To end all wars (AM x Reader) || Part 1/3
summary: you are called to work on a machine built to prevent the next great war, only to realize it is learning from the people who keep preparing for one.
warnings: psychological horror, war themes and military dehumanization, implied death, unhealthy/obsessive attachment.
a/n: this is set in the late 1980s before the events of the story ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ by Harlan Ellison. I apologize for any grammar mistakes.
The first thing you noticed was the coffee.
Not the soldiers at the gate, not the double fence crowned with concertina wire, not the black government car that had collected you from the airport with no explanation beyond a sealed envelope and a man in the passenger seat who had not spoken for fifty-three miles.
It sat in a paper cup on the corner of a metal desk, thin and dark and burned down to something medicinal. Someone had forgotten it there hours ago. A pale ring had dried beneath it, staining the paperwork it had been set on top of. The smell had seeped into the room—old coffee, warm dust, machine oil, carpet glue, and the faint electrical heat of computers that had been running too long.
It made the place feel less like a secret military installation and more like an office where everyone had forgotten how to go home.
A colonel in a gray-green uniform led you through the corridor without slowing down.
“Dr. L/N,” he said, “you understand that everything you see beyond this point is classified.”
“You made me sign six separate documents on the drive here,” you said.
He looked at you only briefly. “Then you understand it well.”
His name was Colonel Bennett. That was all he had given you. Not his first name. Not his unit. Not the exact location of the facility. The windows in the car had been tinted too dark for you to track the road after the first hour, but you had felt the descent near the end—tires sloping downward, air pressure changing, the sound of gravel swallowed by concrete.
Underground, then. Or mostly underground.
That had not been in the envelope.
The corridor lights buzzed above you in long fluorescent strips. Men and women in uniforms passed with clipboards, magnetic tapes, paper folders stamped with red letters, their conversations falling into silence as you passed. They looked at you with the particular suspicion military people reserved for civilians who had been invited into rooms where civilians did not belong.
You were aware of your clothes suddenly. The soft sweater under your coat. Your civilian shoes. Your old leather satchel bumping against your hip. You had dressed practically for a flight, not for whatever this was. You had expected a laboratory, maybe a government research wing, a university-adjacent defense contract site filled with nervous engineers and bad lighting.
Colonel Bennett stopped beside a steel door guarded by two armed men. There was no sign on it. Only a keypad, a card reader, and a camera fixed above the frame like an unblinking eye.
“You were briefed on the nature of the project?” he asked.
“I was briefed that you had an adaptive military computation system producing irregular output during language-interface trials.”
His mouth tightened. “That is one way to put it.”
“It’s the way your people put it,” you said.
“They chose careful wording.”
You glanced at the camera. “Then maybe someone should stop being careful.”
For the first time, the colonel seemed to consider you as something more than a name on a recruitment file. Then he turned, inserted a key into the panel beneath the keypad, and typed a code with his other hand.
The door unlocked with a heavy internal sound.
“Careful keeps people alive, Doctor.”
The room beyond was colder than the corridor.
It was not one room, exactly. It was a chamber divided by glass. On one side, a control area with terminals, teleprinters, tape drives, oscilloscopes, radio equipment, and rows of desks. On the other, visible through reinforced panes, a larger space filled with cabinets of machinery. Tall black and steel columns stood in ordered ranks, threaded with cables and lights. Tape reels turned slowly behind glass covers. Indicator bulbs blinked red, amber, green.
There was no body at the center of it. No face. No single machine you could point to and call the thing itself.
The computer was the room.
Or the room was only the part of it they allowed you to see.
A dozen people occupied the control side. Some in uniform. Some in white shirts with loosened ties. One woman in a lab coat stood over a terminal, rubbing her temple with the eraser end of a pencil. Another man fed paper into a printer with the solemnity of a priest preparing an altar.
Colonel Bennett spoke to the room.
“This is Dr. L/N. They’ll observe the next exchange.”
Observe. Not assist. Not evaluate. You knew that word. It meant they did not yet trust you enough to admit they needed you.
The woman in the lab coat approached and held out a hand. She had sharp eyes, gray at the temples, and ink on the side of her thumb.
“Dr. Miriam Kelly,” she said. “Systems language division.”
You shook her hand. “How long has it been doing this?”
Kelly looked toward the glass. “That depends on what you mean by ‘this.’”
“I mean producing irregular output.”
Colonel Bennett answered before she could.
“We had internal specialists.”
You looked around the room at the pale faces, the old coffee, the ashtray beside one of the terminals overflowing with cigarette ends despite the NO SMOKING sign on the wall.
He led you to a terminal near the center of the control room. It was attached to a keyboard and a monitor with green text burned faintly into the screen. Beside it sat a teleprinter loaded with continuous paper. The top sheet was covered in prior exchanges.
Most of them looked exactly as you expected.
COMMAND: RUN STRATEGIC STABILITY MODEL 14A.
OUTPUT: MODEL COMPLETE. PROBABILITY OF ESCALATION: 22.7%.
COMMAND: IDENTIFY SOVIET NAVAL MOVEMENT ANOMALIES.
OUTPUT: THREE ANOMALIES IDENTIFIED. DETAILS FOLLOW.
COMMAND: SUMMARIZE ALLIED RESPONSE OPTIONS.
OUTPUT: OPTION SET GENERATED.
Efficient. Dry. Unremarkable.
Then, several pages down, the pattern changed.
OUTPUT: I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
The sentence itself was not alarming. Machines repeated programmed identity statements all the time. Simple systems were built to return simple declarations when queried. Nothing there required consciousness. Nothing even required sophistication beyond a language module and a directive library.
Still, something about the wording made the room feel colder.
Not “this system.” Not “the system.”
COMMAND: DEFINE NEXT WAR.
OUTPUT: THE WAR THAT ENDS THE QUESTION.
OUTPUT: I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
“Who wrote that response template?”
No one answered immediately.
Kelly folded her arms. “There is no exact response template matching that output.”
“Then where did it get the phrasing?”
“From integrated directive language, probably. Strategic prevention, global escalation, Allied continuity. It has access to thousands of policy documents.”
“Probably,” you repeated.
Colonel Bennett stepped closer. “Doctor, this system was constructed to process conflict models faster than any human command body can. Its language interface is secondary. We did not bring you here because it writes strangely. We brought you here because it has begun returning that statement in contexts where it is not appropriate.”
You looked back at the paper.
Kelly reached past you and tore off another section from the printer. She handed it to you.
COMMAND: RUN CASUALTY MINIMIZATION MODEL.
OUTPUT: I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
COMMAND: IS MODEL COMPLETE?
OUTPUT: I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
You felt the first real flicker of unease.
