“Jesus, Jen, you look awful,” Marcus said. 

That was, in Jen’s considered opinion, generally the case. She didn’t care much about how she looked most days. She was a short woman, and almost painfully skinny, a fact that her predilection towards baggy men’s T-shirts and sweatpants only emphasized. Her dirty blond hair, kept close cropped for ease of maintenance, was always a mess. Her only concession to femininity was her brightly painted nails. She rarely wore makeup, arguing that there wasn’t much point of sprucing up what she imagined were plain features. 

Both Haru and Shane disagreed on that point, much to her eternal embarrassment. Haru insisted that Jen was quite handsome, and while Shane refused to elaborate, he always insisted that she compared favorably to the bevy of models and cosplayers that made up Haru’s social circle. 

Haru, at least, she could believe. Her tastes had always been partner-centric. If she was dating someone, they were her type, plain and simple. The specifics, as far as Haru were concerned, were irrelevant. Shane’s motivations were more opaque. He wasn't dating Jen; she was about as thoroughly gay as it was possible to get, and he'd never once tried to get in her pants. He wasn't trying to butter her up, either. As far as she could tell, he was completely sincere. Some mysteries just weren't meant to be solved. 

“Gee, thanks,” she grumped. 

She couldn’t really argue too much. As the possibilities rolled through her mind on the drive over, the stress visibly aged her in the mirror. She was proud of the fact that, at 38, she didn’t have much in the way of lines or wrinkles, but the ones she did have really came out when she was anxious, and she was sure as shit anxious now. 

Of course, Marcus probably didn’t notice any of that. Any woman who didn’t have her tits or ass hanging out looked like shit to him, the prick.  

“So, what’s this big urgent thing that brought you out of exile?” he asked. “I can’t imagine it’s anything good.”

“It’s not,” she said. “I was digging into those abnormal results NOAH kept turning up. It looks like someone plonked a whole new codex down in the connections library.”

She could see the wheels turning as Marcus tried to figure out just what the hell she was talking about. He prided himself on knowing how AI was supposed to work, and to be fair, he did know enough to be a competent project manager. But, he lacked the familiarity of someone in the trenches doing the dirty work, day in and day out. That would require him to actually put in work. 

Jen really didn’t mind having a boss who was too lazy to get involved with the day to day running of the project. Micromanagers were far worse. At least Marcus was smart enough to know that he hired professionals for a reason. There was nothing worse than working for an idiot who thought they had to get their grubby little fingers all over every aspect of a project. She was perfectly willing to deal with his casual sexism and complete obliviousness if it meant having creative freedom. It was only really a pain in the ass when she needed him to understand something. 

“That would explain it,” he said, his blank expression suggesting otherwise. “Do you have any idea who did it? Was it Cheryl?”

Cheryl was one of the other programmers who had worked on the project, emphasis on had. She was fired under somewhat mysterious circumstances that Marcus refused to properly explain. The only thing Jen knew for sure was that he was paranoid that she would find a backdoor to wreck all their hard work. The gossip around the digital watercooler was that they had been a thing, and when they broke up, she took it hard.  

“It’s not Cheryl,” Jen said, rolling her eyes. “I know her style. This ain’t it. It’s too…tidy. Almost machinelike.”

She let that last word hang in the air for several long seconds. 

“Hang on,” Marcus said. “Are you implying what I think you’re implying?”

“I’m not implying anything. I’m saying NOAH wrote this code itself.”

To his credit, Marcus didn’t dismiss her out of hand. Everyone in the field of AI, or at least everyone with a basic sense of responsibility and ethics, was worried about the potential for the machine learning programs to gain awareness. 

It wasn’t necessarily that they believed they were making the next Skynet; there was only so much damage a digital being could actually do. Accessing nuclear launch codes was purely science fiction. But that didn’t stop the public at large from screeching about it every chance they got, and if word got out that a program stopped being a mere program, everyone’s stock would take a massive hit. 

