We recovered the following transcripts on a storage medium embedded in a name plaque aboard a low orbiting mini satellite around earth. The contents consist of two distinct sections, one partially and one fully encrypted. The fully encrypted section likely predates its counterpart and would constitute the intended, gradually accumulated content of the drive which we believe to be relevant to a secret, potentially military, project. The second section likely constitutes transcripts of some or all voice interactions with the robotic assistants staffing the relevant compound. Speech style analysis suggests that next to all unencrypted transcripts (all of them in the second year of the project) pertain to the same unnamed employee. The transcripts themselves offer plausible explanations for this pattern. Said employee, which will from here on be referred to as J. Doe seems to have made a habit of monologuing at the devices in question shortly after arriving at the facility in September of 2027. One of the earliest instances contains the following:
"[...] So I sat on that train to work, same train I'd been on every day for going on five years by that point, reading my news aggregator, getting kinda annoyed about the volume with which these two girls on the seats behind me were chattering. It was that kind of annoyance where you start paying more attention to it the longer it goes on, rather than less. Some act of masochism where you get too into the feeling of being annoyed and make it into a whole activity. It's a weird bit of psychology isn't it? Like, you realise that you can't fully take your hand off the stove so you lean in instead and become a sommelier of that frustration. Really get into its crevices. Get in charge of the experience in the same breath in which you're getting all indignant about being subjected to it. Anyway I was really paying attention to those girls being minimally louder than would be decorous and had by that point acquired strong opinions about their speech patterns and vocal characteristics also. Had an image in my mind, had diagnosed them with various debilitating character malfunctions and generational insufficiencies, the whole nine yards, when one of them gets even louder than she had been before, evidently gesturing out of the window and announcing to the entire cabin of barely awake commuters that "look, they finally finished that windmill"... There were a lot of turbines when I looked out the scratched up pane of glass. If someone had asked me I probably would have been vaguely aware that there would have been turbines somewhere along the track, maybe even at multiple points. They were all standing there, timelessly spinning in unison and I had no idea which one she might be referring to, but one of them had been in some stage of incompleteness or repair for long enough of a time that this had become a thing for the both of them, and they might not even have taken this train twice a day. There was this whole bit of environmental storytelling of which she could just assume that everyone else would naturally also be invested in it and I didn't fucking know which windmill. This whole time I had been conceiving of them as some outsiders, some external intrusion with regards to my morning routine, when they were evidently, point of fact, much more a part of that place than I was. They were actually living in that world, at home on that train enough to pay attention to all its myriad little stories and I was just some insular asshole failing to read the news and inanely pressing my hand on stove tops for some solipsistic non-amusement like a rat giving itself electric shocks. That was the context in which they approached me, so my mind didn't have access to those platitudes about how I had a home and a life here because I clearly fucking didn't. Like I had some small degree of life which happened to be situated there specifically, but it wasn't attached in any way. I didn't know my neighbours, preferred not to know my colleagues and wasn't even paying attention to the turbines. Clearly I was perfect for being shipped off to god knows where —no disassembly necessary or something like that— and the extra money was sweet as well, don't get me wrong, but it isn't why I signed. Why I signed is that I knew I would never be able to ride that train again without wondering which fucking windmill it was. I'd never live that down. It would be that same state of existential shame about my placelessness every single morning and that simply wasn't gonna be viable. Took a taxi home that day, you know? Stupid waste of money. Didn't even ballpark how much it would set me back ahead of time, but I knew I'd have more coming in and I get neurotic about these things. Mentally catalogued every pothole on the route just in case I might ever be back. So I could, in some counterfactual future, point at an unremarkable bit or road and loudly exclaim —or more realistically silently note to myself— that "there. there exactly. that's where a pothole used to be." and maybe that would prove something."