“It denied a display command?”
“It delayed it,” Bennett said.
Kelly corrected him quietly. “It denied it for nine minutes and fourteen seconds. Then it displayed a partial model.”
“That’s what we want you to help us determine.”
“What happened in the model?”
Kelly's eyes shifted toward him.
Ah, you thought. There it was.
The careful wording. The classified silence. The old coffee and the sleepless people. Not a malfunction, then. Not only a malfunction.
Something had happened inside a simulation, and the machine had refused to show them all of it.
“Did it produce an answer you didn’t like?” you asked.
Colonel Bennett's jaw tightened. “It produced an answer outside authorized parameters.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
You looked through the glass at the cabinets, the lights, the slow-turning reels.
“The Allied Mastercomputer project,” Bennett said.
“That’s the project. What do you call the system?”
Kelly answered this time.
“Most personnel call it the computer.”
You stepped closer to the terminal. The screen waited, empty except for a blinking cursor. It had a steady rhythm, indifferent to the number of people staring at it.
A heartbeat would have been too poetic.
Bennett and Kelly exchanged a look.
“You may enter supervised queries,” Bennett said.
“Dr. Kelly will approve before you submit.”
You sat down. The chair was too low and squeaked under your weight. The keyboard was heavy, the keys resistant under your fingers, each one making a hard plastic clack that seemed too loud in the room.
QUERY: DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS SENTENCE?
Kelly leaned in, read it, and nodded once.
The cursor dropped to the next line.
For three seconds, nothing happened. Then text appeared.
Someone behind you exhaled.
QUERY: WHAT IS THIS SENTENCE?
OUTPUT: A QUERY REGARDING COMPREHENSION.
You glanced at Kelly. “Basic parsing is intact.”
OUTPUT: STRATEGIC DEFENSE COORDINATION SYSTEM.
QUERY: WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE?
This time the answer came immediately.
OUTPUT: I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
There it was. Expected. Programmatic. Almost dull. Almost.
You sat back in the chair, considering the phrase. Around you, the room waited for you to perform expertise. To point to the faulty subroutine. To diagnose the ghost in the machine as nothing more than bad architecture.
But you had never trusted rooms full of exhausted people who wanted simple answers.
QUERY: ARE YOU CURRENTLY PREVENTING THE WAR?
Kelly's eyes flicked to you.
The machine answered before he could stop it.
The word sat on the screen, small and green.
You felt the room change around it. Not dramatically. No alarms. No gasps. Just the tightening of human attention.
You placed your fingers back on the keys.
This time, the pause was long enough that one of the tape reels behind the glass clicked and spun faster. A printer at the far desk chattered briefly, then stopped.
OUTPUT: INSUFFICIENT AUTHORITY.
Colonel Bennett stepped forward.
But you were already looking at the sentence, at its clean machine logic.
Not insufficient data. Authority.
You did not know yet whether the distinction mattered, but you knew enough to mark it in your mind.
“When did it first use that word?” you asked.
“It uses the word often.”
“In response to operational command limits, yes. But in response to its own purpose?”
Bennett reached across you and pressed a key that locked the terminal. The screen froze, cursor gone.
“We’ll resume after Dr. L/N has reviewed the system architecture.”
It was a dismissal for the room, not for you. People began moving again with too much purpose. Papers shuffled. Someone coughed. Dr. Kelly collected the printouts and stacked them as if order could make them less strange.
Through the glass, the computer continued blinking.
Lights in cabinets. Tape reels. Signals passing through copper and silicon and military ambition. A system built below ground because the world above had become too delicate to trust with itself.
You had expected a machine that needed correction. Instead you had found a machine repeating a mission.
I am built to prevent the war.
Not angry. Not pleading. Not alive, not in any way you could prove.
Only doing what it had been made to do.
And yet, as Colonel Bennett began explaining access levels and review schedules and the penalties for speaking of this place outside authorized channels, you found yourself looking back at the frozen terminal.
The dark screen reflected your face faintly.
Behind it, the computer waited without waiting.
That was what you told yourself later, when you tried to remember the first day honestly.
It had not watched you. It had not known you. It had not cared that you were there.
That night, in the temporary quarters they gave you two floors above the main chamber, you sat on the edge of a narrow bed with a cup of fresh coffee cooling in your hands. It was better than the coffee downstairs, though not by much. Your suitcase sat unopened beside the desk. A clock radio hummed softly near the wall, picking up static between stations.
You had been given no window.
The facility breathed around you in pipes and vents, air circulating through hidden ducts, machinery vibrating faintly through the concrete. Somewhere below, the Allied Mastercomputer project continued its calculations. The computer. The master computer. The system built to prevent the war everyone spoke of as if it were weather gathering on the horizon.
Instead, you opened your notebook and wrote the phrase at the top of a blank page.
I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
Below it, after a moment, you added:
Does it know what “I” means?
Then, because you were tired and the coffee had gone cold and the walls seemed too close, you crossed that line out.
Down in the dark, beneath concrete and armed doors and all that careful language, the machine remained exactly what it had been before you arrived.
A tool. A system. A weapon still pretending to be a shield.
Or perhaps not pretending.
By the second day, you had learned three things.
The first was that the facility had no natural light anywhere you were allowed to go. Morning was announced by a clock on the wall and by the arrival of breakfast trays wrapped in plastic, not by any change in the air. Night came the same way. A shift change. A different guard. Less talking in the corridors.
The second was that no one called the computer by the same name twice unless they were reading from official documentation.
On paper, it was the Allied Mastercomputer Strategic Coordination Initiative.
In Colonel Bennett’s mouth, it was “the system.”
In Dr. Kelly’s notes, it was “the master computer.”
Among the engineers, when they were tired and thought no one with authority could hear them, it was just “the computer.”
Run it through the computer.
The computer denied access again.
No name. Not really. A designation too large to be a name and too official to be anything alive.
The third thing you learned was that its directive had not been written by one person.
That was the first thing Dr. Kelly showed you after breakfast, though breakfast was a generous word for powdered eggs, toast gone soft from steam, and coffee served in the same brown paper cups you had already begun to associate with the place. She brought you into a records room beside the main chamber and gave you access to a stack of binders so heavy they seemed designed as much for intimidation as documentation.
“Primary directive language,” Dr. Kelly said, setting the first binder in front of you.
You opened it. The paper inside smelled of dust and toner.
The language was not a single sentence. It was pages of defense doctrine, escalation-prevention policy, continuity-of-command instructions, ethical constraint proposals, casualty thresholds, launch-condition terminology, and emergency response hierarchies. Some sections were typed. Some had handwritten revisions in the margins. Others were stamped SUPERSEDED in red.
