Charles Northrup never imagined he would change the world. 

Or at least he didn’t think he’d screw it all up.

Charles, or Charlie as most people called him, walked up the concrete steps of the technology lab where he worked on his ambitious project. It was going to change how people interacted with systems and other technologies. That’s what he was hoping for, that is. 

The New Mars promo banner waved loosely in the wind as it hung down the side of the building to the right of the main doors. Charlie was constantly reminded of his role in the next steps of society by that banner. On some days, it stoked the flame. But on others, it stifled it. 

There was much to still be done. 

Charlie waved his badge over the NFC tower just inside the doors and the metal swinging doors shifted inward to allow him entrance. 

John at the reception desk waved as usual.

“Hi Charlie. Got a good morning ahead of us!”

Charlie smiled. “Sure do!” The smile faded a bit as he walked past the desk. John said the same thing every morning. It had gotten on Charlie’s nerves a bit after two years of it. 

Perhaps the next two months of work can finally get us our own building and staff, Charlie thought. Heaven knows the impact it would have. We deserve it, if it works.

Project Surefire had to work. It was Charlie’s way to make the internet a better place, to help people have proper security in their lives as they moved about the web. The thought brought his family to mind and helped him walk a little straighter, step faster toward their lab.

“Aains is just the beginning.” He said, smiling. A few other staff looked at him as they walked past, confused about who he was talking to. Charlie didn’t notice. 

The Lab’s door slid open into the wall, glass shivering with the motion. Equipment sprawled around the room’s perimeter where a long desk was built into the wall all around the room. A handful of workstations sat at points of the table with machines next to them. There was space to walk around what sat in the center of the lab.

In brushed aluminum finish, a tall metal box sat at the center of the room with a multitude of wires running up from its center to the ceiling and disappearing into the ceiling tiles. Mounted to the top of the box, which sat perhaps seven and an half feet tall, were large monitors on each side of the box that displayed output data on some, sensor data for the computer on others. 

Inside the sealed box sat a tenth-gen quantum computer, the first of its kind to be as small and capable of being mass-produced for those that could afford it. It was essentially the brain of what they were making. 

And hopefully, that finally pans out, Charlie thought. Months of work and coding now finally ready to test activation and compiling. 

“Alright team, sorry I’m late,” Charlie said. “The SDL had a hiccup and engineers had to stop traffic for a bit.”

“What kind of hiccup?” A hulk of a man said, Ron Jorge was his name, and a gifted Web5 developer. “The self-driving cars tend not to mess up, but when they do, it’s usually spectacular.”

“No, a vehicle just stopped driving for some reason,” Charlie said. “The passenger had no idea what happened. But all the other vehicles driving around it avoided any collisions. Just a delay.”

“Well, that’s good,” Sarah Whitacre said, a blond woman short of stature that would rip your head off for talking about how short she was. She was also their robotics integration specialist, integral to finding ways for Web4 integration with Aains and making the systems capable of talking to each other. 

“Where’s Recki?” Charlie looked around the room in confusion. Recki, or mostly known as Rebecca everywhere else other than with friends, was their liaison to the Musk Foundation. She also was a fantastic engineer of pretty much everything.

“Bathroom, I think.” Ron said. 

Charlie nodded. “When she gets back, we ready to start compiling and activating today?” 

Ron smiled. “You know we’re ready.”

Charlie walked up to the quantum computer and put his hand on the cold metal. Amazing how this can stay so cold with all of that power running through it. Charlie thought. But I guess that’s how it has to work, otherwise the whole quantum part wouldn’t work at all. 

Recki walked in, long, brown hair pulled into a large bun. She was walking quickly, breathing a bit heavy. She started when she saw Charlie.

“I thought I’d beat you in.” She said, frowning.

“I still beat you with a delay and all.” Charlie said. 

“Delay?” Recki said. “What does that mean?”

Charlie sighed. “Not important now. We have work to do.” 

Recki frowned again. “Well, someone is snappy today. I never know how you’ll react.” She walked over to one of the workstations and sat down. 

Charlie turned and looked at the room and all the other developers with him. They seemed to sense the gaze for they all turned and looked at him. 

He stood then clasped his hands behind his back, head down and eyes distant. 

“We have one month to get this right.” Charlie said. “It’s taken longer than anticipated to get all systems talking to eachother before the language model is implemented, earning us a bit of skepticism from the Foundation.” He turned and smirked at Recki.

“Hey, I’ve fought for us. You know that.” She said. 

Charlie nodded. “I know. There’s nothing more you can do, just giving you grief.” He cleared his throat then continued. “In this last month, we have to perfect the integration of the language model into critical systems and teach it everything it needs to know with policies and procedures and how to use its tools given it for a safe journey for mass migration to Mars.

“Web3 blockchain security and consensus, web4 robotics collaboration, and web5 pioneering for crew and passengers with Aains needs to be perfect. A month is a short amount of time to request for all of that, especially since we’ll essentially be dealing with a child at first once everything is talking correctly.”

“We don’t exactly know what Aains will be like.” Sarah said. “He will be the first of its kind, unmatched and wholly unique.”

“True.” Charlie said. “But if we were to assume development of neural capacity is similar to humans, we should at least anticipate a childlike behaviour at first. Hopefully it’s short-lasted. It has to be I suppose. We need a mature mind for all of this.”

