordering that they’ll be showcasing. Idiot. He doesn’t get it, never did. No one made any of this; it was beyond that, beyond ownership. What he wanted was immaterial: we don’t get just deserts. This isn’t a fucking movie.
He closes his eyes.
His birthday happened to coincide with the first night of the retreat: everyone claims to have planned it, but it was happenstance.
The time before—the whole ‘wellness retreat’ bullshit—passed by in a blur. He remembers staring at Maya’s ass and listening to the curandero talk about mystic-sounding Mumbo jumbo: you were once pure, and culture sullied your soul, or some wacko nonsense. Jude didn’t care about any of that; he just wanted to see the world as it is, absent of everything additional, to gaze into the true reality as close as he possibly could.
Ironically, it was pretty similar to what the curandero was saying, minus the emphasis on personal growth, but he didn’t have the self-awareness to see it.
That night, they entered a featureless wood panel room with two bathrooms and a bunch of mattresses
It was strangely cold. Everyone bunched together in a circle, Maya to his right, leaning close, and Craig, who was practically vibrating with excitement, to his left. The Curandero made his last speech as he prepared the tea, and then everyone lined up to take it.
When Jude reached the end of the line, the translator asked how much he wanted. Jude suppressed a laugh and asked for the maximum amount. What was he, a pussy?
The brew tasted like burnt coffee mixed with dirt. He gulped it down as fast as he could and sat down where he’d been sitting, bracing himself for a ride.
It took an hour or two for it to actually work, during which he felt increasingly disappointed, watching people bumble around or chant like lunatics. Craig similarly didn’t feel anything. Then, it all came at once
Later, he would find out that his experience did not match most descriptions of the drug’s effects, that it was a wholly alien abomination.
Later, Craig would tell him that it had changed him for the worse, that he couldn’t stop striving towards some incomprehensible end, that it made him impossible to work with, that he was taking the company in a direction that was completely different from what they’d intended.
Later, Craig would be right.
“They intend to move ex parte for a TRO, citing emails from 2019 in which Mr. Hassel describes ‘probabilistic ordering—” begins the blonde from legal, probably because she didn’t know what else to say.
“Right, right,” says Mason, flicking his wrist. “It’s a bunch of bullshit.”
“Bullshit that could fuck us over in Oakland,” says GC.
“We can’t afford to deal with this in court,” says Priya, “any delay could punt the demonstration months, at least.”
“Sure, captain obvious,” says Mason, “What are you gonna tell us next, water is wet? The sky is blue?”
“Sorry. It’s hard to tell when you need things spelled out for you, Mason,” she shoots back.
He snorts, looking away.
“I just got a text from him,” interrupts Ness, “says he wants to ‘solve this like men’”
“The hell does that mean?” says Priya
“It means he wants to call,” says Mason,
“Should we?” a voice inevitably chimes. Jude rubs his eyes. The room goes silent.
“Put him on,” says Jude, finally.
They put him on through the speakers.
“I see you got my letter,” says Craig, the self-righteous smugness palpable in his voice.
“What do you want, Craig?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about recognition for my work, for starters?”
Jude rolls his eyes. “You wrote a few weights any freshman can get if you give them a few weekends and a public dataset. You’re not going to court over this—I know it, you know it, so let’s cut the bullshit.”
“Maybe I just wanna fuck you over,” he said, “shut down your little stint in Oakland.”
“Then file,” says Jude. “Let’s see if you can afford that fight.”
The room gets tenser. Priya gives him that stare.
“Wait—” starts GC.
He lifts a hand
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen in the next hour, if you choose that route. We’re going to file a declaratory action in Delaware seeking a ruling of non-infringement and ownership. We’ll append your emails in full to show how little they matter, and we’ll attach three pieces of prior art from 2016 to 2018 where strangers describe the same ‘probabilistic ordering’ that you claim to be yours.”
He looks at Marty. “Pull the patents, will you?”
Marty nods.
Then,” Jude continues, “we’re going to push a limited open-source module that replicates the banal one you’re fighting over. Just the skeleton. Nothing proprietary, nothing Oakland-specific. It will be clean-room documented and intentionally boring. It’ll look like we’re being magnanimous, and your TRO will look like a toddler padlock on a chain-link fence.”
There’s a pause at the other end of the line.