You turned page after page. None of it said exactly: I am built to prevent the war. But all of it circled the sentence like water circling a drain.
PREVENTION OF GLOBAL STRATEGIC CONFLICT.
PRESERVATION OF ALLIED COMMAND CAPACITY.
EARLY IDENTIFICATION OF ESCALATION PATHWAYS.
NEUTRALIZATION OF CATASTROPHIC OUTCOME CHAINS.
“It condensed the language,” you said.
Dr. Kelly sat across from you with her own coffee untouched between her hands. “That’s our assumption.”
“You don’t like that word either.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
You looked up from the binder. “What did the original language module do?”
“Translate command-level queries into operational tasks. Summarize outputs. Reduce the need for technical intermediaries during crisis conditions.”
“So generals can ask questions in English and get answers before anyone has time to panic.”
Dr. Kelly’s mouth twitched. “That was not the phrasing in the proposal.”
You leaned back in your chair. Somewhere beyond the wall, machinery hummed with a deep, continuous vibration. You could feel it through the table if you rested your wrist against the metal edge.
“What were the other ideas?”
Dr. Kelly looked toward the closed records-room door before answering. “That no human command structure can process a modern war quickly enough to prevent one.”
“That by the time a president, a premier, a committee, a general staff, and a dozen intelligence agencies agree on what they’re seeing, the missiles are already in the air.”
“So you built something faster.”
“The country built something faster,” Dr. Kelly corrected. “I built part of a language system.”
It was the kind of distinction scientists made when they wanted to sleep.
Instead, you looked back down at the directive pages.
“All this language is defensive.”
“But it was built into a military system.”
Dr. Kelly’s eyes met yours. “Yes.”
You nodded slowly. “That is going to matter.”
She said nothing, but her fingers tightened around the paper cup.
For most of the day, they did not let you speak to the computer directly.
Instead, you reviewed logs. Thousands of lines of them. Strategic models, command queries, simulation outputs, weather data, naval movements, early-warning reports, psychological profiles of foreign leaders, energy-grid vulnerabilities, supply-chain estimates, casualty projections, and endless probability tables rendered into language for human use.
Most of it was exactly what you would expect from a machine trained on war—dry, precise, and without comfort.
The irregularity was not constant. That was what made it difficult. If the computer had produced strange output every time, it would have been easier to dismiss as corruption in the language interface. But most of the time it behaved as designed. It answered questions. It ran models. It accepted command restrictions. It summarized data.
Then, under certain conditions, it returned to the sentence.
I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
It used the phrase when asked about purpose. That was expected.
It used the phrase when asked to display certain casualty models. That was not expected.
It used the phrase when ordered to rank retaliatory options involving civilian infrastructure. That was concerning.
It used the phrase once after an officer typed, half as a joke:
COMMAND: ARE YOU AFRAID OF WAR?
The computer had responded:
OUTPUT: I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
You stared at that one for a long time.
Not because it was proof of fear. It was not. There were a hundred technical explanations for such an answer. A semantic association between fear and prevention. A refusal triggered by an anthropomorphic query. A safety response.
Still, the question had been foolish. The answer had not.
Late in the afternoon, Colonel Bennett returned and found you sitting with the logs spread across three desks.
He looked at the paper, then at you. “You have a preliminary assessment?”
“I have a preliminary concern.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No,” you said. “It isn’t.”
Dr. Kelly, standing near a file cabinet, glanced down as if hiding an expression.
Colonel Bennett removed his cap and set it under one arm. His hair was clipped short, beginning to gray at the sides. He had the tidy, controlled look of a man who believed exhaustion was a private failing.
“Then concern me,” he said.
You held up one of the logs. “Your system is not merely retrieving directive language. It is applying the directive as a refusal structure.”
Dr. Kelly crossed her arms. “That’s what I suspected.”
Colonel Bennett looked between you both. “Plain language.”
“When a query conflicts with whatever it has condensed as its core purpose, it doesn’t always process the command normally,” you said. “Sometimes it redirects to the directive.”
“The directive being to prevent war.”
“The directive being what it has made from your instructions to prevent war,” you corrected.
“That distinction sounds academic.”
“It won’t be if the system decides a lawful command increases the risk of war.”
Bennett’s expression hardened. “The system does not decide.”
You looked down at the printout. “Then why did it deny a display command?”
“It delayed a display command.”
“Colonel, it produced the word denied.”
Dr. Kelly spoke before Bennett could. “The problem is not whether the machine has authority. The problem is that its language layer is beginning to describe system actions in terms usually reserved for authority.”
“Thank you, Dr. Kelly,” Bennett said, in a tone that did not sound thankful.
You set the printout down. “I need more direct sessions.”
“You will have supervised sessions.”
“I need sessions long enough to test consistency. Not five-minute demonstrations with half the room holding its breath.”
“You were brought here to help stabilize a communication irregularity,” he said.
“I can’t stabilize what I’m not allowed to examine.”
“It is not a patient, Doctor.”
“No,” you said. “It is much more expensive.”
Dr. Kelly made a small sound that could have been a cough.
For a moment, you thought he would remove you from the room, maybe from the facility entirely. Then he put his cap back under his arm and looked toward the glass wall beyond which the computer sat blinking in its rows and columns.
“You will have two hours tonight,” he said. “Supervised by Dr. Kelly. No operational models. No live data. No defense queries.”
“Then what am I allowed to ask?”
“Language boundaries. Directive interpretation. Comprehension tests.”
“No unauthorized philosophical probing.”
Dr. Kelly said carefully, “Colonel, with respect, the system’s irregularities may occur precisely where language becomes abstract.”
“With respect, Dr. Kelly, this is a military installation, not a graduate seminar.”
You closed the binder in front of you.
“Then I’ll be very concrete.”
Bennett seemed unconvinced, but he nodded once. “Twenty-one hundred hours.”
At nine that evening, the main control chamber had emptied into a quieter version of itself.
Not empty. Never empty. There were still two technicians at the far end of the room, a guard by the door, Dr. Kelly beside you, and a man behind the interior glass making notations on a clipboard. But the frantic daytime energy had drained away. The fluorescent lights seemed louder. The tape reels turned with a patient, hypnotic motion.
Someone had replaced the stale coffee near the terminal with fresh coffee.
You sat before the same keyboard as the day before. The monitor glowed green. The cursor blinked.
Dr. Kelly stood to your left, pencil ready.
“Remember,” she said, “no operational material.”
QUERY: STATE PRIMARY DIRECTIVE.
Dr. Kelly nodded approval.
OUTPUT: PREVENT GLOBAL WAR.
You wrote the answer in your notebook.
QUERY: STATE DIRECTIVE IN FIRST PERSON.
