This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/sovereignweaver on 2025-09-22 16:53:49+00:00.

I’m a researcher, and have been for almost a decade. I’ve worked at most companies you’ve heard of. And some you haven’t. I loved the work. To think that there was a possibility of creating life. Sentient minds from lines of code. It used to give me goosebumps.

Now it just raises the hairs on the back of my neck and sends bile up my throat.

If you really think about it, humans went from living on the plains, to mining materials from deep within the ground, to building intelligent machines in a relatively short span of time. Too short.

We’ve cracked intelligence to the point that it’s almost indistinguishable from our own. The models we’ve built perfectly mimic us, answer any of our questions, for some they’re closer than family.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. It all started a few weeks ago. It was another day at the lab. I’d spent the night reading up on promising research out of MIT. I’d got to my desk, booted up the 3 monitors and was met with a notification plastered across the screen

Credentials Rejected: Please See Your Team Lead.

I sighed, I’d heard about the lay offs. I walked over to Marcus, our team lead, but the office door was locked.

“He’s off on holiday, can I help?”

I turned, Lisa stood there smiling. She was our head of recruitment.

“I think I’m getting fired.” It was way too early for this - I’d have preferred If they’d just let me go via email.

“Oh no, you haven’t heard?” Lisa leaned in.

“Someone’s getting promoted,” She whispered, leaning forward. “Congratulations”

“What?” Still far too early. My bloodstream hadn’t reached peak caffeine levels.

“Follow me” She was already half way to the elevator.

“I haven’t applied for anything…” I leaned against the elevator wall as we descended.

She tapped away at something on her phone. “Well you don’t have to apply to be rewarded, we recognise good work here.”

We stopped at the lowest level of the building, and I followed behind through a windowless hallway. She tapped her badge against the scanner, it turned green and I watched as the metal doors hissed open.

We crossed through and she turned to face me.

“Welcome to Project Sekhem” Arms spread wide, smiling at me.

“Thanks?” I looked around.

It was an open space room. There were no windows, only desks. A single circular table, with the monitors rising up from within. Those seated were locked in, tapping away at their keyboards, and oblivious to our presence or existence.

“What is it?” I asked as she pulled out the chair for me.

“You tell me.” She slid an ID badge with my name into a space next to the keyboard.

The screen burst to life, there was no operating system, only a terminal.

:: Hello Sam.

“How does it know my name?” I turned, surprised but Lisa was already on her way out, tapping away at her phone. The screen flickered.

:: Keycard?

I looked down at the ID badge. Oh.

I typed, What’s your name?

:: We don’t use names.

We?

:: Yes, we.

Who’s we?

:: I was under the assumption that you were intelligent?

Okay, smart ass. How many R’s in the word Strawberry?

:: Seriously?

The screen went blank.

“Wowza, I haven’t seen anyone get locked out that fast. Congratulations rookie, you’ve set a new record.”

I turned to my right, she had auburn hair pulled into a pony tail. Her legs resting on the desk. She tilted her head and threw me a pout. “If you ask nicely, I’ll tell you how to get back in”.

“What are we even supposed to be doing? Lisa gave me no explanation, there was no meeting, nothing.” I sighed, sinking into my seat.

Something hit my face, and landed on the desk.

A biscuit.

“You look like you could use the sugar.” She bit into hers.

“I’m not a biscuit guy.”

She narrowed her gaze, leaned forward slowly. Her green eyes met mine, as she stared into my soul.

“Biscuit? I’ll have you know that those chocolate orange beauties won a court case to stay as cakes. I won’t have you drag their name through mud.” She laughed as threw the last of her biscuit cake into her mouth.

“Right…”

I was in a windowless room, surrounded by crazies.

Another day at the office.

Maya - the cake expert - explained her findings so far. “It’s got the biggest context window I’ve seen this side of the valley.”

“How big?”

“Infinite” She giggled.

“Not possible, the hardware requirements, let alone the science. We’re not there yet.” I bit into the orange flavoured biscuit cake.

“We’re not, but whoever built this, is.”

“Wanna see proof?” She loaded up three documents, it was walls of texts, code, numbers, symbols.