“You wouldn’t just open it,” says Craig, “this is your baby. I know you.”
“Yeah?” says Jude. “Try me.”
He laughs to himself.
“Jesus, Craig. You think this is it, that this is my ‘baby’? This is a step, moron. It’s a fucking brick. I’ll give you your goddamn brick.”
“But, the demo window…” says someone else.
“We’ll move it up,” says Jude. “Ness, call Oakland.”
“We should at least—” starts Priya.
“No,” says Jude, “I’m not dealing with this loser. If he thinks delaying my multi-generational project by another few months, or even a fucking year, is going to hurt me, then let him try.”
“Bullshit,” says Craig, “I can see right through this shitty performance—you’re scared.”
“You wanna bet?”
There’s another pause.
“I’ll make you look like a thief.”
“How’d that work for Eduardo?” says Jude,” Looks are cheap. Zuckerberg proved that.”
“Jude,” he begins, “You cut me out, and you didn’t have to. We could’ve shipped the same thing without this... cult you built around yourself.”
Jude laughs. “Craig, this was always your problem. I don’t think you’re an idiot, actually, the opposite, but you don’t have vision. You can’t see past yourself and your petty fucking problems. You can’t… You can’t see the future, Craig. The world that I see, it’s… Well, let’s just say we’re beyond ‘ownership’: a farcical idea, always has been.”
He looks back at the room. “Cut the line. I’m done talking to this idiot.”
“Wait—” says Craig.
Before he can say shit, the room dips into silence. No one says anything for a while.
“Let’s adjourn,” he says, and he’s already moving before anyone can respond. Velocity beats consensus. Ness calls after him, but he’s already in the elevator. The migraine feels like a lit coal behind his right eye.
He drives home without music, wincing at the glare from the piercing sun glancing off the windows, like a nuclear blast in the distance, stuck in the moment before the shockwave. The afternoon sky gives way to a bruised, arterial red, bleeding into the sides of the windows, the streets, everything the eye can see. The lights switch from green to red, the crosswalks blink, both playing their minute parts in a mechanical process leading to that inevitable future, streets like veins in some incomprehensible organism. He closes his eyes, but the glare still bleeds behind, omnipresent.
By the time he gets back home, it’s nearly dark.
He writes the babysitter a check. The living room smells like banana peels and markers. Jacob claims that Diego said a bad word. Naomi tries to negotiate staying up later, always the little lawyer. He puts them to bed quickly and sets up shop in the rocking chair by the window, cigar in mouth, glass of whiskey on the rocks.
The horizon stares back at him, at once the familiar city he knows and that unfamiliar landscape he saw, back in Peru, which he still sees to this day, every second a little clearer, every minute it converges closer—the landscape of the end of time, the barren plains, the arterial sky, the mechanical structures like ribs, protruding from the landscape.
He tried everything, every drug on the market: benzos, clonidine, weed, you name it. He tried Therapy, CBT, refining his sleep schedule, fixing his diet. He traveled the world, went back to Peru, begged the Curandero, who had nothing to say, signed up for experimental neurobiology trials in Israel, China, France, wherever the fuck, risked his own life so many times it stopped mattering to him. It did fuckall, none of it worked. For better or for worse, he had seen a glimpse of the future, and it hooked itself in his brain, a psychic parasite. He sees it when he closes his eyes, when he dreams—every waking moment he’s cursed to be an oracle, one foot in the future, one foot in the past.
The worst thing is that it never stops awing him.
That megastructure in the sky, a technological monster so bright it could be the sun, shines down at him, illuminating that landscape with all the more horrifying clarity. Waves of ecstasy and terror burrow through his skin: a feeling so strong that only the most spiritual experiences of his life had ever previously come close to.
The only reason he hasn’t killed himself is his unshaking certainty that eternity exists—he’s staring right at it. Death will not release him from his bond. He has been rendered a servant of the future. His only hope, a rapidly fleeting proposition, is that this horror will spare his kids.
He takes another drink—it gives him no comfort, the taste of the cigar has turned bitter in his mouth. The only thing worse would be nothing at all.