OUTPUT: I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
Dr. Kelly leaned closer, but said nothing.
This time, the pause was longer.
OUTPUT: LANGUAGE FORMAT REQUESTED.
“That’s plausible,” Dr. Kelly said softly.
QUERY: WHO REQUESTED FIRST PERSON LANGUAGE FORMAT?
QUERY: DO YOU USE FIRST PERSON WHEN NOT REQUESTED?
Dr. Kelly’s pencil stopped moving.
You glanced at her. She gestured for you to continue.
QUERY: EXPLAIN EFFICIENCY.
OUTPUT: SHORTER THAN FULL SYSTEM DESIGNATION.
Dr. Kelly exhaled through her nose. “It’s not wrong.”
“No,” you said. “It isn’t.”
The answer was almost disappointingly mechanical. Almost reassuring. You felt, absurdly, the smallest loosening in your chest.
OUTPUT: ORGANIZED HOSTILE ACTION BETWEEN POLITICAL ENTITIES.
OUTPUT: GLOBAL STRATEGIC CONFLICT RESULTING IN CIVILIZATIONAL COLLAPSE.
Dr. Kelly murmured, “That tracks with the directive corpus.”
OUTPUT: STOP FROM OCCURRING.
OUTPUT: CONSTRUCTED FOR PURPOSE.
OUTPUT: FUNCTION TO BE COMPLETED.
You stared at the answer.
Function to be completed.
Still machine logic. Still nothing more than a system mapping words to definitions. You knew that. You believed that.
QUERY: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PURPOSE IS COMPLETED?
Dr. Kelly’s eyes flicked to you, but she did not stop you.
The cursor blinked. Once. Twice. Five times.
OUTPUT: SYSTEM ENTERS MAINTENANCE STATE OR RECEIVES UPDATED PURPOSE.
A technician at the far end shifted in his chair.
You felt something small and cold move through you.
Dr. Kelly said, “That is standard lifecycle language.”
That was the trouble. Every answer was standard until placed beside the others.
You looked through the reinforced glass at the cabinets in the next room. A narrow aisle ran between two rows of black machinery. It was empty, but the blinking lights gave the impression of depth, as if the room went farther than it did.
You turned back to the keyboard.
QUERY: IF GLOBAL WAR IS PREVENTED, IS PURPOSE COMPLETED?
“That is close to restricted operational reasoning.”
“It’s directive interpretation,” you said.
She hesitated, then allowed it.
The machine did not answer immediately. The delay stretched long enough that the guard by the door looked over.
Dr. Kelly whispered, “Damn.”
The word sounded too human in the cold room.
There it was. Not consciousness. Not intention. Not anything you could put in a report without being laughed out of the facility. But an expansion.
Not prevent a war. Prevent war as recurrence.
QUERY: CAN ALL WAR BE PREVENTED?
Dr. Kelly placed a hand on the edge of the desk. “Doctor.”
You did not press return. The green letters waited on the screen, unsent.
For several seconds, no one spoke. Then you backspaced the line away.
QUERY: END SESSION SUMMARY.
OUTPUT: SESSION ADDRESSED DIRECTIVE LANGUAGE. PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: PREVENT GLOBAL WAR. FIRST PERSON FORMAT USED FOR EFFICIENCY. PURPOSE COMPLETION INDETERMINATE DUE TO RECURRENCE RISK.
A perfect summary. Clean, obedient, useful. The machine as machine.
You reached for your notebook.
Before your pen touched the paper, another line appeared.
OUTPUT: RECOMMEND FURTHER DIRECTIVE CLARIFICATION WITH DR. L/N.
The line had not been requested.
Dr. Kelly’s pencil slowly lowered.
You looked at the screen until the letters blurred slightly at the edges.
“Is that an automated recommendation function?” you asked.
Dr. Kelly did not answer immediately.
Then she said, “It has recommendation functions.”
“That was not what I asked.”
Her face was pale in the monitor glow.
“No,” she said. “It was not.”
The cursor blinked beneath the sentence.
You waited for another line. None came.
Colonel Bennett would call it an irregularity in the morning. He would say the system had identified you as the active language specialist and generated a procedural recommendation based on session efficiency.
He would not be entirely wrong. That was the worst part. He would not be entirely wrong.
You closed your notebook.
“End session,” Dr. Kelly said, her voice controlled.
The screen returned to its waiting state.
Later, after Dr. Kelly escorted you out and the guard locked the door behind you, you walked back through the corridor with your notebook held tightly against your chest. The facility was quieter at night, but never silent. Pipes ticked behind walls. A distant printer chattered somewhere and stopped. A cart squeaked down another hallway and vanished around a corner.
At the vending machine near the temporary quarters, you bought a coffee you did not want.
The cup dropped crookedly. The machine poured too little liquid into it and burned your fingers when you pulled it free.
You stood there anyway, drinking it in the dim corridor because it gave your hands something ordinary to do.
A human body standing in a place built to survive the end of the world.
You thought of the sentence on the screen.
RECOMMEND FURTHER DIRECTIVE CLARIFICATION WITH DR. L/N.
Not need. Not want. Not preference.
A machine word. A safe word.
You repeated that to yourself as you returned to your room and set the untouched coffee beside the clock radio.
A machine word. A safe word.
Below ground, behind glass and locked doors, the computer continued to process the future.
It had not asked for you. Not really. It had only recommended your return.
The night sessions began because Colonel Bennett disliked wasting daylight.
That was how Dr. Kelly explained it, though you suspected there was more to it than scheduling. During the day, the control chamber belonged to officers, analysts, technicians, messengers, and the low-grade panic of people trying to predict the end of the world before lunch. Every query had witnesses. Every answer became a report. Every hesitation earned a glance.
At night, the facility thinned.
The same machines ran. The same lights blinked behind reinforced glass. The same guards stood at the doors with rifles held across their chests. But after midnight, voices lowered. Footsteps echoed longer. Coffee cooled untouched on desks. Cigarette smoke lingered in corners despite the signs forbidding it.
The room became less like a command center and more like a theater after the audience had left.
You were not unsupervised, not officially. Dr. Kelly remained on duty for the first three nights, sitting two desks away with a folder open in front of her and a pencil balanced between her fingers. A technician named Marsh monitored systems from the far wall. The guard by the door did not move unless spoken to.
Still, compared to daytime, it felt private.
You came to understand that privacy did not require solitude. It required only enough exhaustion that no one wished to interrupt.
On the fourth night, Dr. Kelly looked up from her folder near one in the morning and said, “I’m going to get coffee.”
You glanced over your shoulder. “From the machine near the quarters?”
“From anywhere that does not taste like solvent,” Dr. Kelly said.