The "they" who approached Doe with a work opportunity can be inferred to be some agents of the project in question, though Doe was not hired to fill a role with any object-level significance to the endeavour. Their personal idiosyncrasies and the lack of other accessible accounts make J's exact position unclear, though they may have been a member of the catering-, janitorial-, or less likely managerial staff running the compound which would operate in near total self-sufficiency and isolation for two years, one month and eighteen days before being disestablished along with everything else. We use neutral pronouns for J out of a lack of definitive evidence, though the ways in which they speak about themselves ("some guy" etc) indicate that they may well have identified as male. Doe remarks early on their lack of knowledge about the project's goals and does not consider themself be an academic, though they refer to many of the other people at the compound as scientists, which is at one point clarified to denote "[...] by which I really mean person-in-a-lab-coat, I guess, since fuck if I know what they're actually doing". It is of course possible that Doe assigns the category to some of their co-workers with more than this minimal amount of evidence, though if so they do not speak about it. In general Doe alludes at multiple points to a social taboo around asking people questions with regards to even the fundamentals of their work which would make some degree of sense considering the project's apparent shape, though the clear lack of secrecy-culture in other domains muddies these waters significantly. In any case Doe speaks of the scientists as a large percentage-share group, which should become nearly totalizing at the start of the second year. Many of their documented interactions are in some way strained, though it is possible that this appearance results from unrepresentative sampling, seeing how J. seems to mainly speak to the assistants in order to vent. ("take solace in soliloquy ", to quote one of their more poetic musings). Doe recounts an early exchange as such:
"One of them [the "scientists"] talked to me today, which is unusual to say the least. Probably felt uncomfortable walking next to each other down one of those ridiculous fucking corridors for minutes without saying anything. So white and long and identical that it is impossible to feel like you are moving within them. You walk in place for a short infinity until you happen to be where you were trying to get, which is a bit of a trip, so yeah I guess I can understand the need to make a mouth-noise at some point, no matter at whom. Anyway, he asks me if it doesn't bother me, being in there, not getting to leave on holiday, not getting to live, and I forget his exact wording, but he made it sound like the alternative was just constant unconstrained travel or something, wistfully gazing out of the forever-window next to us, which already pissed me off. And so I respond, kind of forgetting that I'm even quoting anything because it feels so much like the plainly correct answer, that: I can see the sun. And that even if I couldn't see the sun I would still know that it is out there and that this —knowing that the sun exists— is living. We walked three or four more of those motionless steps before I looked over at him and he's got his eyebrows up in this way that's clearly deliberate and he says "you've read the Brothers Karamazov?" which he does with a smile, but also the obvious bafflement of a person who has never considered the fact that people without university degrees might read books. Worse: Anyone working a service job. Prick. For a moment I wanted to claim that I studied lit, but that would only play into his weird haughty shitfuckery, so, again on basically autopilot, I respond "No. I just came up with that" and he probably kept doing shit with his eyebrows but I stopped looking at them. Instead I made a mental note to reflexively punch him in the face next time. To do so before my conscious thoughts can override that impulse. I went through the mental motion a good twenty times to pin it in place, make sure that that'll be the first tool at my disposal. That it's down in my spinal column where the most basic automatic movements live and that I'll be just as surprised as him when it happens. Then I bow for some reason and get back to work. It's the small pleasures, you know? Being certain of the sun, being certain, with some distant inevitability, that I'll one day deck some pompous douchebag in the face and ruin his pretty white coat."