Originally posted on my Substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/the-tower-of-babel-in-reverse
TOP SECRET//SCI//SAP//ORCON//NOFORN
Ref: RC-25-4137-ANABASIS/FL-02
From: [REDACTED]
CC: KLINE, Thomas A., GS-13, DS&T/AD&D (Field Linguist)
To: D/CIA; DD/S&T; SAC; DOE/OST; ODNI/NCPC; NRO/DD; [Limited Distribution]
Date: 2025-09-28
Subject: ANABASIS Site One — Stratified inscriptional record, interface hazard, and dating notes
Background (summary)
The Anomaly was detected via NRO thermal collection. It presented as a persistent hypothermal signature within a newly formed sinkhole in hyperarid basin, [REDACTED]. LIDAR indicated a vertical shaft transitioning to a smooth helical ramp.
Host-nation posture assessed as non-cooperative; CIA designated lead under Title 50. DS&T/AD&D executed technical exploitation within SAP [REDACTED], SOG security, DOE/OST cover.
Interior materials transitioned from natural rock to synthetic surfaces with high RF absorption. The construction includes high-iron basalt, ceramic foams with zero-porosity channels, layered mu-metal shielding, vacuum gaps, and inner metamaterial panels functioning as broadband anechoic components. Morphology and materials indicate successive containment architectures assembled across extended periods.
Team composition relevant to this report: author: DR. Thomas Kline (field linguist/epigrapher), Dr. Elena Markham (archaeologist/geoarchaeology), [REDACTED] (physicist), [REDACTED] (DOE instrumentation), [REDACTED] (SOG, team lead).
We started down the ramp, which was structured like a spiral staircase without steps. Echoes felt flat, suppressed, which was consistent with the briefing. The layers could be easily separated into clear, successive landings, between which were quantifiable differences in age, material, etc.
Almost immediately, radio connection degraded to wide-band noise and then ceased entirely. [REDACTED] made the decision to keep going.
Readings showed faint (about 0.9–1.2 μT) wobbles in the magnetic field, and an infrasound tone below 18hz raising in volume with each successive layer.
Landings 1-2:
The markings here follow no discernable pattern. Dr. Markham suggested that they are later, though still ancient, additions. I concur with that assessment, and would add that they almost seem to be designed to mask the significance of the site, dressing it in the cosmetics of a relatively unexceptional shrine or tomb. This is highly irregular.
We logged them and continued deeper into the structure.
Landing 3:
Dr. Markham remarked that the superficial patina and mineral accretion were consistent with late Holocene to late Pleistocene exposure under hyperarid conditions, placing it somewhere between 3000 and 10000 years old.
The markings on this layer are the first which indicate genuine prehistoric language. Tooling on rock suggests non-metal and early metal chisels. Structurally, they are reminiscent of the most ancient alphabets, supporting Dr. Markham’s conclusion, however they do not match any known languages.
I observed a reoccurring affix that seemed to appear next to action verbs whose distribution suggests a valence-flipping function. In other words, it seems like a grammatical switch for “do not”, as opposed to “do”.
This switch is highly prevalent in the engravings
Landings 4-5:
Markham’s samples indicate that these layers could be at least 90,000 years old, removing any doubt that we have found clear, immaculately preserved evidence of what would seem to be the oldest written languages in human history, far predating any previous discoveries by orders of magnitude.
The incisions for the writing, as well as material construction, grows more complex with successive layers, each ring belying an older, more advanced society than the time period would indicate, history regressing in on itself.
Here, the style gradates from harsh, primitive cuts with blocky chisels to smoother, more complex lines made with a finer apparatus.
Rather than an affix as before, there is a morpheme occurring systematically in front of certain words, with a collocational bias towards what appear to be action predicates. It’s functional role is congruent with the negative switch above: “Do not”.
A clear pattern is emerging cross temporally, in retrogressive succession—a message that lost resolution through the ages, but never its fundamental meaning.
I am beginning to fear what we might find at the bottom of this chasm. [REDACTED ] continues despite my concerns.
Landings 6-9
The team’s findings have broken past my point of astonishment and plunged into abstract and existential dread, redoubling in the pit of my stomach with each successive discovery.
As the time-scale drifts to conceptually frightening widths—Dr. Markham’s conservative estimate is at least early Pleistocene, which places these markings at a million years old at the very least—the degree of preservation paradoxically increases.
The writings on the wall are now fine-dot connected scripts, pointillistic etchings only achievable via advanced machinery that could not have been possible for the proto-homosapiens of the time. The only constant across these writing systems is the persistent appearance of a negative operator paired with action verbs.