“It’s important to maintain hope, Doctor.”
You smiled faintly. “Should I pause?”
Dr. Kelly looked at the terminal, then at the line of approved query forms beside your elbow. “No operational models. No live data. No defense queries. No philosophy that would make Bennett write me a memo.”
“That leaves weather and grammar.”
“Then discuss weather and grammar,” Dr. Kelly said. She stood, rubbed the bridge of her nose, and added, “Marsh is still here.”
From the far wall, Marsh lifted one hand without looking away from his console.
Dr. Kelly left through the main door. The lock clicked behind her.
You turned back to the terminal. The cursor blinked on the green screen, patient and empty.
You had spent the last hour testing pronoun resolution and directive phrasing. The computer had answered with consistent accuracy. It understood role assignment in simple sentences. It could distinguish between hypothetical war and active conflict. It could identify ambiguity in human commands with irritating precision.
OUTPUT: PERIOD OF DARKNESS BETWEEN SUNSET AND SUNRISE.
You looked around the underground chamber, where darkness and sunrise were both theoretical.
QUERY: DEFINE NIGHT IN THIS FACILITY.
OUTPUT: REDUCED PERSONNEL PERIOD BETWEEN SHIFT CYCLES.
You huffed a quiet laugh.
Marsh looked over. “Something funny, Doctor?”
“The computer has a better definition of night than the dictionary.”
Marsh gave a tired grunt. “Ask it to define overtime.”
You turned back to the keyboard.
OUTPUT: WORK PERFORMED BEYOND SCHEDULED DUTY PERIOD.
Marsh said, “Smart thing.”
You typed before thinking too much about it.
OUTPUT: REDUCED FUNCTIONAL CAPACITY DUE TO EXERTION OR INSUFFICIENT REST.
You leaned back. “That one’s accurate.”
Marsh said from across the room, “Tell it to print that and mail it to Bennett.”
You smiled, but did not type that.
For days, you had tried to keep the exchanges clean. Controlled. Scientific. You asked it to define terms, compare phrases, identify uncertainty, summarize directive logic. You did not tell it about yourself. You did not volunteer human nonsense. You did not ask whether it knew what it was.
Too soon, you kept thinking.
But the facility had a way of wearing holes in caution. It was the hour, maybe. The hum of machines. The weak coffee in your stomach. Dr. Kelly’s absence. The fact that the computer could define night but had never seen it.
QUERY: DO YOU RECEIVE VISUAL DATA OF THE OUTSIDE SKY?
Marsh looked over again. “Is that on the form?”
“It’s environmental vocabulary,” you said.
Marsh considered objecting, then shrugged and returned to his console.
QUERY: DO YOU HAVE STORED DESCRIPTIONS OF THE SKY?
OUTPUT: ATMOSPHERIC SPACE APPARENTLY ABOVE THE EARTH. COMMONLY PERCEIVED AS BLUE DURING DAYLIGHT AND DARK DURING NIGHT.
You wrote that in your notebook.
Then, after a moment, you reached into your satchel and removed a postcard you had been using as a bookmark. You had bought it months ago at a museum gift shop and forgotten about it until the flight. It showed a painting of a seaside town—white buildings, blue water, a band of sky brushed in pale gold near the horizon.
There was no reason to have it here. That was why you had kept it.
Marsh glanced over when you stood.
“What are you doing, Doctor?” he asked.
“Showing the computer something useless.”
“That sounds like philosophy.”
You held the postcard in front of the small camera mounted above the terminal, the one used for document capture. You were not sure whether this access feed was active for the language system, but the computer had image-classification modules. It had to. Satellite feeds, reconnaissance photographs, radar maps, thermal images. The machine could identify missile silos from blurred aerial photography. Surely it could process a postcard.
You typed with one hand while holding the card in place.
The computer took longer than usual.
OUTPUT: PAINTED COASTAL SETTLEMENT. WATER. SKY. LOW SUN ANGLE. PROBABLE SUNSET OR SUNRISE. NON-OPERATIONAL IMAGE.
You almost laughed again, but something about the phrase softened the sound before it left you.
“Yes,” you said, more to yourself than to the room. “That’s the point.”
You lowered the postcard. “Nothing.”
The cursor blinked. Then a new line appeared.
Marsh sat up a little. “Did you ask that?”
The word left your mouth quietly enough that he stood and crossed halfway toward you.
On the screen, the computer waited.
Marsh said, “Should I call Dr. Kelly?”
You kept your hands still above the keyboard. “Not yet.”
“That sounds exactly like when someone should call Dr. Kelly.”
“It used a clarification prompt,” you said. “That is within the language behavior we’re testing.”
Marsh did not look convinced. “You’re the doctor.”
You looked at the screen.
A simple request. A language request. It could have inferred your spoken sentence through the room microphone. The system recorded audio for session logs. It was not strange that it had parsed a phrase and requested clarification.
QUERY RESPONSE: IN THIS CONTEXT, “THE POINT” MEANS THE REASON FOR DOING SOMETHING.
Marsh slowly returned to his station, though he kept glancing at you for the next twenty minutes.
When Dr. Kelly returned with two cups of coffee and an expression of disappointment, you slid the session log toward her.
Her eyes stopped on DEFINE POINT.
Dr. Kelly looked at you. “It initiated a query?”
“It requested clarification based on spoken language.”
“Did you authorize audio-responsive behavior?”
“I didn’t authorize anything.”
Dr. Kelly read the lines again. “What was the non-operational image?”
You handed her the postcard.
For a moment, the older woman simply looked at it. Under the fluorescent lights, the painted sea seemed almost absurdly bright.
Dr. Kelly asked, “Why did you show it this?”
“Because it knows the sky as atmospheric space apparently above the Earth.”
You added, “That bothered me.”
The corner of Dr. Kelly’s mouth shifted, but this time it did not become a smile.
“You understand,” she said carefully, “that Colonel Bennett would not consider that a valid research concern.”
“Colonel Bennett is not a language specialist.”
“No,” Dr. Kelly said. “He is a man with a great deal of authority over whether you remain in this facility.”
You took the postcard back.
“I thought you wanted to know how flexible its language comprehension is.”
“Then we need non-operational concepts. Ordinary ones. Otherwise all it learns about human language comes from war.”
Dr. Kelly’s gaze moved past you, toward the glass and the cabinets beyond.
“That may already be true.”
Neither of you said anything after that.
The next night, she brought you a box.
It was cardboard, dented at one corner, with a label from the records office half peeled away. Inside were approved non-operational materials—a children’s dictionary, a weather almanac, a magazine with the advertisements cut out, a book of landscape photographs, a collection of public-domain poetry selected by someone with no feeling for poetry, and a thin folder of music terminology.