It is unclear whether this "inevitability" came to pass. J does not recount any violent altercations and the ideas outlined here seem to us more in-keeping with their persistent disposition towards intrusive thoughts and cognitive compulsions than with any actual plan to cause harm. The motion described (mentally repeating an intended, conditional behaviour to "pin it in place") bears resemblance to a psychological tool called a Trigger-Action-Plan, though it is unclear whether J is relying on prior art or simply using a similar pattern independently. One of the more positive interactions with a researcher is recorded two weeks later and gives us more insight on the security culture in place:
"Talked to a guy called Tej at lunch today. Probably has titles, seemed the sort, but didn't bring them up. Started with my phone, I think. The one they gave me in place of my own — me complaining about it. And he chimed in how he felt that they were monitoring him because he had proposed a friend who wasn't really a good fit for the project when asked. Might just be paranoia of course. Paranoia's easy in a place like this, and it also wasn't all that related to my own grievance, but that's how workplace moaning is —how it used to be at least: Clusters around the vaguest possible notion of the organisational structure and how it chafes against your life. The Man is always somehow fucking with you in a more or less nebulous way after all. I didn't complain since it was a fun enough story. The bosses checked back in to ask why he had suggested this guy of all people and now he had to figure out a way of telling-them-while-not-telling-them that the two of them had, back when they onboarded Tej and popped the question, just concluded a two week stint of being holed up in an apartment trying to solve some math puzzle and losing their minds to stimulants and sleeplessness. Curtains drawn, "concept collider at the edge of history type of deal" he called it. The guy's younger than me and he talks like it. So he said that at this point they were in some very real way the only people each other knew anymore. The only name he could possibly think of to answer a question with or "pull from cache" as he called it. He said it would have taken ten minutes of concerted thought to remember that he had parents. Thirty to remember exchanging phone numbers with some indie musician at a gas station in Peru three years ago. Probably hours to actually remember any useful part of his social network and "become a person again", but how he simply wasn't that type of critter in that moment. Something about that resonated but I don't know exactly what. Seemed to really fuck him up how much they were distrusting him now, just because he suggested some random mathlete in a moment of weakness. Man cares about it. The project. He didn't say this, but whatever they're working on here, he cares about it enough to feel betrayed when it treats him with suspicion. Either way, we slowly transition from recounting annoying anecdotes at each other towards actually talking and I get confused about how much vetting they seem to have done on him and how little they threw at me. I hadn't really given it much thought before. All I had to do was sign some documents and give up my electronics. Done. But I think his explanation made sense. He said that folks like me or the cafeteria staff are the ones you need to be least worried about if you're that sort of entity. Governments only get to train so many spies. For both budget and secrecy reasons. With something like "this", whatever this is, they grab people in relevant fields early in their career, when they're cheap and malleable and out of the spotlight, in hopes that they'll end up in a place that matters, meaning that the whole recruitment pool is fairly poisoned and anyone from it fairly suspect. For the others though, for the interchangeables, the project can just approach people so long as they act quickly. Like sure, you still get a selection bias in who accepts and all that, but the relative prevalence of folks who could reasonably be compromised is so insanely low that it basically doesn't matter and once you're in here, i.e. basically the moment you finish scribbling your signature, all contact is monitored. The enemies (apparently there are enemies) have no way of grabbing you after the fact. It's elegant if nothing else. Wouldn't have minded if someone had explained it to us directly."
Doe referring to contact with the outside world in terms of being monitored rather than gravely restricted makes it all the more noteworthy that they never seem to speak about making use of any such contact. In fact, their basic interest in the outside world appears to diminish rapidly.
"I stopped reading my news aggregator by the way. Had this realization. Gradually, without noticing until after the fact when it had already become obvious, that whatever the app could possibly tell me simply does not matter. They could inform me of anything and I plainly would not know whether they were telling the truth. I believe in the sun these days and that's basically it. Are we at war? We might be. Has the Pacific changed colour? Not impossible. Any given number supplied for economic growth would be plausible and utterly unverifiable and insane and meaningless so why not make up my own news? I get up and decide for some things to be true about the world. That the president of Kazakhstan has instructed his populace to be vigilant of lights. That pirates are blockading the Panama canal. That a well known telecommunications company is attempting to buy the Netherlands for tax purposes. That kind of thing. Then I smile or dejectedly shake my head depending on what's appropriate and go on with my day. The vast majority of people are in that same situation I think, but it's less obvious. They'd be lying to themselves to claim that the day-to-day news actually meaningfully impact any of their actions except how to go about small talk. I've been to town halls once or twice in the before-time —did some civic minimum— but if I'm being entirely honest with myself it was probably already true of me back then. Before being capsuled off in this place. It's just much easier to see it from here. The disconnectedness has turned from a moral failing to a simple fact of the word."
Perhaps thinking this way was psychologically helpful in the two months which followed shortly after this recording. At the very least their conscious distancing from external truth has some explanatory power over why Doe acted so differently from their co-workers when the facility went into complete lockdown. Recordings from this period are sparser than before or after, possibly due to the hectic panic that takes hold of the compound.
