Fuck you

My memories were tugging me, pulling me back into the hotel room.

The lighter in my hand kept slipping as I pushed myself back against the sofa. Getting shot through the tendons tends to do that to you. I lit the cigarette and took a deep one. Piercing through the night’s heavy fog the iridescent neon lights reflected off the pool of blood. My hazy eyes could barely make out the mess of glass and guts in front of me. Slowly, but steadily the marching grew louder and started to drown out the ringing from the gunshots. Right as I felt myself slipping away, the enforcers burst through every window and door. For a split second everything went still. An almost palpable tension weighed heavily on the already murky ambiance. Just as I raised my hand to wipe the blood from my eyes, every gun sprang into action. My final memory would be the sight of a thousand bullets tearing through the damp air from all directions.

Startling awake I instinctively reached for my temple. The cold of the Dura steel gave me relief.  We were still on the mag-car riding down the hallway. I pulled the pamphlet they had given at the gate out of my pockets.


‘Consciousness is a wonderful phenomenon but also a very misunderstood one.

Our conscious is what defines us, it drives us. It outlines our talents, our flaws, our likes, our dislikes. It’s our stream of thought, our inner monologue. Understanding consciousness is the first step to truly understanding our species.

What does it mean to be conscious? Is it an intricate event or is it just a bag of tricks?
Is it just another evolutionary aberrance or  something greater ?

Where does consciousness start? Our body is made up of millions upon billions of tiny cells. Each of which are not in the least bit conscious. At what level of cellular organization does consciousness arise?

Join us as we attempt the nearest approximation of an irrational phenomenon. As with our limited faculty of senses feeding into our biased translator we try to understand how a foreign language works’

-Montern solutions.


“Christ, that’s atrocious,” I thought as I shoved the pamphlet back into my pocket. “Uhh, how much more to my room?”  The slickly dressed guard paid no heed as we continued to glide down the seemingly mile long hallway dotted with doors.

Suddenly the mag-car stopped.

“Here.” He said pointing to the door on our right. He handed me a keycard as I stepped out, the harsh neon lights of the hallway obscured the blackspace code on it.

Pointing the code into the lens on the knob the door clicked open. From inside the warm glow of incandescent lamps gushed out, clashing against the mechanic glow of LED tubes in the hallway.

The room was a small one, dimly lit with only one square window. A calming wave of familiarity swept over me as I stepped in. From the gentle glow of the computer panel flowing onto the bed to the rain drenched window pane, everything had been like I left it. It felt as though if I had been teleported to my apartment back in the city.

“Aw, all this for me, you shouldn’t have,” I joked. The guard wasn’t amused.
 “Get ready, the meeting is at 8 sharp,” he said with a grunt as slammed the door shut behind him.
After waiting a few seconds to make sure that he had gone before I leapt onto my computer.
“Now, now, I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” I muttered as I attempted to decipher the blackspace code. My keystrokes bought up the heavily encrypted source code of the keycard . The passkey would have to be more that 2Gbit as brute forcing  led nowhere.

A small smile crept onto my face; cracking codes had always been my passion, it helped drown the background noise.

Lunging into the cupboard I grabbed the electric cutter. “Just where I left it.”
With the signal scrambler switched on I started cutting into the door knob. “I sure hope there aren’t any cameras in here.” Tunneling through the maze of wires i finally spied my prize. A brand new Montern chip, hopefully with an integrated key generator and compiler.

 The sudden rapping on the door startled me. “Ready?” questioned the burly voice from the other side.

“Coming,” I replied fumbling to put the lid back on the door knob. The new guest turned out to another smartly dressed brick house.

“Dr. Roberts would like to meet you, follow me.” He got back into the mag car before I had a chance to question him.Turns out we had another long journey ahead of us.

”Who these guys are and more importantly, why I have I never heard of them,” I sat there wondering between cigarette puffs as we glided down another seemingly never ending hallway of light. We were greeted by a red door against an all white background, as we ended our journey.

As I got out of the mag car the guard motioned to my keycard .A small lump of distress formed in my throat as he printed a new cube of code

The door seemed to crack to life as I coupled it with the keycard. You could hear the clicking and falling of locks inside it.

”What? You don’t trust your own cyber security?” My joking glance was reciprocated with a cold scowl.

“Man where do they get you guys from.”

Without warning the door popped open and I was treated to a blast of cold air. The sparse furnishing accentuated the room’s already immense proportions. As I lingered towards the condensed glass pane running through center, the soot from my cigarette formed a visible trail. It had been a long time since I breathed air this fresh. The rapid air replacement system coupled with the distinct hum of machinery gave the room a mystifying almost life like semblance.

My trance was broken by a silvery voice.
“So you must be #32.” The source of the sound seemed to be a curious old man in black overalls.

”Excuse me?” I gave him a questioning glance.

“Ah yes. I forget that I haven’t introduced myself to you.” He extended his hand. “I’m Dr. Roberts, behavioral programmer and the lead scientist in our little project here.” He glanced over to the glass pane. Sensing my confusion he continued. “What you are looking at here is the result of years of research and months of programming, the world’s 1st deep learning, self-correcting, AI and you Mr. 32 are going to help us run the tests.” He finished on a high note.

“Well this should be interesting.”

                                                             *****
Behind the pane of glass the camera zoomed into Robert’s and 32’s face, the whirring about the machinery grew a notch.

The maintenance crews exchanged a concerned look.

“Subject has initiated first contact with a human, cognitive and visual readings are climbing but within acceptable parameters. Core temps are holding steady. Fans at 75% capacity.” one of them talked into a short range transmitter.

“Copy that, wait until further instruction are provided,” responded the transmitter. “Let’s hope the machine won't blow out halfway through this cycle,” it added.