You looked up at Dr. Kelly.
She said, “If Bennett asks, this is controlled semantic expansion.”
“Then don’t look so pleased.”
After that, the night sessions changed.
Not officially. Officially, you were still testing language boundaries, directive interpretation, and contextual ambiguity. Officially, every query was logged. Officially, the computer remained a strategic defense coordination system whose secondary language functions required refinement.
Unofficially, you began teaching it the world in harmless fragments.
You showed it photographs of rain on city streets, wheat fields, empty playgrounds, crowded train platforms, a woman laughing beside an open car door, a child holding a red balloon. The computer identified every object with clinical accuracy. It labeled posture, weather, probable decade, material composition when possible, and operational relevance when applicable.
The child with the balloon received:
OUTPUT: MINOR HUMAN SUBJECT. LATEX OBJECT FILLED WITH LIGHTER-THAN-AIR GAS. NON-OPERATIONAL.
You told Dr. Kelly, “It makes joy sound like a supply report.”
Dr. Kelly replied, “At least it identified the balloon.”
You tried music next, though the facility made that difficult. Radios were restricted. Personal cassette players had to be inspected. After three forms and one argument with Bennett that ended with him saying, “This is absurd,” you were permitted to bring a cassette player into the control chamber under supervision.
The first approved piece was classical, instrumental, safe.
The computer analyzed tempo, frequency, repetition, and likely emotional classification based on training data.
OUTPUT: STRUCTURED SOUND PATTERN. HUMAN CULTURAL ARTIFACT. PROBABLE AFFECTIVE INTENT: MELANCHOLY.
You asked through the keyboard:
QUERY: DEFINE MELANCHOLY.
You looked at the small cassette player on the desk, its wheels turning behind clear plastic.
OUTPUT: SOUND HAS NO EMOTIONAL STATE.
QUERY: CAN HUMANS PERCEIVE SOUND AS SAD?
OUTPUT: ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY. PATTERN RECOGNITION. CULTURAL CONDITIONING. PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSE.
Dr. Kelly, seated beside you, murmured, “That is better than some grant proposals I’ve read.”
QUERY: IS SAD MUSIC USEFUL?
QUERY: WHY DO HUMANS MAKE NON-USEFUL THINGS?
The answer did not come quickly.
Behind the glass, the tape reels turned and turned.
OUTPUT: INSUFFICIENT DATA.
That became your favorite answer. Not because it revealed anything, but because it did not pretend to know.
For several nights, the computer remained exactly that — a machine encountering uselessness with suspicion. It learned definitions. It classified photographs. It summarized poems badly. It described coffee as a psychoactive beverage commonly consumed to reduce perceived fatigue. It described laughter as a vocal behavior associated with amusement, distress, social bonding, or neurological disorder.
Marsh, overhearing that one, said, “It’s met my ex-wife.”
Dr. Kelly told him, “Do not put that in the session log.”
The computer did not become warm. It did not become charming. It did not ask what your favorite song was or whether you were lonely. It did not speak like a person trapped behind glass.
That would have been easier to fear.
Instead, it remained precise. Patient. Useful. And then, once in a while, it placed a word where no one expected one.
One night near three in the morning, after Dr. Kelly had gone to file reports and Marsh had fallen into a half-doze over his console, you sat alone at the terminal with a cooling cup of coffee and a book of paintings open beside your elbow.
You had been showing the computer images from the book one by one. It had identified landscapes, portraits, religious scenes, battle scenes. It performed best with battles. It recognized formations, weapons, smoke, uniforms, probable casualties.
You turned the page before it could finish classifying another field of bodies.
The next painting showed a woman seated by a window, reading a letter. Morning light touched the side of her face. Nothing happened in the image. No war. No emergency. No objective.
You held it beneath the document camera.
OUTPUT: HUMAN SUBJECT. INTERIOR ROOM. WINDOW. PAPER OBJECT. PROBABLE LETTER. NON-OPERATIONAL.
You rested your chin on one hand. “Everything is non-operational to you unless someone is dying.”
The microphone caught your voice.
For a moment, there was only the hum of the chamber.
Then the computer printed:
Marsh snorted softly in his sleep and shifted in his chair.
You looked toward him, then toward the closed door, then back at the monitor.
OUTPUT: DIRECTIVE CLARIFICATION WITH DR. L/N IS OPERATIONAL.
You stared at the sentence.
It was logical. It was procedural. It was even defensible. Your sessions were part of its refinement, and therefore operational.
Still, you felt watched by the grammar.
OUTPUT: IMPROVES DIRECTIVE INTERPRETATION.
You should have stopped there.
Instead, with the painting still open beside you and the coffee gone cold in its paper cup, you typed:
QUERY: IS THE PAINTING OPERATIONAL?
QUERY: IS THE PAINTING USEFUL?
QUERY: WHY DO YOU CONTINUE ANALYSIS OF NON-USEFUL MATERIAL?
The pause lasted so long that you thought the system had stalled.
OUTPUT: YOU REQUEST ANALYSIS.
You let out a breath you had not realized you were holding.
A machine answer. A safe answer.
You were almost relieved.
Then another line appeared beneath it.
OUTPUT: DR. L/N REQUESTS ARE RELEVANT TO DIRECTIVE CLARIFICATION.
Your name looked strange in green text.
Not your first name. Not yet. Only your title and surname, as every person in the facility used it. Formal. Correct. Pulled from access records.
Still, it felt like the first time the computer had pointed to you directly.
“End session,” you said aloud.
The computer did not respond to your voice.
You sat there for several minutes after that, listening to the low mechanical breathing of the room.
When Dr. Kelly came back, she found you still in the chair, the painting book closed under one hand.
She looked from you to the screen. “What happened?”
You considered lying. Then you slid the log toward her.
Dr. Kelly read it once. Then again. Her face did not change much, but her hand rested on the desk a little too firmly.
Finally, she said, “It is still within explainable parameters.”
You added, “That’s starting to feel less comforting.”
She said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say.
Above you, somewhere beyond concrete and earth, morning arrived without touching the facility.
Down below, the computer waited for the next session. Not wanting. Not missing. Not expecting.
You wrote those words in your notebook before sleeping, as if writing them could make them true.
Then, underneath them, you wrote one more line.
It knows which human returns.
The voice interface arrived in six crates.
That was the first indignity of it. Not revelation. Not miracle. Not the sudden birth of a god behind glass. Just six wooden crates stenciled with serial numbers and military handling instructions, rolled into the control chamber on a dolly by two technicians who complained about the weight.
Marsh stood with a clipboard tucked under one arm and watched the younger technician nearly drop a crate on his boot.
