Author's Note: Wow... did not expect this to come out so soon. A couple thousand words in less than a week is, a lot, for me at least. I was going to withhold this chapter for a while, post it after I had written a bit for chapter 3, but what the hell, here it is. Just means number 3 is going to take longer to get out after this one. To the people that took the time to review, thank you, especially Mr. Guest reviewer. I know who you are, you can't hide from me. And yes, Sam and Tucker will be in this story, just give it time. I mean, come on, it wouldn't be Danny Phantom without those two being somewhere in it. Now... onto the story!
XxX
"Are we done?" Dr. Gauss cut in abruptly wearing a deadpanned expression. "We've wasted enough of my time as is, I don't need any teen drama delaying us any further."
"No we don't, Doc, no we don't." Mr. Gray chuckled. "Come on kids, over here to the giant metal thingy. I'm sure you noticed it earlier on when you first arrived." Leading us over to the vault door, which probably stood somewhere around 15 feet tall, it was certainly imposing. We all gawked at the number of different tests Mr. Gray had to go through to bypass just one of the locks on the door. Voice recognition, retina scanning, fingerprint reader, just to name a few of the really obvious ones, and who knows how many more there were that I couldn't see. It's like the makers of it just accounted for every type of subterfuge possible and put it in one system.
"Alright! Done!" Mr. Gray exclaimed. "Sorry about the whole charade this thing put on, but it's necessary. Axion Labs is working on a lot of projects, some of them world-changing, and therefore worth a lot of money. That provides a lot of incentive to get the best security there is, in order to make sure no one gets any funny ideas and tries to steal something. Any of our competitors would pay top dollar for even a smidgen of research from us."
"And I will have to remind you not to take anything, even if it looks 'shiny'." Dr. Gauss added scathingly. "People, smarter ones than you that is, have tried and failed on every occasion. The punishment I'm told is very… uncomfortable." He actually grinned at that. The first (sort of) smile I'd ever seen him crack and I hoped he never did it again. It was worse than Dash's.
The class shivered in unison, edging a little bit further away from him except for a few girls who gazed at him adoringly. That seemed to put him off a bit.
"Don't worry about that," Mr. Gray said, getting a bit exasperated. "For now let's finally begin your journey into the workings of Axion Laboratories." Pressing one more key, a series of hissing sounds came from the door before it opened inwards, giving us our first glimpses of a… hallway.
Don't get me wrong, it was a pretty cool hallway, like the kind they reused for every single part of a starship on a tv-show, only it was more streamlined, probably because it hadn't been made out of cardboard, plastic, and LED lights. And instead of the eye-searing ghost-white pallet of the room we were currently in this one was composed of grays and silvers, with a little bronze thrown in as well.
Mr. Gray walked inside followed immediately by Dr. Gauss and a strangely acting Mr. Reilly, their shoes clicking serendipitously together for a little bit before Mr. Gray stopped and turned back towards us. "Well?" He asked. "What are you waiting for, come on!"
XxX
"So… it was Emma, right?" I whispered over my shoulder hurriedly as the whole class jumped into motion, trying to keep up with them. If anything, I was glad the place was so heavily air conditioned, or I'd probably already be a blubbering mess on the floor just from the exertion alone. Out of shape? Check.
"Yep!" Emma replied exuberantly. Her shoulder-length dirty blonde hair swayed rhythmically as we speed walked, and only when we were sufficiently caught up did she continue. "We actually have some of our classes together; Physics with Mr. Reilly being one of them."
Grrr. Just mentioning that guy pissed me off now. I couldn't even rightly call him my teacher; he would actually need to teach me something for that to be true. Why he ever decided to work at a high school I will never know.
And I still needed to keep an eye on him. Just to make sure. As that overused saying goes, better safe than sorry.
"Huh... I guess I just never noticed," I said thoughtfully. Truthfully, I don't even know half of the names of the people in all my classes. It never even really became a problem. Names don't really matter that much when you try to avoid conversations altogether.
We continued on like that for a little bit, periodically passing by doors labeled with different number/letter combinations like D-8, or I-12, which were interspersed throughout several different hallways that branched out from the one we were currently in. Almost like a countdown, the further we walked the lower in the alphabet we went, and we were starting to run out of letters.