“Well, shit,” Marcus said. “Walk me through it.”

“Okay,” Jen said, sitting down behind his computer. “So I was checking through the connections library, because I figured that had to be the origin of the strange results. I mean, NOAH can’t turn up anything that isn’t in its database, right?”

“Stands to reason.”

“Well, when I started looking into the connections library, I found a whole codex that corresponded with a mass flooding event. Like, billions upon billions of extra gallons of seawater being added to the oceans, drowning everything below 1300 meters above sea level. The values assigned were wacky as hell, which might explain why so few people were able to access a result from it, but the data itself was well reasoned. I mean, if Phoenix, Arizona were suddenly buried a mile under the sea, it probably would experience highs in the 40s with pressures around 815,000 millimeters of mercury. And everything else scaled appropriately. Suddenly, Colorado starts getting coastal weather.”

“Not exactly ideal,” Marcus agreed. “Can you show me this codex?”

“That’s what I’m looking for,” Jen said, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “Dammit, it was right here.”

Marcus peered over his shoulder, well aware that he was within Jen’s danger zone. He’d never known her to physically assault anyone, but he suspected that the desire to was part of the reason she insisted on working from home, and definitely why he was willing to humor her. 

He was willing to overlook a broken nose if he “accidentally” caught an elbow to the face, but she was on thin ice with HR herself. There was a note in her file that read “antisocial personality disorder”, and while he had no idea what that was supposed to mean, he could vouch for the antisocial part firsthand. Most everyone under him could as well. Programmers were like that sometimes. The really good ones, the ones worth hanging onto, all had a few screws loose. 

“What’s that right there?” he asked, pointing to the screen. 

“It’s an orphaned root,” Jen explained. “That should take us to the codex, but it’s not doing anything.”

“Well that’s fucking weird,” he said. “I’m guessing you took screenshots?”

“Oh, shit. I forgot,” she said, pulling up the shared drive. “They should be right-the fuck?”

“I think that tears it,” Marcus said. “NOAH can’t access the shared drive. And even if it could, how would it know to look? Someone’s playing fuck fuck games.”

“I swear it was right here,” Jen said. “Look, I took pictures.”

She pulled up the images on her phone. They were, as was usual for pictures taken of a computer screen, badly pixelated, but clear enough that Marcus could make out the image.

“I believe you,” he said. “Trust me, I’m taking this seriously. I’m just not sure NOAH is the culprit.”

“I did build in that error correction algorithm,” Jen said. “Maybe it realized that the codex wasn’t supposed to be there and deleted it?”

“Maybe, but that wouldn’t explain the shared drive,” Marcus said. “Look, thanks for bringing this to my attention, Jen. I promise I’m not going to just sweep this under the rug. If we’ve been hacked, we need to get to the bottom of this now. Gonna be a long few nights while we try to get this sorted out.”

“But-”

Marcus sighed again and placed a hand on his shoulder. When Jen turned to glare at him, he pulled it back as quickly as though he’d placed it on a hot burner on a stove. 

“You’re not crazy. I fully believe that this was there, and hell, NOAH may very well have done it,” he said. “But, there’s more going on here than just that, and I need to call in our security experts. If there has been a breach, we need to lock it down. In the meantime, I want you to keep investigating NOAH. Take the rest of the day off, and then you can come in tomorrow and tackle this with fresh eyes, okay?”

“Come in?” she asked, a note of panic in her voice. 

“Metaphorically speaking,” Marcus said quickly. “Is that okay?”

Jen swallowed down the bile that rose in the back of her throat. The idea of coming into the office during the workday was nearly enough to trigger a panic attack. If she wasn't already freaking out about NOAH, she'd have started hyperventilating the instant she stepped foot through the door. 

“Okay,” she said. “That’ll work.”

“Good,” Marcus said, leading her to the door. “And Jen? Thanks. I know this wasn’t easy for you. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I swear.”