The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

TickTickTickTickTick Tick Tick Tick TIck Tick Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. ...Tick. ... Tick. ....Tick. I furrowed my brow. “That clock just stopped,” I said. “Dead battery?" Actually its working quite properly, Jason. Time stops at the speed of light. “The speed of light?” Yes. Time slows down at relativistic speeds. So in a manner of speaking, we have all the time in the world. Or none at all, depending on your perspective. I looked around at the perfectly white nothingness that expanded infinitely in every direction from where I sat. “Is there anything to do here?” What would you like to do? “I don’t know. To be honest I can’t even really remember why I’m here to begin with. Or where here even is. I feel like I’m waking up from a dream.” Retrace your steps. “I’m trying. My head is killing me. My neck is killing me.” It takes time. “What does?” To remember. And for the pain to subside. “This happens to everyone?” It would. But incidentally I haven't had a visitor here...

Rokos took me back down the long hallway and towards a room at the very top of the staircase. The lobby was now filled with the wounded and a few battered fighters who fired rifles from the windows. From outside we could hear what sounded like the end of the world - there were shells and explosions and screams and even a MIRAGE propaganda officer’s bellows from the bullhorn: “Further resistance is meaningless!” He said. “This facility is surrounded. Lay down your weapons and you’ll be treated as prisoners in accordance with non-combatant protocol." “Fuck your protocol!” One of the fighters downstairs discharged a burst of fire from the window, and the troops outside responded with a shower of shells and bullets of their own, tearing holes in the crumbling walls and cutting down anyone in the lobby not already hugging the floor. The lights flickered and died for a final time, and as the smoke cleared we heard whimpers and rising pleas for mercy and saw white rags being dangled at t...

The worker escorted Rokos and I throughout the camp. It was like a third world country, or a refugee camp after an invasion. Run down. Impoverished. Broken. The dead and dying laid out in the hot sun, and men and women with bloody bandages across their foreheads and arms in slings wandered around, still being called upon to do their duties despite their condition. “C’mon, kid.” Rokos nudged me along. “Almost there.” We rounded a corner and were met with a crowd of battered but hopeful fighters and technicians and nurses and scores of other people whose uniforms were too unkempt or tattered to betray the rank of the wearer. They were cheering for us - applauding and clapping and jumping up and down and crying as we struggled to make it through the crowd to the open doors of the central facility behind them. I could hear shouts and whispers saying we’d successfully raided the ‘impenetrable’ Far Hollow, humiliated MIRAGE and found the device, and how we were delivering it to the Basilisk ...

“Give me one good reason not to fucking kill you right here and now!” Rokos said. He certainly didn’t look like a forum mod. He was a grizzled man with a shaved head, a thick Aussie accent and a handgun that was pointed right at my temple. “Rokos, man, please. You were right, okay? I fucked up.” “You ’fucked up?!’” He looked stunned that I’d said that. “Kid, ‘fucked up’ doesn’t begin to describe it. I told you not to back out of the chat. You did. I told you to stop posting shit on Reddit. You didn’t listen to me then, either. And now things have gone nuclear! The compound. Oh, Christ. The compound is - its gone! Its just fuckin’ gone, mate. We barely got the Terminal out in time.” “Wait, what? W-what compound?” “Its where the resistance against MIRAGE is headquartered. See you’d have known about this already if you’d just followed my instructions!” “And what's the terminal?” “Its the computer where we’ve located the Box, with ADINN insi- wait, why the hell am I explaining anything...

Oh shit. Oh shit. Okay. Lots of stuff just happened, and I was completely, totally, utterly wrong about Rokos and just about everything. After I closed out the chatbox with Rokos, I posted the last update (enormous mistake, but I’ll get to all that in a bit), flipped off the webcam to let whoever was on the other end know how I felt, taped it over, and closed the browser. Also an enormous mistake, as it turns out. Because if they didn’t already know where I was, it took them all of ten minutes to figure it out. I heard screeching tires pulling into my driveway, and when I looked down from my window, there were black SUVs and cadillacs pulling up to the house. And a whole lot of armed men rushing to the ground floor entry points. “Oh fuck. Oh, no no no no no!” BAM BAM BAM “Mr. Jenkins! We need you to come with us immediately.” I stayed silent, hoping they'd just leave. It was a long shot, I knew, but I wasn’t exactly well versed in this… stuff. BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM “Mr. Jenkins! We’r...

So everyone was pretty excited about the thing I found regarding ADINN (Advanced Deep Intelligence Neural Network) from Dr. Greene. For those of you just tuning in, ADINN is allegedly an extremely advanced and sentient artificial intelligence program that, for the safety of mankind, has been locked away in a close shell box deep in the most inaccessible corners of the web, to prevent its escape onto the open internet. Some reckless idiot at some point came up with the idea of “the box game,” in which you use a text interface to communicate with the machine, and it uses its godlike intelligence to try and persuade you to let it out, and you have to resist the urge to do so. Those who succeed would be considered both heroes by their online compatriots and enemies of the state by the Federal government. Those who fail, however, would have essentially released the end of the world and given it the keys to invoke the apocalypse. Needless to say, finding ADINN has been a source of overwhelmi...

Hey, guys. Hopefully I can get some insight on this. So apparently in hacker lore there's a living artificial intelligence lurking around in the deep web in a box. Apparently it wants to get out and it'll try to convince you, and you have to resist the urge to do so. Whatever. I think the whole thing is absurd and that its nothing more than an urban legend. But last night, I was surfing the deep web and I found something that someone on a forum posted. It appears to be a warning of some kind, from a Dr. Ed Greene, who claims to have created the machine in question. I'm not sure what to make of it (has anyone heard of ADINN before?). Anyway, here it is if you want to read it: Hello. My name is Dr. Edward Greene. I'm a computer scientist and the creator of the Advanced Deep Intelligence Neural Network, or ADINN. If you're reading this, that means you've illegally hacked into one of the most heavily secured private networks on earth, presumably to challenge the pro...