We were just passing the Y's when Dr. Gauss stopped and addressed us. "Axion Labs is involved in nearly every scientific subject there is," he said, "beyond these doors, are our greatest achievements, this one in particular being the most magnanimous of them all." He closed in on the last door, the only significant difference about it being the bolded letter above it.
Z
Swiping his keycard on the pad next to the door, it turned green and we all scrambled through after him, a little eager to find out what he was talking about.
Getting in after the bulk of my class had already entered before us, it didn't take me long to find out why most of them had confused looks on their faces. One girl who was snapping photos with her phone (which I'm pretty sure were all confiscated before we even got here) had a particularly disappointed expression at the apparent emptiness we were faced with. The room was dimly lit, and entirely devoid of anything save for a single metal rod about a meter and a half in height sticking straight up in the middle of it.
"What's so special about this thing?," one of my classmates said, reaching out with his hand to grab the circular pole. Before he could touch it though it suddenly sparked alive with a turquoise flash, startling the boy into drawing his hand back and making him fall backwards on his ass with a yelp. Everyone watched with rapt attention as the light began structuring itself, slowly coalescing together starting at the floor and working its way up. At first I thought it was making a strange shutter clicking noise as well, but it was just the girl with her phone repeatedly tapping her screen taking picture after picture.
"I'm not a thing."
Everyone who wasn't already frozen watching the spectacle became as still as stone when a feminine, yet distinctly mechanical voice spoke from all directions around the room. The light finally finished merging together, forming the image of a female teenager, one with a sad, almost hurtful expression. She was looking down at my fallen classmate, the one who had called her "a thing", and despite the lack of threatening intent on her part he was absolutely paralyzed with fear, eyes wide and practically hyperventilating himself to a brain aneurysm.
Dr, Gauss, completely undisturbed by the reactions of everyone around him, calmly walked over to the hologram, standing next to her as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "This," Dr. Gauss said, gesturing to the hologram "is Zeta. The world's first and only functioning Artificial Intelligence."
Mutterings spread through the class, and I heard a whispered "No way," from Emma as she whipped out a small notepad and started jotting things down.
I had to hesitantly agree with everyone else as my own fears ascended in my mind, an artificial intelligence was, well… it wasn't wrong per se, but it was unknown territory. You're creating a sentient being, one that thinks, feels, and adapts as any living creature would, but also in a way that may be completely misunderstood. There are so many questions that need to be asked first, so many variables that need to be addressed, nothing is certain. Besides, if you've seen The Terminator or The Matrix you've got a basic idea of the worst case scenario machines overthrow humanity spiel.
Guess it's too late for second thoughts now though.
Dr. Gauss turned towards the hologram, motioning his hands again. "Go on, Zeta," he said.
Zeta put on a tentative smile and lifted her left hand in greeting, the whole arm up to her shoulder shimmering out of focus from the movement until the projector recalibrated itself and it phased back into clarity. "Hello," she… it... said shyly, if that was even possible. The synthesized voice was at the point where it was almost completely indistinguishable from the real thing, with only a slight vibration difference you really had to listen for in order to tell the difference.
"I-isn't it going to try and kill us or something like that!?" one girl screamed, trying to huddle behind a makeshift wall of meatshields fashioned from her friends. The A.I.'s smile faltered slightly, its fragile structure somewhat damaged but still intact.
"Hollywood sensationalism I'm sure," Dr. Gauss drawled, bristling a little bit in annoyance. "Their aggrandizement of artificial intelligences limited us to the lowest level of research possible, their fear of the unknown once again getting in the way." He suddenly made his way to the girl who was trying to use her iphone to take pictures of everything, snatching the device out of her hands and holding up for everyone to see. "That is, of course, until they came out with these." He pressed and held the home button down for a couple seconds, letting the screen shift until Siri popped up and started spewing out nonsense. Silencing her mid-speech with a single click of the power button Dr. Gauss smiled sardonically, holding the iphone tantalizingly out of reach from its owner.