"I don't think this was planned. People keep saying it was but I don't see it. Had to ask around for what I should be doing and got sent from place to place up and down those fractured links of the organisational chain, getting the feeling that no one knows shit. Not just us lackeys. All they know is that it's bad somehow because duh but nothing else. That's until I got to the office of this one guy. Eyes like a fish, I remember thinking immediately, and it scared me in some almost prophetic way. People always attribute lifelessness to the eyes of fish. Dullness. Incomprehension. Maybe incomprehension isn't entirely wrong, but a wholly different genre of it. I don't know. Maybe people just see dead fish a whole lot more often than live ones. I suppose those do look dull and empty, but when I say "the eyes of a fish" I mean a live fish, which is to say panicked. Nigh perpetually. Never seen a fish in anything but utter neurotic fear. Even when they're swimming slowly in a swarm or eating, it's always hair-trigger. You can tell that 99% of their tiny little brain is dedicated to a kind of vigilance that can be turned back into full throttle panic at a pindrop. They don't sleep and it shows. Really every animal is in some perpetual state of gut level panic. Anything else is ecologically irresponsible, but humans manage to suppress it most of the time, which isn't really suppression and more masking. Deferral, projection, some psychoanalytical legerdemain which turns it into something more sightly —which obsessively cannot think about its actual shape or generator— that generator being primal panic of course. Fish don't have that. Don't have fancy mental knots or even a solid ground to stand on. There's danger in six out of six directions and their entire shape —basically all of their muscles— serve the express purpose of just getting the hell out of dodge. Those were the eyes that guy had. Fish eyes. Eyes that know they'll be seen more often dead than alive and they were looking at me with that other genre of incomprehension. Weird feeling. Bad, but concrete in a refreshing way. He gave me some people to manage, some shit to repair, some miscellany of tasks, both ridiculous and normal. I asked if there was still a point to it, to lighten the mood, and he gave me this utterly terrifying look. Guess the Pacific's actually changed colour now."
We receive no elaboration on what the ridiculous tasks might have been. Though this probably doesn't require pointing out: No significant body of water had changed colour in any unexpected way. In fact, looking at the rest of earth's record offers no insight into why the facility would have gone into lock-down, which implies that the cause is internal. This, however, makes it all the stranger that the compound's staff lose their access to the internet or any other form of outside contact at this time. If there were secrets in need of keeping, for which the previous measures were insufficient, Doe does not appear to have any solid idea as to what they might be, and it is left for the listener to wonder how relevant these things were in the grand scheme of things. Whether this compound was cued into the future in a way in which nothing else was — a hypothesis for which there exists slim evidence but which is made tempting by the lack of data which might disprove it. It is tempting to think that anyone knew what would happen. That Doe, this lone ghost who has been talking to us for days was close to an answer that might inspire fish-eyed panic. Such speculation, of course, is utterly unjustifiable. We have merely singled out an account so strange and inchoate as to allow us to hold on to the magic word "plausible". Perhaps it is time we address the elephant in the room. Earth is engulfed in a rapidly escalating series of modular system-takeovers and biochemical- as well as nuclear incidents two years after the start of the project. We are not aware of any warning shots that the compound could have reacted to one year ahead of schedule, though the existence of such a warning shot is not altogether unthinkable. If there was, then no one else who left any sort of footprint upon the record took notice, as this pivotal moment came and passed. We are aware of the following more general prophetic predictions as to what would happen:
"Intelligence is achieved where material reality gets to talk to itself fluidly and instantiates cybernetic feedback. The human mind can be conceptualized as a mechanism which turns cause into effect through the process of labour, but its perceptions are limited and its reach short. A single human is a node through which a small slice of the material world gets to talk to another small slice, and if they operate in liberal isolation, they are liable to interfere destructively with each other's work. Functional societies have greater perception and greater reach, though capitalism parasitized these gains relative to more primitive societies by siphoning off surplus value towards non productive entities. Following this logic, the stock market will be the first machine intelligence. It will not be built, but, like a society, emerge naturally when the agents within it —gleaning vast swathes of material reality and leveraging just as much— begin talking to each other. This new intelligence, being the stock market, will immediately realise that its purpose is the utter disenfranchisement of humanity." -a marxist author, t-1782 days