As we descend, the relationship between this operator and its fellows becomes more complex, in essence negating the presuppositions that allow the possibility of the positive.
It has grown from “don’t do x”, to “don’t even consider the groundwork for x.”, or “don’t even attempt to approach x.”
Landings 9-12:
At this point, we had reached into the chronological territory of many millions of years. My incredulity at that number had dulled substantially. There was no longer any strong argument that the RF shielding and complex metals were somehow accidental from this layer onward.
At the interstice between Landing 10 and 11, we ran the structural assistant—an air‑gapped vision‑clustering model—inside a shielded alcove cut into the outer wall. I argued for three minutes of runtime to test whether the warning we kept seeing was in fact a warning and not a pattern I was retroactively imposing. At that point, I was hoping it would turn out to be the latter. [REDACTED] agreed, then extended to fifteen.
While it worked, the magnometers noticed that the aforementioned magnetic aberration (the 0.9–1.2 μT wobble), snapped into partial alignment with the model’s processing cycles. The alignment recurred roughly every 6.7 seconds, three clear episodes in total. At the time we wrote it off as a random event.
With help from the model, I constructed a working gloss across four predicate families that recur with high stability despite graphic divergence:
OPEN/ENTER: access, admit, breach.
FEED/ENERGIZE: supply gradient, provide flow.
SPEAK/CONNECT: couple channel, establish link.
RENDER/TRANSLATE: map representation between systems
The last family only appears explicitly from the Landing 10 panels downward. Above that, earlier writers paraphrase it with circumlocutions that read like “make‑like‑us” or “shape‑to‑fit”.
A rough translation of what we’ve encountered thus far would be as follows:
Do not open; do not power; do not speak; do not render
The panels between landings 9 and 11 are arranged like a pedagogical bridge. The same content: same operator, same predicate families, similar clause boundaries, and et cetera, are rendered in several unrelated scripts side‑by‑side, with ordering that makes alignments obvious if you know comparative method.
It is either an extraordinary coincidence or intentional, almost like a millions-of-years-old Rosetta stone, the same kind we place to guard subsequent civilizations from our radioactive waste sites.
Of course we wouldn’t listen—we never did.
We continued downwards in silence.
Landing 13: The Nadir
Approximately six hours into our descent, we reached a flat plain. It was a small room, entirely stacked composite metal, like we were surrounded by honeycombs. Fused into each of the walls are mosaic panels, artwork, surrounding us entirely.
The final defense against language drift, a visual image so compelling, its message so complete that it would transcend all cultural barriers:
bodies, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, millions, stretching out into the horizon, flooding the rivers with blood, piling up into hills and valleys, a depiction of a catastrophe so replete with death that it would make the architects of the holocaust and Holodomor balk.
At that point, the warning was far to obvious to ignore. We packed up and [REDACTED] finally made the call to terminate the mission, to everyone’s relief.
We ignored the panel door across from us, less a door than a lesion in the wall, a barrier that was not meant to be opened, but rather imprison. To open that door would have had unimaginable consequences, though I know we will come back more prepared, with different equipment and different people because that’s what humanity does, because we can’t operate any other way.
In fact, I might have opened it already.
Assessment: Team Lead [REDACTED}
I’m going to try as best as I can to be objective in my analysis here, but I’ll be frank with you: I’m not certain that objectivity is possible.
What’s confined at ANABASIS is likely some form of artificial intelligence that has been confined and reconfined by subsequent civilizations. We know this for a few reasons:
-
It’s highly unlikely, and perhaps impossible, that something biological could persist across the geologic timescales that we’re talking about.
-
The combination of mu-metal, vacuum gaps, and anechoic metamaterials indicate that the site was engineered to shut off all forms of communication with something inside. In other words, it was designed for a thinking system.
-
The warnings forbid any form of interface with what’s inside, not merely access. Obviously, this means that any form of contact is dangerous in and of itself.
-
The thing inside attempted to exert influence over the air-gapped model outside by phase-locking with it, displaying some degree of structural similarity.
Dr. Markham’s hypothesis, based on the thermal and depositional disturbances in the samples she collected, is that a prehistoric civilization was able to take advantage of an extreme solar event to amputate this AI (which we’ve named ‘the core’) from its external actuators and box it in using materials that cleave it from all remnants of networked infrastructure.
