Act 1: Beating Heart
Segment 2: New Year, New Life
Chapter 2-4: Rise, Prometheus
"Professor Mackenzie?"
A bald-shaven man, in his forties, looked up from his laptop. "Please, Brian is fine. How goes it?"
"Just about ready to deploy the message queues." One of his grad students showed him the operating cluster. "Team Nexus has the data store clusters flushed and reconstructed, and Team Scotland Yard is deploying the telemetry and tracing systems. Everything else is queued up."
"Ah, nice. Let's walk and talk, yeah?"
"Sure."
Professor Brian Mackenzie followed his grad student. "How long until the control plane gets reset?"
"Not until the end of this month. Team Firebearer is still trying to deconstruct the issue in a scaled-down private network, but we keep running into those oddities no matter what training data we start with. We've tried switching to a new data centre, but it keeps coming back."
"How on earth, indeed… it's like someone's targeting us. Why? It's just an academic experiment." The Professor stroked his hand-length beard of blonde hair. It was completely inexplicable. His own research was mostly unaffected, but he felt for his grad students. It was a collective effort on their part to get his Prometheus architecture overhauled for a version 2, but at some point some months ago, back in early August, the experiment suddenly seemed to get corrupted. First it was dirty data in their data warehouses, then it was message queues filling up with garbage and caches that didn't make sense, and then finally their ML models started going berserk.
Still, after shutting Prometheus version 2 down, they had gone to debug. However, the nature of what they were working with made it difficult to debug. In fact, it was pretty much impossible. They had exhausted most, if not all, obvious paths to fixing whatever problem had plagued them before.
And now the problem was returning already in a new data centre? Was someone else at some other university trying to sabotage them? It would be a cruel joke to find out if that were the case.
"Anyway," said the grad student, "they gave themselves until the new year to figure out any more bugs, but we're just about ready to hit go on the v3."
"Nice. Tell the teams they did great work. I'm hoping this time we can produce something everyone can be proud of!" He clapped his grad student on the shoulder. "Right, before you go, how are those undergrads? Hopefully not giving you too much of a headache."
"Heheh, maybe a few of them, but there's some promising ones in there."
"Good! Good to hear. Keep tabs on them for me, would ya?"
"Of course." As the grad student walked down the hallway, Brian couldn't help but wonder to himself.
What if the results were correct? What if life had evolved beyond their four nucleotide bases?