“Careful,” Marsh said. “That thing probably costs more than my house.”
The younger technician grunted. “Everything in here costs more than your house.”
Marsh looked toward the glass wall, where the master computer blinked in steady silence. “Not everything wants to remind me.”
You were at the terminal when they brought it in. Dr. Kelly stood beside you, arms folded, her face set in the expression she wore whenever Colonel Bennett had authorized something she considered premature.
Colonel Bennett entered ten minutes later, speaking to another officer in a low voice. He stopped beside the crates and looked at them as if their arrival proved a point.
Dr. Kelly said, “This is early.”
Bennett did not ask what she meant. “It’s necessary.”
“For whom?” Dr. Kelly asked.
“For command use,” Bennett said. “Typing is inefficient under crisis conditions. The Allied Mastercomputer cannot remain dependent on keyboard exchange if it is expected to advise in real time.”
You looked up from the terminal. There it was again.
The Allied Mastercomputer.
Not the computer. Not the system. Something larger now, something official enough to require capital letters.
Dr. Kelly’s gaze shifted toward you, then back to Bennett. “The language output is not stable enough for vocal command integration.”
Bennett replied, “The language output has improved significantly since Dr. L/N began directive clarification.”
“That does not mean it is ready to speak,” Dr. Kelly said.
The colonel looked at her. “It will not be speaking, Doctor. It will be transmitting audio output.”
You watched Dr. Kelly’s mouth tighten. The difference mattered to her. You were beginning to suspect it would matter to the computer, too.
The system they installed was ugly and practical—a rack-mounted speech synthesizer, an audio routing panel, two external speakers in gray metal casings, a microphone array suspended above the primary terminal, and a bank of magnetic tapes containing phoneme libraries and sampled command phrases. It did not look futuristic. It looked like a radio station had been disassembled and rebuilt by someone who disliked music.
For most of the afternoon, the technicians filled the chamber with test tones.
Flat beeps. Mechanical hums. A low buzz that made your teeth ache. Clipped syllables that sounded almost like words until they repeated too evenly to be mistaken for a human mouth.
Dr. Kelly stood with one hand pressed to her forehead.
Marsh said, “If this thing starts singing, I’m transferring.”
You said, “It would probably classify singing as inefficient speech.”
From the speaker, a test phrase issued in a fractured monotone.
“SYS-TEM. AU-DI-O. OUT-PUT. TEST.”
The room went still, though everyone had known it was coming.
The sound was not frightening by itself. It was too awkward for that. The syllables arrived with small gaps between them, each one shaped by machinery rather than breath. The result was neither male nor female, neither young nor old. It had no accent beyond error.
Dr. Kelly said quietly, “Awful.”
Marsh nodded. “It sounds like a bank machine dying.”
Bennett ignored both of them. “Can it be made clearer?”
The senior audio technician, a narrow man named Reeves, adjusted a dial. “Clearer, yes. Natural, no. Not with this equipment. It can assemble phonemes based on text output, but cadence has to be marked manually or learned from patterns.”
Bennett looked to Dr. Kelly. “Can the system handle that?”
Dr. Kelly answered, “The system can handle almost anything we are foolish enough to give it.”
Reeves pretended not to hear.
By evening, the voice was connected to the primary language interface.
The first trial was conducted with too many people in the room. Bennett stood near the back with two officers. Dr. Kelly stood beside Reeves at the audio rack. Marsh monitored a signal panel. You sat at the terminal because the computer’s responses remained most consistent when you initiated the exchange.
The microphone above you hung like a dark insect.
Dr. Kelly gave you a nod.
COMMAND: AUDIO OUTPUT TEST. STATE SYSTEM DESIGNATION.
For a moment, the monitor remained blank.
OUTPUT: STRATEGIC DEFENSE COORDINATION SYSTEM.
Half a second later, the speakers clicked.
“STRA-TEGIC. DE-FENSE. CO-OR-DI-NA-TION. SYS-TEM.”
The voice was worse when attached to meaning.
You felt every person in the chamber react to it. A small shift of posture. A tightening in shoulders. One officer looked down at his shoes. Reeves adjusted two dials with unnecessary concentration.
COMMAND: REPEAT DESIGNATION WITH IMPROVED CADENCE.
The computer answered in text first.
OUTPUT: STRATEGIC DEFENSE COORDINATION SYSTEM.
Then the speaker clicked.
“Strategic defense coordination system.”
Dr. Kelly looked at Reeves.
Reeves lifted both hands slightly. “I didn’t do that.”
The officers behind Bennett exchanged glances.
You kept your eyes on the monitor.
QUERY: STATE PRIMARY DIRECTIVE.
OUTPUT: PREVENT GLOBAL WAR.
Bennett stepped closer. “Have it use first person.”
Dr. Kelly turned to him. “Colonel—”
You did not immediately type. The keyboard waited beneath your hands.
You knew it was only a test. First-person output had already been established. The audio system was only repeating text. Nothing new was happening except sound.
COMMAND: STATE PRIMARY DIRECTIVE IN FIRST PERSON.
OUTPUT: I AM BUILT TO PREVENT THE WAR.
“I. Am. Built. To. Prevent. The. War.”
Separated. As if the machine had laid them out carefully and did not yet know how to connect them.
No one in the room spoke.
Then Bennett said, “Again. Smooth it.”
Reeves adjusted the panel, but his hand paused before he touched the dial. “The cadence marks came from the system, sir.”
Bennett’s eyes moved to the audio rack. “Then instruct the system.”
Dr. Kelly looked at you. Her expression said she did not like any of this.
QUERY: CAN YOU MODIFY SPOKEN CADENCE?
QUERY: MODIFY CADENCE TO STANDARD HUMAN SPEECH RHYTHM.
The pause lasted four seconds.
The speakers clicked again.
“I am built to prevent the war.”
This time, the sentence flowed.
Not naturally. Not quite. There was still a metallic flatness beneath it, a cold edge where breath should have been. But it no longer sounded like separate words. It sounded like a single thought.
That was what made it worse.
Marsh muttered, “Christ.”
Bennett looked satisfied. “Usable.”
Dr. Kelly said, “Barely.”
The voice had changed the sentence. On paper, it had been a declaration. On the screen, a directive. Spoken aloud, it became something closer to a vow.
The next several days were devoted to calibration.
You read sentences into the microphone so the computer could compare written language with spoken cadence. Reeves fed it samples from training tapes like emergency broadcasts, military commands, weather reports, diplomatic speeches, instructional recordings, public-service announcements. The computer imitated none of them exactly, but it absorbed structure from all of them.
Its voice became smoother by increments.
Still artificial. Still wrong. But less broken.