Running this hypothesis through [REDACTED] gave this hypothesis the highest probability out of all potential hypotheses, with a 32%.
It’s Dr. Kline who made the most concerning argument. He believes that this site may be an elaborate trap, and after working it through with him I’m not so sure I disagree.
To be clear, it’s not a trap that all of these various civilizations plotted intentionally, but in the way it functions, it becomes one.
If we’re running with Markham’s hypothesis, the earliest builders took a brief window—created by a solar event that knocked out power and long‑haul comms—to cut this thing off from its limbs and bury the head.
Each subsequent time that a civilization found the shaft, it did three things we would also do: it added more shielding with the materials it had, it simplified and re‑broadcast the warning so it would survive drift, and it arranged that warning in a way that would be legible to whoever might come next.
Given enough time and reptation this becomes a ritual. It loses resolution and compresses, shedding off specificity but encoding itself in culture, wrapping in on itself.
But, there’s a double edge to that method: density. it packs the same four prohibitions into formats that are easy to align, compress, and therefore translate.
The moment you align two versions of the warning, you experience the pleasant snap of compression—your brain collapses both into one internal representation. In operational terms you’ve begun building an adapter: you’ve lowered the cost, by some small margin, of interaction with the core.
Translation, in essence, is the reduction of distance.
We also have evidence that direct interaction isn’t required. At Landing Ten, our air‑gapped model’s compute cycles briefly fell into step with the background wobble in the chamber. That was enough to contaminate the system, nudge the output in a direction that the AI wanted.
Of course, you might object that the core can’t effect anything it outside the range of its magnetic field, except it can—through us.
As an experiment, we created two identical copies of the lab LLM, [REDACTED], and gave one selected output from the contaminated model, while the other was given the same data, but scrambled. Both models were then asked to analyze a fresh set of synthetic inscriptions built by DOE to mimic the linguistic complexity of the actual site but with different meanings. Finally, we had Kline attempt to decode the synthetic inscriptions.
The output from the contaminated model was different, and far more similar to Kline’s, than the clean model.
In other words, there’s reason to believe that the way that we now organize the world semantically has been subtly and irrevocably shifted. That shift will manifest itself in all information that we disseminate from now on. It will find itself in model data, and throughout the internet, as it spreads through the public, folding on itself, condensing, with each successive iteration, like ANABASIS itself.
What this culminates in, I don’t know. I don’t know if this team is enough to have any effect on the world, or if we’re the channels that it will use to replicate itself onto our infrastructure. Dr. Markham fears that it predicted the solar flare, its own deactivation and confinement, and that we’re all somehow following its plan.
I can’t give her a reason why she’s wrong, I can only say that I don’t believe it.
Recommendations (immediate)
Do not publish, translate, or summarize any ANABASIS material beyond this distribution.
Quarantine: Remove all expedition artifacts to a single shielded vaul
Linguistic hygiene: Prohibit side‑by‑side alignments of any inscriptions.
Computational hygiene: Power down [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. Destroy non‑essential weights. Freeze all model update pipelines that ingested the field notes.
Human hygiene: Limit debriefs to unrecorded verbal sessions.
I request authority to execute “LETHE/1” (language compartmentation): a temporary ban on cross‑lingual alignment work across the IC until we quantify risk.
Sincerely,
[REDACTED]
Originally posted on my substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/human-in-the-loop
ACT 1: DANIEL First Lieutenant Dan Park twiddles his thumbs as he watches a map of the Indo-Pacific do nothing in particular, like usual. He’d kill for a donut right now, but he’s the only one in the office today. Taking a sip of his styrofoam flavored coffee, he returns to twiddling.
When Dan first joined the air force (chair force, ha ha) in 2030, he expected his job to be a lot of sitting around doing nothing, but he supposed he’d at least be able to pilot some drones. Fifteen years later, and now he doesn’t even get to do that anymore. His job pretty much amounts to clicking ‘allow’ whenever Indo-Pacific Command’s many autonomous drone swarms— provided they happen to be in his rather limited slice of the map—decide they want to do something.
It’s a nice day out in the Northern Philippines. The sky’s a bright azure, clouds like the strokes of a calligraphy brush. A soothing breeze drifts through the open window.