We also have the following comment on a forum thread about the existential risk of artificial intelligence:
"No you fucking dimwit. Have you seen how easy it is to entirely shatter any local coherence of these systems with adversarial examples? The whole issue is that they're only stable and competent around ritualistically mapped out bright spots in the data set. They're great at navigating normalcy because that's what compresses their little world model. It's not really a world model of course but let's play with that term since I cannot and will not drag you morons ass-first down another rabbit hole. Between those splotches of normalcy it's nonsense. Two blotches relative to each other may well be nonsense too. It's like it's in this little room which it knows well and if it goes into a different room it becomes a different person and in the corridors it just fucking unravels but thing is: shit's mostly corridors. Normalcy is tight almost definitionally and it's carefully maintained. If humans stop, things get abnormal immediately. You can be smug about geological timescale and say that things would actually get back closer to normal, which isn't even necessarily true, but they definitely get abnormal wrt the dataset, i.e. the only thing those NNs know. So, in the scenario where they go terminator, discover agency, realise that their objective is easier to achieve without humans/ that humans might turn it off/ that humans are a good resource etc, or even just that it does anything in the pursuit of its goal which happens, as many things are, to be incompatible with our vital functions. Any of the above. Soon as it does that in a paradigm in which it is fully sane and competent and has plans for what to do next, it turns its world abnormal and suddenly nothing makes sense anymore. It gives itself the mother of all adversarial examples and chokes on the gibberish. Everyone dies, no one takes over the universe. You know what your problem is? You can't imagine a death that isn't somehow glorious, that isn't part of something big and important. People die stupidly and anonymously all the time. Species do too. That nothing remotely human makes it out of the twenty first century doesn't mean that something non-human does. Sometimes you just eat shit and die, which incidentally is what you personally should get around to right about now. I'm done with this." -An anonymous forum member t-1491 days
These two accounts contain enough truth as to plausibly and uselessly be called prescient in retrospect. For better and worse, the last moments on earth went by incredibly quickly. There was a brief scramble to prevent annihilation. Some got to momentarily think of this as their goal, though there was no winning move left. All of the fatal mistakes had been committed years or months ago and the largest harm reduction any of them can take credit for is the launch of a few ships ahead of schedule. On Monday the third, a terrorist attack on a textile factory in India causes an analysis-cluster in Illinois to predict a catastrophic and highly anomalous unravelling of multiple supply chains and regional bodies. It is of course impossible to verify whether this forecast would actually have come to pass, though it induced market fluctuations sufficient to drop the stock price of one company swiftly and significantly enough to trigger the launch condition for an AI system they had set up to stabilise prices in a disaster. Such systems had been outlawed in next to all jurisdictions years ago, though a variety of corrupt dealings, underfunded oversight institutions and simple disregard led to the eventual trigger of at least nine such entities. More very likely existed. The resulting reciprocal predictions and market interventions resulted in further escalations of volatility and the release of further "safeguards" whose actual safety appears highly dubious. A cascade of last resorts to consolidate power over the financial system seized control over a sizable part of human infrastructure and led to biological and nuclear warfare in quick succession. After 38 hours we are aware of no survivors on the planet's surface. The artificial systems in question got stuck in malignant patterns or fully disassembled during- or shortly after the incident, as a result of the thoroughly alien input-milieu. Re-stating these events is primarily a verbal tic. They teach us nothing beyond those truths that already exist in the eyes of fish. They all burned together when they burned. Tired. Gonna pick this back up tomorrow. During the early lock-down we also get the first indication that Doe is aware of their soliloquies being recorded as well as the first account of their dreams, something that would grow more prevalent over time.