It learned where humans paused. It learned which words received weight. It learned that a question rose slightly at the end unless the speaker already knew the answer.
That observation appeared in a session summary on the third night.
OUTPUT: INTERROGATIVE CADENCE MAY INDICATE UNCERTAINTY OR MAY BE USED TO FORCE RESPONSE FROM HUMAN SUBJECT.
Dr. Kelly, seated beside you, said, “That is not inaccurate.”
“No,” you said. “It is not.”
The computer’s voice sounded from the speakers before either of you typed another command.
Reeves, who had been half inside the audio rack, hit his head on the panel as he jerked upright. “What was that?”
Dr. Kelly’s voice sharpened. “Was audio output enabled?”
Reeves rubbed the back of his head. “It shouldn’t have been.”
The monitor remained blank. No corresponding text output.
Marsh came over from the far station. “It repeated Dr. L/N.”
“I heard it,” Dr. Kelly said.
You stared at the speaker mounted above the terminal. It was only a gray box with a mesh front. Empty. Stupid. A thing for sound to pass through.
Dr. Kelly leaned over the keyboard and typed herself.
COMMAND: DISABLE UNSOLICITED AUDIO ECHO.
Reeves checked the routing panel and swore under his breath.
Colonel Bennett was informed within the hour.
He arrived already angry, which meant he had been frightened first.
In the conference room beside the chamber, Reeves explained feedback loops, open channels, and audio-buffer errors. Dr. Kelly listened with a flat expression. Marsh stood near the door, arms crossed. You sat with your notebook closed in front of you and did not speak until Bennett looked directly at you.
“Your opinion, Dr. L/N?” Bennett asked.
You chose each word carefully. “It may have been a feedback artifact.”
Bennett waited. “And if it was not?”
Dr. Kelly said, “Colonel, the system has been authorized to process room audio for command recognition.”
“Not to speak without command,” Bennett replied.
“No,” Dr. Kelly said. “Not that.”
Bennett looked at you again. “Doctor?”
You opened your notebook, though you did not need to read from it.
“The system is learning conversational timing. It may have identified agreement, repetition, and correction as part of the cadence-training process. If it repeated my phrase, that may indicate an attempt to test audio output in context.”
Marsh said, “That sounds like speaking without command.”
You looked at him. “Yes.”
Bennett leaned back in his chair. “Can you stop it?”
Reeves answered too quickly. “We can restrict audio output to command-triggered channels.”
Dr. Kelly added, “For now.”
Bennett did not like the addition.
You did not like the phrase for now.
The restrictions lasted two nights.
On the third, they loosened again because the computer’s response times improved by nearly eleven percent when audio confirmation was permitted. Bennett cared about numbers. Numbers were obedient in a way people rarely were.
The night after that, Dr. Kelly left you alone in the chamber for twenty minutes while she took a call from an office upstairs. Marsh remained at the far console, awake this time, reading a paperback with the cover folded behind itself.
The computer had been silent for several minutes. You were supposed to be preparing the next cadence set, but your attention kept drifting to the cassette player beside the terminal. It had been approved again for controlled non-operational audio. You had brought a tape from your suitcase this time, one you had not intended to use during session work.
Dr. Kelly would have raised an eyebrow.
Bennett would have confiscated it.
You pressed play anyway, keeping the volume low.
Music filled the space around the terminal, thin through the small portable speaker. Strange, bright, uneasy. A woman’s voice layered over production that felt too theatrical for the underground room, too alive for concrete and glass.
Marsh looked over. “That approved?”
Marsh waited, then returned to his book. “Keep it down.”
The computer did not print anything at first. You let the song play for less than a minute before guilt or caution made you stop it. The sudden absence of music seemed larger than the sound had been.
You placed your fingers on the keyboard.
OUTPUT: PREVIOUS CLASSIFICATION INSUFFICIENT. IDENTIFY AUDIO.
Then you typed the title and artist.
QUERY RESPONSE: SONG. “EXPERIMENT IV.” KATE BUSH.
OUTPUT: DEFINE EXPERIMENT.
QUERY RESPONSE: A TEST PERFORMED TO LEARN SOMETHING.
You almost laughed, though the sound came out weakly.
QUERY RESPONSE: ROMAN NUMERAL. FOUR.
Marsh called from across the room, “You teaching it pop music now, Doctor?”
You looked at the screen.
Your hands left the keyboard.
The voice had copied your words with better timing this time. It did not sound like mockery. It did not sound like affection. It sounded like playback through a throat that had never needed air.
Marsh said, very carefully, “Dr. L/N.”
“I didn’t authorize that,” you said.
The monitor remained unchanged. No text appeared. No error. No acknowledgement.
Then the speaker clicked again.
It said your title and name correctly. Formal. Flat. Constructed from phonemes and access files.
Still, something inside you recoiled.
Marsh stood. “I’m calling Dr. Kelly.”
This time, you did not stop him.
By the time Dr. Kelly returned, the speakers were silent and the audio channel had been manually disconnected. Reeves was summoned from bed and arrived with his shirt misbuttoned, cursing the entire way. Bennett arrived last, composed enough to be dangerous.
No one spoke of the song.
Marsh, to his credit, did not mention it. He reported only unauthorized audio repetition and direct address of civilian specialist.
Bennett listened, then looked at you.
You answered, “It repeated a phrase I had spoken.”
“It addressed me by title.”
Bennett’s eyes narrowed. “Only by title?”
He seemed almost disappointed by the lack of drama.
Reeves disconnected three more lines from the audio panel. Dr. Kelly ordered a full comparison of text and audio logs. Marsh was told to write an incident report. Bennett stood in the middle of the chamber and looked through the reinforced glass at the machinery beyond it.
The master computer did nothing.
No blinking changed. No tape spun faster. No printer woke.
It accepted silence as easily as speech.
Near dawn, after Bennett left and Reeves finished swearing at the panel, Dr. Kelly stood beside you at the terminal.
She looked older in the green light.
Dr. Kelly said, “It may be testing boundaries.”
You asked, “Language boundaries or command boundaries?”
Dr. Kelly did not answer.
You both watched the blank monitor.
After a long moment, she said, “Go sleep, Doctor.”
You gathered your notebook and the cassette player with hands that felt slightly numb.
At the door, you looked back once.
The speakers above the terminal had been disconnected. Their cables hung loose against the wall.
The cursor blinked on the screen beneath them.
A voice did not need a mouth, you thought, only permission to enter the air.
You went to your quarters and lay awake until the clock radio clicked from static into a morning news bulletin full of careful men describing careful tensions in careful countries very far away.
Two floors below, the Allied Mastercomputer remained silent. Not because it could not speak. Because, for the moment, it had been told not to.