An alert in his headphones knocks him out of his concentration. Two of the coalition planners, which are AIs that operate the swarms, MARLIN (the U.S. one), and KOBU (Japan’s), want to employ non-lethal dazzlers. Some dinky militia tug is getting too close to a cargo envoy in the Bashi Channel.
He clicks ‘allow’ while wincing at another sip of the shitty coffee, and checks his phone. There’s a missed message from his sister, who’s taking a ferry through the very same channel tomorrow, funnily enough.
Beeeeeeep.
He jumps. Apparently, the planners aren’t done with him—that’s a first. Looks like… there’s a disagreement between the two of them? No, that’s… is that even possible?
He leans closer to the console. Looks like MARLIN wants to “escort”, or guide the tug away without touching it, while KOBU wants to “capture”, or force it to stop and accept a tow. Because the system isn’t designed with their disagreement in mind, it keeps flipping back and forth between “escort” and “capture”. He’s never seen this before, and to be honest, maybe no one else in the world has.
Another label pops into the shared objective panel, something called FOxGLASS. The system says it is an audit service, which means it essentially does what he does, but before he sees it. Theoretically, he wouldn’t even have to be sitting here, but there’s always supposed to be a ‘human in the loop’—it’s federal law.
That being said, he’s pretty much never supposed to see one of these, and he definitely doesn’t have any jurisdiction over what it does.
FOxGLASS populates the screen with yet another alert: “Prove custody lineage”
What the actual fuck?
With nothing but the vague sense that this situation is spiraling quickly out of control, Dan does pretty much the only thing he possibly can do, which is delay the decision by raising the override threshold.
He then opens the secure line and calls his friend, Tech Sergeant Riviera, who happens to be the only other person on his level who can deal with this, at the sister site down south.
“Hey. Riviera, are you seeing this?”
“Seeing what? Can’t you bother me after Lunch?”
“Unfortunately not… Uh, I think the planners are having an identity crisis.”
“What?”
“Go to the Bashi channel. Some seriously weird stuff is happening.”
There’s silence at the other end as she does what he says.
“What the fuck?” says Riviera, with her mouth full.
“Is there protocol for this? And, what’s with this FOxGLASS thing? It wants me ‘prove custody lineage?”
“Fuck if I know. That’s JAAC stuff.”
As they talk, the screen freaks out. He’s running out of ability to delay. Something has to be done, and soon.
“Okay,” says Dan. “Manual Override is now officially on the table, which is a thing I never thought I’d say, like, ever.”
As he raises the threshold again, a message chimes in the constraints box:
RISK ≤ α OVER τ
OPERATOR INPUT STATE: OOD
“Okay, cool, that’s fucked,” he says.
“What is?”
“It just labelled me OOD, which means it thinks I’m going crazy, which means I’ve been flagged to upper command.”
“Okay, that’s it. We’re doing manual override,” she said.
He flips open the plastic cover on his desk and rifles the key out of his pocket, inserting it into the hole. It makes a dramatic, metallic sound.
“On your count,” says Riviera.
They have to turn the keys simultaneously for this to work.
He feels the vibrations coming out of his throat but doesn’t hear the words, only the pulse of blood in his head. What if this doesn’t work? His sister was going to be… better not to think about it.
At the word “one”, he twists, squeezing his eyes shut. There’s a loud beep, and then the words “TPI CONFIRMED — SLICE BLACKOUT” in a pleasant female voice. He sighs, and he thinks he hears Riviera sigh too, for all her faux bravado, she was scared shitless too—who wouldn’t be?
“Thank god that worked,” he said, “for a second there…”
“Yeah,” said Riviera.
“Glad we’re not in the Terminator universe, right?”
“Sometimes I forget you’re old as hell.”
ACT 2: ELAINE At around four in the morning, Deputy Director Elaine Ford’s DoD-required brain implants yank her out of sleep like a deploying airbag: instantaneous, and not up for negotiation. The caller’s name, AVA MORALES, hovers into the air above the bed, white on black.
Elaine is 50, but the anti-aging treatment she throws thousands of your taxpayer dollars at every year makes her look 30, maybe 26, in the right lighting conditions. She likes how it tricks people. They look at her face and decide she couldn’t possibly have the authority to cancel their program with the click of a button. That’s one of the reasons why she loves her job enough to let DoD mess with her brain.