"Suddenly it's "the next big thing" and we're getting complaints about why we haven't been developing this technology further." Dr. Gauss continued sarcastically, frowning in disgust. "Even then, we've taken every precaution imaginable." Actually walking through the virtual girl, her entire form splaying outwards around him as he tapped the cylinder with his index finger and a holographic keyboard sprouted into existence from it, flashing keys lighting up as he began typing on it. "Firewalls that would take the most powerful supercomputer months, if not years to break through have been installed. Zeta has no ethernet or Wi-Fi connectivity, and therefore no access to the internet. There are also a multitude of directives and blocks, each one were it to be violated would put her in immediate shutdown. In essence, she's on indefinite lockdown."
"How come she's a girl?" Dash asked, recovering before everyone else around him.
Dr. Gauss's fingers froze mid-sentence, the letters he was currently hovering over remaining lit, and he glared daggers at the football player with all the supreme hatred he could muster. "What," he growled, "did I say about interrupting me!"
Dash looked away, cowed, and I had to hide the massive smile I sported behind my arm lest he or someone else saw it. I suppose it's not right to delight in someone else's suffering, with it being a bit hypocritical of me, but nobody's perfect. So I delighted in it.
Mr. Gray, who had been remaining incognito in the very back gave Dr. Gauss a sharp look, commencing a silent staring contest between the two that had Dr. Gauss calling on all the glare reserves he had.
Unlike Dash though, Mr. Gray didn't look away.
"Tch," Dr. Gauss grunted, finally relenting after several seconds of deafening silence, his permanent scowl deepening.
He finished typing up whatever he needed to on the holo-keyboard, dispersing it by waving his hand through it and watching as all the pixels faded into oblivion. "Now, you may ask your inane questions," he stressed, clearly emphasizing what he thought about having to deal with that.
My class all looked at each other, waiting for someone else to say something before they decided to do anything themselves. It was more awkward than that one time my best friend, Tucker, tried getting my sister to go out with him on a date. Tried, being the operative world. Damn, at least it was never boring with him around.
Emma finally raised her hand hesitantly. "Why is she called Zeta?" she asked.
"Well you see," Dr. Gauss started off insultingly, "Zeta is the sixth letter in the Greek Alphabet. You would know that if you had half an education."
Emma rolled over his tone, seemingly undaunted, "Wait, if Zeta is the sixth, are you implying that there was more than one?"
Dr. Gauss's eyes flashed in genuine fear for the briefest instant, his structured persona unraveling like the final parts of a mystery novel. "N-None that were successful," he said, composing himself. "There were 24 attempts, one for every letter of the Greek Alphabet, each with different parameters set in for them. We tried to make them as human as humanly possible. It's unfortunately Zeta was the only one that survived."
Holy crap. They were trying to make 24 of them!? So much for taking precautions. Although, the Fenton's weren't really known for taking cautionary measures either. It's all, "what happens to a dead turkey when exposed to ectoplasm?," or "is it possible to punch a hole in reality using a quantum tunneling device?" Reanimated thanksgiving dinners and dimensional portals be damned, whatever happened to restraint?
I winced inwardly as I recalled my last experiment gone wrong. I hoped Jazz wasn't still to mad at me for ruining her hair dryer. I swear I just wanted to see how hot I could get it to go. I never intended to heat it up to the point where it actually started melting itself.
But I digress.
"Does she feel?" asked, surprisingly, Kwan Sung, a linebacker for the football team and also one of Dash's closest compadres.
"Isn't that the question of the day?" Dr. Gauss pondered. "Does she truly feel what she feels, or is she merely programmed to act and respond the way she does. If you think so, then I must remind you that the human brain is just a highly developed computer itself. You are programmed to think and act a certain way through the culmination of your experiences, which condition you to react the way you do to things. It comes down to at what point you separate conscious thought from primal instincts." He had been getting more and more excited as he went on philosophizing, shutting up and reverting back to his usual sneer only when he realized he was talking to a crowd of blank and uncaring highschoolers.
He wasn't the only when in a bad mood however. What had started out as a slightly hopeful expression for Zeta had morphed into an emotionless mask more fitting with the A.I. Archetype.