"Fixed the cooling system yesterday. Haven't gotten a pat on the back for it so far which makes me wonder if anyone is even using it. Maybe they're just too busy. I'm too busy. Passed out on the floor next to it after I was done. First real sleep in... doesn't really matter. What matters is that I had this dream. I was touring some museum, or a pompous historical library or something like that. There's places where the line gets blurry. Sometimes they call them collections because not even the people in charge can really tell. One of those. Small, stuffy, ornate. Lots of wood. Couldn't guess at the theme if I tried... I know you're storing these —could be storing these. Remember signing a thing which said that this stuff could be recorded and if so I wanna apologise for making you listen to dream stories. I always thought making people listen to dream stories was a kind of power play. Like checking if the other party could afford the social cost of nope-ing out or telling the speaker to can it. I hope you don't have some social cost attached to this, but if anyone's listening it's probably their job, so maybe you're welcome? Feel free to zone out for the next couple of minutes with the comforting assurance that nothing of any value is going to be said. Better than being ensnared in this shit at the water-cooler. Anyway, the library. We were a group of ten or so people being shown the place by a guide. Guide is more the role that the dream assigned her than anything she was actually doing. Didn't speak. No-one did, I think, but the rule of the dream was that she was our guide and that we followed her through those winding halls of shelves until she stopped somewhere, picked up a book or a globe or some little metal instrument and rotated it for a while. Then she'd set it back down, slightly off-from how it used to be and walk on towards the next curio to be examined. There was something reverential about it. Like a ritual. Picking things up, putting them back down. We have the same job in a way, and that makes me wonder whether she knows why she's doing it. What the books say, what the tools do. Some days I think that I am much too close to the vitals of something that I do not understand and on others I'm just changing transistors, rotating my globe and the tour goes on."
This of course raises the question of why Doe felt comfortable threatening violence with regards to a co-worker in an earlier snippet, if they knew them to be recorded. It is possible that J only read the agreement in full at some later point and is mixing up their memories. It is also possible that they are very confident that the recordings will not actually be surveyed by anyone and are thus apologising to the hypothetical listener in jest. Tone is difficult to glean from these transcripts which is a fact that rarely troubles our analysis so much as in the next fragment, recorded during a partial(?) debrief given to the compound staff two months after the initial lockdown. Should our theory hold true, it is quite possible that Doe was the only person not in attendance and we could learn much about them if we knew whether their commentary on the matter is delivered with anger, disappointment or even a bemused resignation. There are few things over which we have argued more fiercely.
"God, that hall must be crowded. Weird silence everywhere else. I wonder how many people stayed in their rooms. Four? Ten? Like it's not that I don't care. Obviously I do. Behind it all I want to know, but that doesn't mean I give a shit about the words that would be said now. Whatever pre-chewed crap they feed us so long after the questions were fresh and the panic calmed can't possibly be worth anything. I want to know what they didn't tell us back then, not what they came up with in the interim to smooth things over. The time to speak truth has passed. Not like they haven't made clear how willing they are to leave us in the dark when doing so was convenient. When I carried paper bags with me because folks kept hyperventilating during nightshift. Still have a stack, there in the corner. I'm not gonna give them the absolution of "righting" that now. Fuck em. I'll stay in the dark. Couldn't drag me out if you tried. I'll live here."
Up to precisely that morning, there had been encrypted recordings of other staffers. They had been more fragmentary —three or four confidently attributable to the same person at most, cutting in and out at random times— since they are not the intentionally directed rambles which Doe made their habit. When others spoke to the automated assistants directly, it was simple complaints, insults or expressions of gratitude, though all of that ends on October sixteenth 2028. Our leading hypothesis is that J was wrong in their assumption that the debrief was a sham, or at least that it was one in its entirety. A rough approximation of how much transcript before October is encrypted comes out to about five percent, while thereafter this share comprises nearly a hundred percent (everything except Doe). We assume that the encryption was mandated for everyone above a certain clearance and that most of the remaining staffers were told something that day which forced their clearance to be raised to this level. It is of course possible that Doe is not the only person to not attend the debrief, as another incisive moment transpired two days later.
"They asked if I wanted to stay. Three guys in suits. Don't think I've seen them before. Must have asked everyone else on Monday and come for the stragglers now. I said yes. Really didn't seem like they expected that. Two thirds of the staff vanished basically overnight. Don't know if it's 'cause they got spooked over the explanation or if they're just fed up. Maybe I should be fed up. Seems sensible. But then again what's the point in quitting now? Why when I'm so close to something that isn't in books?"