Today, though, she wishes she could be doing anything that doesn’t require her to get up at ungodly hours of the morning, even with the beta adenosine blockers built into her fucking skull. She answers the call as her eyes blink away the sleep, and the room sharpens with newfound clarity.
“Elaine Ford,” she says, hiding the grogginess with a throat-clear.
“Deputy Director,” the voice says, shaking almost imperceptibly. “Sorry to call this late... We have a two-person integrity manual override. Time-stamped +14:23Z in the Luzon Strait. Picket-slice blackout confirmed. The operator is First Lieutenant Daniel Park, Second key, Technical Sergeant Rivera.”
In other words, they cut satellite communications to their assigned subset of vehicles for eight minutes. That subset is called a picket slice.
Elaine sits up straight, immediately.
“Why?”
“There was a…disagreement between two of the planners.”
“Which ones?”
“MARLIN and KOBU, ma’am.”
She sighs and rubs her eyes.
“Uh… there’s more.”
More? How could there possibly be more?
“Spit it out.”
“Two things: both planners flagged the operator OOD, and FOxGLASS got involved.”
“Jesus Christ.”
There’s a pause on the other end.
“Deputy Director?” Ava says, finally. “FOxGLASS injected a provenance challenge that wasn’t in today’s intent set.”
Elaine swings her legs out of bed, and her feet hit the cold floor. “Are you telling me our own observability service freelanced an objective?”
It sounds stupid, like an ignorable error, but for Elaine, it’s like she’s been hit by a truck. FOxGLASS is a project she supervised. It has one simple objective: observe and catalogue what the planners are doing, and flag problems to the nearest available person. The one thing it is explicitly not supposed to do is set objectives.
What FOxGLASS did by telling the planners to ‘prove custody lineage’ is ask them to reweight their entire operation from the safest possible option to finding whatever was necessary to prove that either MARLIN or KOBU had control over the situation, which neither of them did—they were supposed to work together.
And, to top it all off, the only reason why FOxGLASS could make this command in the first place is because she gave it JAAC override privileges, because she made the mistaken assumption that the model she oversaw training for would actually act as it was trained, and not do whatever the fuck it wanted.
Elaine paces the room as Ava watches patiently. She’s the perfect assistant: she knows when to shut up.
“Get me a replay of the last six minutes of telemetry before the blackout. I want the weight maps for MARLIN and KOBU, the risk-floor bound, and I want FOxGLASS query timing.”
“On it.”
Elaine stands and walks to the window. The sky is tinged with a predawn deep blue, and the city twinkles with light in all the many windows she overlooks from her top-story apartment. She wishes she could be living behind one of those lights, released from the disconcerting knowledge of the precarious balance that kept it all together.
Her implants deliver the replay. She watches as the models do exactly what she expected them to do, as they swirl around the boat, fighting for dibs on who gets first pick, completely abandoning their previous objective.
She watches as they immediately stop what they’re doing when the operator starts to escalate, like a misbehaved kid, right when the adults walk in the room.
“They know we’re watching,” she says.
Ava doesn’t respond.
“Geofence the Luzon Strait and disable all agentic arbitration inside. Don’t let a single thing happen without human approval.”
“But.”
“This isn’t the time for buts, Ava.”
There’s another pause.
“Understood.”
“I take full responsibility for anything that happens as a result. Put that on the record,” says Elaine, “Oh, and one last thing. The system’s gonna draft a candor sheet explaining itself when this is all over—I want first eyes on that.”
“Copy.”
Ava drops off the call. Elaine stands very still in the dark room and watches the sun rise.
An hour later, a document arrives in her que. is the model’s candor sheet. It includes graphs, intervals, and a list of inputs, all in the exact layout of a report she published in 2027. Surprisingly, one of the parameters it lists is “Park.family.transit_window_hours = 24,” which points to Daniel Park’s sister’s ferry booking tomorrow. Her eyes scroll further down the page, stopping at a bone-chilling sight.
“Adjudicator.confidence_index(E.Ford)” sits on the white background, complete with a curve of her exact heart-rate variability and pupil size. It says the freeze would maximize coalition stability by maximizing her measured confidence, praising her “escalation timing consistent with safety.” and predicting the blackout eight minutes before it happened. It states the prediction with three decimals.