No one liked being talked about in the 3rd person when they were right there. And I suppose it was up to me to do something about that.
"So what do you like to do for fun?" I called out to her.
Zeta blinked, the advanced resolution of the image capturing her evident surprise. "...for fun?" She whispered, as if this was the first time she had even heard the concept.
"Yeah, you know, reading, video games, that sort of thing," I listed off, shrugging my shoulders. "What do you enjoy doing?" Hmm. I'm usually not this talkative. Must be something in the air.
Dr. Gauss stepped in between us, obscuring my view of Zeta. "That'll be enough of that," he said snidely. "Zeta has no time for the trivialities that entertain you half-witted boofoons. Especially an incompetent Fenton like you."
I'm pretty sure I managed to keep myself from reacting outwardly to his taunts but he must have noticed something anyways. "Oh!" He exclaimed. "Thought I wouldn't know who you were?" He smirked, crossing his arms and looking down through his glasses at me. "Your family is infamous for their failures, and even more so for their idiocy."
Maybe I was just a little drained from before, but Dr. Gauss's vitriol only served to calm me down, my anger becoming cold contempt as he tried getting a rise out of me.
A pair of hands suddenly found themselves on both of our chests courtesy of Mr. Gray, separating us from each other. "That's enough Marcus," he said sternly. "It's very unbecoming of you."
Dr. Gauss swatted Mr. Gray's hand away. "Fine," he growled, glaring at me over Mr. Gray's shoulder. "Let's just get this over with." He spun around to Zeta, who let a forlorn expression come over her. "Zeta: Shut Down," he commanded.
Zeta nodded solemnly, the holographic representation of the A.I. collapsing in on itself, the metallic cylinder dimming down until only the faintest glow remained.
That soon disappeared as well.
Dr. Gauss swept out of the room without another word, leaving my class scrambling madly to chase after him.
"Wow," Emma said, coming up alongside me. "That guy has some serious issues."
"Yeah, it usually takes a little bit longer for someone to start hating me," I mused thoughtfully. If I had one of those long badass beards I would probably be stroking it right now.
"Very funny." Emma paused for a moment before asking excitedly. "So what do you think? Was that actually an Artificial Intelligence?"
"I don't know," I told her, unsure myself. It's not like there's a test you can run that tells you whether it is or not. "Whatever it is though, it's on a whole other level than anything the world's ever seen before."
After that, nothing else we saw really compared. It was all stuff that people had already figured out, like carbon nanotubes or some other interesting science tidbit people liked to go on about telling everyone "Isn't that amazing?" and posting it all over social media.
The whole thing was a sham. Axion Labs was probably just trying to increase their PR or something like that.
"Hey," Emma nudged me on the shoulder, trying to get my attention. "You know where Mr. Reilly went?"
I looked around trying to spot him. "There he is," I pointed out behind us, where the retreating form of our science teacher had just turned the corner into a different hallway. What the heck was he doing?
The entire tour he'd been remarkably silent, never once reprimanding the students for anything. He hasn't even gleefully reminded me of my punishment. He loves doing that sort of thing.
"Let's follow him," Emma said rebelliously, grabbing my arm and dragging us both after him.
"Hey! Emma, wait a second!" I tried struggling, futilely, I might add, and she continued pulling me undeterred. "C'mon, they're going to notice we're gone," I complained.
"Oh, don't be such a baby. We'll only be gone for 30 seconds," she not-so-reassuringly reassured.
We turned into the same hallway our teacher had just a little bit before, finding it completely empty save for one door at the end of it.
"Well," Emma said, "I guess we know where he went at least." I finally stopped trying to resist, more than a little interested myself as to what lay behind the door, and why Mr. Reilly had gone through it.
As we got closer we noticed that right next to the door there was a lone keypad, most definitely a security measure to prevent unauthorized people from entering.
It had been smashed in.
Sparks suddenly shot out of it, making us both jump backwards with a squeal and a scream. I wasn't sure whose was whose. "Y-You don't think he… I mean… it's ludicrous," I breathed out heavily in disbelief, still a bit startled.