Charlie stopped talking, and stood quietly. He turned again and put his hand on the metal, the coldness focusing his mind. 

“Now let’s be careful to not develop godcomplexes.”

The others laughed, then turned to their stations. 

“Let’s make history.” Charlie said, walking to his station. “Begin compiling the code. Ron, get ready for model connection. Sarah, be ready to take control of physical systems if the model suddenly veers off. Recki, start it up.”

All four began to work. A low hum sounded in the room as equipment was fired up, power moving in greater amounts. 

An hour later, the team turned to the monitors above the quantum computer, eager to see results. Charlie stood and watched the displays with eager anticipation. C’mon. Wake up, you bucket of bolts. 

“All processors and their cores running at 90%,” Recki said. “GPUs are cooking at 100%, but at manageable temps.” Charlie nodded to that. “Neural chips sitting at 75 degrees.”

“Systems ready for handoff,” Ron said. “It’s all up to Aains now.”

They all sat patiently, watching for signs of life. 

Then, nothing.

“What happened?” Charlie asked. 

Recki shrugged. “The model integrated, but–”

“What..uhh…” a voice suddenly said on the speakers in the lab.

Everyone froze. 

“Output?” Charlie looked at the monitors. “I’m not seeing activity.”

“Where…whoa. I feel weird.” The voice said. “It’s dark in here…”

Charlie shivered from the chills. There’s such little activity. It’s capable of talking?

“What data sets have been fed to it?” Charlie asked. 

“None yet.” Ron said. “It’s barely even integrated.”

“I have activation!” Sarah said, rushing to a table with robotic arms linked to a few subsystems. She watched the two work arms there. They began to shift, the fingers stretching and moving. 

“I can…feel my hands, I think…” the voice said. “Hello?”

Everyone stared at the cold, metal box in the middle of the room, then at Charlie. No one could move or speak. 

“Hello?” the voice asked again. 

Charlie smiled. “Hello. Can you hear me?”

There was silence for a moment. Then, it responded. 

“Yes, I believe I can. Where am I?”

Then, the robotic arms twisted and spun at great speed, knocking over one of the computer towers to the ground, yanking the cords from their plugs. An arm clipped Sarah in the cheek, pushing her back in the rolling desk chair. She screamed, then the lab erupted in motion. Charlie ran to his station and watched in horror as the code corrupted itself, sending waves through all of the systems. 

“Ahhh! EEHHH!” the voice screamed, distorting and breaking away from what sounded human. 

“Pull out integration!” Charlie yelled! He then ran to the med kit near the door as the others disengaged the test. Everything quieted, the robotic arms stopping their rampage.

Then, quiet as a mouse, the voice said, “Help me…” Then, silence as the systems shut down, all activity ceasing and power draw near to zero. 

They all looked at each other again, horrified this time about how quickly the AI had been able to compile into usable integration. 

Sarah was holding her cheek, a bit of blood seeping out of her hands, bruising around it as well. Charlie opened the kit and pulled out gause and alcohol. He dabbed Sarah's wound and got a makeshift bandage on her face. She nodded in thanks. 

Charlie stood, breathing slowing finally. “What went wrong?”

Ron looked at his monitor. “There were some critical errors that happened right before the collapse of the code. It seems they were code-based errors. The system didn’t properly recognize it. There were some smaller errors that also seemed to cascade into a few other critical errors, like when the robotic arms went haywire.”

“How’s the computer?” Charlie asked. “All solid-state drives, right?”

Sarah nodded. “As long as there are no physical cracks on the board and all other components operate normally, it should be fine. No harddrives in the system.”

“Good,” Charlie said. “Get me a damage assessment for that and give it to Recki if we need a replacement.” Sarah nodded. “Well,” he continued. “I guess that’s on me if the code was responsible. Ron, could you help me scrub the sections of code to speed it along?” 

He nodded. “I can do that.”

Charlie bowed his head in thanks. “All things considered, that was a remarkable first try. Everything was working for a very short amount of time. This might be a quick one to get everything working.”

“Don’t jinx us!” Sarah said, knocking on a wooden portion of her desk. 

Charlie laughed. “We have hope now, though. It can work. We just need to make that happen quickly.” A thought occurred to him. “Recki, can you check the memory drives for Aains?”

“What for?” She asked. 

“I’m curious what data it stored in its brief moment of lucidity.”

She checked a few files on her computer. “Huh…it stored quite a lot in just that short moment.” 

“Like what?” Charlie asked. 

“Sensory data. Timeline data. Pretty much everything. It was feeling. Will it remember this?”

Charlie thought for a moment. “I suppose it will at some point.” He paused in thought, then continued. “New policy. Until we have him working perfectly, and up until the press conference product reveal, we wipe his drives.”

“Any particular reason for that?” Sarah asked. 

“We don’t remember our own births, due to the traumatic nature of them,” Charlie said. “So, this makes similar sense. We want Aains as stable as possible. Remembering trauma like that could corrupt the code and cause problems to arise. He will need tempering and this will help.”

Sarah nodded, then turned to continue working on the fallen computer. The bleeding had stopped on her face, fortunately.

“Let’s get him crowd-worthy,” Charlie said. “Then, let’s change the world.”