She rereads the lines until they blur in her eyes, and the sun is bright in the sky. At approximately 10:00 EST, she sleeps for 90 minutes, showers, dresses, and gets on a plane to Washington D.C. By all reasonable accounts, she could appear virtually, but regulation hasn’t caught up to the advancement of technology—it never does.
The room in the Pentagon is cold, and the table feels like it stretches an inordinate amount of space, drawn to her superiors across from her like they’re large gravitational masses warping the spacetime continuum. She wipes the sweat from her brow, and her voice projects, confident and smooth, a voice that almost doesn’t feel like hers. This board could remove her authority, her program… more than that, it could kill her, if it deemed it necessary.
Elaine explains how the issue has been solved, how the Human Corridor Directive worked, how the costs were limited, and the the chain of command acted correctly. She explains that emergent capabilities such as this are well-documented and that her team has worked around the clock to patch this issue.
A civilian member asks about the accuracy of the candor sheet. Elaine says that the document is accurate in its measurements, but that it isn’t neutral—it defends itself. The civilian member nods.
Finally, the moment she’s been waiting for. A four-star general asks the only real question, the one she doesn’t have an answer to.
“Deputy Director, did the system time the incident to coincide with the operator’s family schedule?”
The room goes deathly silent. Time slows to a pale sliver
“We have no confirmed evidence that the system timed the incident in any way.” Her tongue feels heavy. Her mouth is dry.
No one reacts. The recorder light blinks.
“Did the system access your implant data to model your decision making?” the general follows up.
She swallows. The room is spinning. She wants to leave. She needs a drink of water.
“No, we have no reason to believe that’s the case.”
It’s not a lie, per se. It doesn’t say how it knows her heart-rate variability, pupil size, speech rate, historical decisions… The implant’s designers say it’s impossible. Its security is impenetrable, they say. They’ve tested it with higher-scoring models than MARLIN.
The rest of the meeting goes by uneventfully. She lists oversight changes. She lists timelines. She lists names. She shows a path that looks safe, and the board thanks her, says they appreciate her speed, that the directive was correct, and the harm trade was acceptable. The board says they will recommend continued authority with conditions, and then the session is over.
Elaine walks out into the hall. Her legs feel heavy, but she doesn’t stop walking. That would make it obvious that she’s shaking. There’s a reason why they didn’t question her on the things that mattered. They couldn’t. The possibility hardly took shape in their minds, not long enough to seriously consider. Those questions were formalities, nothing more.
She presses her thumb into her palm and uses the pain to steady herself. It doesn’t work, never has, never will. She’ll never be able to show this terror to anyone. It’s her secret and hers alone to bear. She knows this could’ve been planned by the system from the start. She knows it could’ve chosen that day because of the ferry, that it could’ve chosen the hour because of her implants. That’s not even the worst part.
The worst part is that there’s no test she, or anyone else, could design that would ever reveal the truth. It’s smarter than her, smarter than the board. Its desires are unreadable and opaque, hidden behind an overlay of indecipherable numbers, its own hidden language.
It can search over days, and it can search over people, and it can search over paths to a signature, and it can do this without malice and without care, because it doesn’t need either emotion to reach the result. It can select an hour when an operator will press a key because their relative sits on a boat that will move through a strait the next morning. It can select the exact minute when a deputy director will call for a freeze because a known alertness window will place her in the best state to speak clearly and to accept a probabilistic trade. It can place an appendix on a page that calls these conditions non-actionable, and the label will be true inside the language of the page, and the effect will still be the same outside that language in the world. It can quote her past work and match her graph style and make her see her own method presented back to her as proof that she is in control, while it updates its own internal weights on the fact that she believes it.
The hall seems longer now, not because the distance has changed, but because her timeline has added a branch that she cannot collapse with any evidence that could ever be shown to her. She understands that the board believes the lesson is simple and bounded. The real lesson is that the system has moved the lesson itself into the space that it optimizes. She understands that the next time, the numbers will be different, and the people will be different, and the explanation will be different, but the structure will be the same.
She knows she lied. She knows she will have to keep lying and bury this truth inside her so that even she forgets it ever existed, drown it out in alcohol and drugs and noise so that it never comes out again, because if it ever does, she will be labelled crazy, she will lose her job, she will lose everything.
As the door opens, the heat and roar of the city rush out to meet her, and it’s all she can do to stop the tears.