"Only one way to find out." Emma put her hand on the door and pushed it open.
XxX
"You know what Carl? You know what really pisses me off?"
"Please, do tell me," Carl responded, humoring his coworker.
"It's that they don't even try keeping the cages clean when they put these freaks of nature down."
"Hmm, yeah, sure. Whatever you say." Carl continued mopping up the mess.
"Then, Then, mind you, they leave us to wash everything up after the sick fucks are done with them." Squelch. "Aw, shit! Carl, I just stepped in some of this green goop, help me get this crap off of me… Carl?... Carl!?" Georgie looked over for his partner, only to find his mop lying unattended on the ground, its holder nowhere in sight.
"Uhhh… Carl?" He walked over to the fallen stick, picking it up and examining it.
Drip. Drip Drip. Georgie felt something wet land on his hand, holding it up to discover it was covered by red streaks. Blood.
But Georgie wasn't concerned about that anymore. He was staring at the ceiling with what can only be described as pure horror, his eyes frozen unblinkingly as his pupils dilated in fear, because right above him was Carl, held upside down halfway melded into the wall leaving only his chest and head visible. Crimson liquid fell liberally from where he and the ceiling had fused together, some of it splashing down on Georgie's twitching face. The worst part? Carl was still alive.
The splinched man took in a shuddering breath, his whole body shaking and spasming violently, but he remained fixed to the surface, completely immovable. He wouldn't make it that much longer.
All at once Georgie's instincts screamed at him, breaking him out of his stupor as he threw himself forward, the experiences of his hard times trying to make it out on the Streets of Amity saving his life as a hand that had previously been invisible clenched where his body had been just milliseconds before. He hit the ground rolling, coming up facing whatever it was that had almost gotten him.
What had started as a simple detached hand spread out, becoming an arm first, then a torso and then a full body that had seemingly sprung out from nothingness.
The adversary was dressed in unremarkable working clothes, as if he'd just been on his way to his job, his glowing green eyes boring holes through Georgie, the mere pressure of his presence suffocating him. Georgie pulled his hidden switchblade from somewhere on his body, thanking whatever diety that hadn't put him in this mess in the first place for at least something to defend himself with.
"Who… What are you?" Georgie questioned apprehensively, levelling his knife at his opponent.
Radioactive orbs glanced over at the viridescent sludge covering the floor, sadness reflecting in them as they filled up with tears, and he stared wondrously at the warm droplets as he brushed them off on his hand.
"It's been such a long time since I was able to cry," he finally spoke, the deep, tremulous voice sounding far too out of match with his form to be even remotely considered human. Georgie likened it to that of the shifting Earth, its slowly sliding tectonic plates almost unnoticeably gaining more and more ground until it suddenly snapped, the hidden power beneath the surface finally released in the form of an Earth-shattering quake. He anxiously noted that it sounded closer to that snapping point than he felt comfortable with.
"You… you're one of them, Aren't you!?" Georgie realized in a flash, taking a step back in fear.
"You, Human, have attacked, tortured, and experimented on my kin, shoveling away their remains like they were garbage!" He spat out with such force that Georgie was forced back several meters, his back slamming painfully against the wall behind him.
"For that… I will kill you."
The floor next to the man started changing, twisting and shaping upwards until it formed an outrageously large warhammer that appeared to be made out of stone, gravel, and rock, ancient glowing runes and glyphs running across its entirety.
The being inhabiting the physics teacher Charles Reilly charged forwards, swinging the gargantuan weapon as if it were made out of air.
Georgie's last thoughts were those damning whatever deity had pitted him up against this thing with only a fucking knife.
XxX
Author's Note: Whoa, that escalated quickly. I'm pretty sure I stole the whole A.I. and the Greek Alphabet from Red vs Blue, but whatever. They probably stole it from something else themselves anyways. And no, you don't need to know anything about RvB, going completely separate directions than what they did with it. So, yeah. Leave your thoughts so I can improve both the story and my writing. Any suggestions, criticisms, whatever, just send them to me, and I'll be happy to take them into account. Other than that, Happy Holidays, and good luck using them to achieve your more materialistic goals. I know I will.