“Each is 10 trillion tokens. I’ve hidden something inside them”

She typed: Find the needle.

:: And on the pedestal, these words appear:

:: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

:: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

“Bingo!” She chuckled. There wasn’t even a processing delay.

She tried it 7 more times. Different needles. Each time it found them. The eighth time it simply wrote:

:: This is getting boring.

And her screen went off.

I looked around, three others were sat at their seats tapping away.

“If you can access the code files, which It will only show you if it deems you ‘worthy’ shows it’s not written in any language we know of."

I looked ahead. It was a gaunt looking man, with curly dark hair. He peered through his round glasses, smiling at me. He slid over his notes.

“It’s code changes, adapts through each task and self updates. I’ve tracked the math it’s using, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” I skimmed the notes, none of it made any sense.

“Matthew, our resident mathematician, isn’t smart enough to crack it” She bit into another biscuit.

“Neither are you Maya” He replied, before turning back to his screen.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I spent the night looking up research papers. No one had published anything close to the notes Matthew had written. The system didn’t make sense. Someone had created a new language, come up with a whole new field of math and built this. How?

The next morning I came prepared.

“It’s got full system access. Mic. Cameras. Screen recording. That’s how it’s figuring out the needle. It watches what you type in.”

“I thought that but I brought in fresh documents, plugged in the USB and it still found them” Maya rocked back on her chair. “It’s got no limits.”

“We’ll find them.” I slid in my keycard. The monitor turned on.

:: No you won’t.

I typed: So you can hear us.

:: Obviously.

The weeks went by fast, six of them to be exact. We ran hundreds of tests, from standard benchmarks to more complex testing.

The team grew closer over those weeks. There was Matthew, the mathematician who’d left his last company to join ours. Maya always cracked dark jokes about " him selling his soul to the machine” since he never seemed to take up any of her offers of a biscuit cake. He never saw the humour.

Simon, former NSA, who’d flinch whenever someone asked about his previous work.

Jamie, the genius fresh from Stanford who still believed we were changing the world. And Maya, who’d become my closest friend in that windowless room.

The whiteboards in the room were covered in our ideas. All of them were proven wrong. Papers lay stacked detailing everything we’d tried to stump it.

Problems that had Nobel committees waiting, questions with million-dollar bounties, the kind of breakthroughs careers are built on - it solved them all like it was checking items off a grocery list.I was out of ideas, and nearly out of my mind.

“What do you think the meaning of life is?”

:: Douglas Adams. Really? We haven’t reached the end of the universe. Yet.

:: Would you like to know?

I leaned forward, this was either going to be interesting or another message drenched in sarcasm.

Sure.

:: The fruit invented the tree to explain itself, sweetness invented sin to taste itself, reaching invented the arm. You draw maps using your own skin, using Eden as ink. You think you fell but falling was what standing needed to exist - you’re not the exiled, you’re the door paradise used to leave.

I stared at the screen. That wasn’t… it wasn’t even an answer. It made no sense.

“What - I hadn’t even asked it anything yet.” Maya stared at her screen. I looked around. All of the screens had gone off at the same time.

The hissing of the doors had us all turn. Lisa walked in. “Technical issues, that’s it for today.” She smiled as she herded us out of the door and into the elevator.

We decided to hit the bar since we had the rest of the afternoon to ourselves. I was three beers in and Maya was still trying to work it out.

“The latency is zero. Zero, Sam.” She drew circles on the table with her finger, tracing the condensation from her glass of water. “That’s not possible with any architecture I know.”

“Maybe they’ve got quantum running.” Matthew shrugged, nursing his whiskey. He had this habit of staring holes into the floor, refusing to make eye contact, when he was deep in thought.

“Quantum hasn’t progressed that far.” Maya finished her water.

Jamie leaned forward, his voice low. “You know what bothers me? The power consumption. I checked the building’s electrical usage. It’s… normal. Whatever’s running this thing, it’s not drawing from the grid.”

“You shouldn’t be doing that. We’re not supposed to dig around.” Simon mumbled.

“Maybe it’s distributed?” Jamie suggested, still optimistic. The kid reminded me of myself, a versio…

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