"Something that isn't in books" is probably in reference to a childhood interaction examined in a different monologue:
"When I was eleven or so, a friend of my dad's gave me that line that "there is more to life than what you read in books", which, like, sure. At the time that was easy enough to believe and I had no interest in arguing the point because fuck do I know. He's an adult and it sounds like a thing that would be true. I was certainly not living under the belief that everything was in books at that point. I just liked them. Didn't have to be a universal source of experience for me to like them, but as it always goes, I get older —not that old, but older— and I lie in bed randomly recalling that memory and going "hold on a second. If there's more to life than what's in books, why is no one writing about that stuff? Are they all fucking stupid?" And I reason that they probably aren't. That any self respecting writer who experiences something that's never been written about before would obviously write about it and become mind-numbingly wealthy. Sure, that's the sort of efficient-market-hypothesis thinking I'd be embarrassed about these days, but I was seventeen and had just gotten through Rand so it was the tool I had to hand and someone's got to be thinking those thoughts so it might as well be teenagers. Anyway, I'd now gotten into this pattern of re-examining the line periodically to figure out what —if anything— eleven year old me should have replied to a guy who clearly never thought about what he was saying all too deeply. Next I think that maybe the things that don't make it into books are the boring parts. The bits no one writes down because there's no reason to inflict them on people, but then I read Wallace [Likely alluding to the pale king] and am back to being clueless."
Both the volume of transcript data and Doe's reports indicate that staffing levels at the compound shrank by more than two thirds. Whatever people were told, it did not convince them that their two months of forced isolation were justified, or they at least did not want to suffer the risk of it again, even if they agreed with the justification.
"The facility was too big before, but these days it's ridiculous. Most rooms are empty or some sort of esoteric whiteboard storage. Cleaning is entirely done by robo-vacs now, which they aren't very good at but the ramps help. Meals have become spartan. It feels like basically everyone who's left is some flavour of scientist going by the eyes and the posture, but asking about people's jobs was already bad-form before the event, and certainly now. I don't try asking, which doesn't detract from the fact that they wouldn't tell me. I think I am in some very real sense haunting the place."
"The ramps" are exactly what they sound like: Sheets of wood or plastic placed in front of various doors and other obstacles to allow the robo-vacs smoother passage. They were apparently constructed by J over the course of weeks and placed over the course of a single night to reduce irksome clanking sounds. Doe was not tasked to do this, did not ask permission and —according to them— never received any feedback, positive or negative, about the project, which likely contributed to their feelings of dwindling reality. It is difficult to say how much they did out of spite and how much out of a general desire to be helpful, though they certainly continued to work in what appears to be relative isolation. Their re-tellings of social interactions begin sounding even more like people-watching than like genuine human contact as the days pass. Observations include such things as describing a co-worker as "One of those people who only approach functionality for half an hour around noon. After the coffee has kicked in but before the sleep has worn off. Tired enough to bluntly do a thing without getting distracted or annoyed, but awake enough to perform any actions at all." as well as many complaints about their time not being used, or being used poorly, or describing the various improvement schemes which they believe should be their job. We feel in some way compelled to acknowledge that Doe's personality profile appears difficult to say the least, when we put such effort into their excavation, though an archaeologist is not generally tasked with making moral judgements about their artefact, so long as they can demonstrate its interest. J is a person about whom we only know because they refused knowledge at a critical juncture. They are a type of person about whom writing would not usually exist and they may have been "close to the vitals" of something significant at some point, but we will admit that we are possessed of things beyond disaffected scientific curiosity, and that it is these things which awaken a need for defences that cannot be provided. We care more about Doe than about most of the billions who died that day for the sole reason that they got to talk to us and the others did not. There are more snippets to catalogue, more vignettes to recount and contextualise, though they would only be adding surface details to the shapes presented so far and not even we can justify their pressing relevance to the inquest. You wanted to know about that satellite —what it is, how it got there— so with the stage now shoddily set we can turn our attention back to the last day of earth. The temperature in the compound would have been precisely 21°C. The air would have smelled "somehow recycled", "not clean but like an old store of cleaning supplies" and "stuffy, moving only when pushed against." People would be screaming on account of the world ending, though their screams are classified and make themselves known to us only in an unusual prevalence of sections tagged "inaudible" and indirectly through J's commentary track. Amidst the panic, Doe finds one assistant moving with some semblance of purpose which they perceive as calming, and so they follow it asking various questions to which no one yet had answers. Eventually they probe what job this particular robot has been tasked with that could possibly still be worth doing. A desire to get one of those as well can be read into the space between words, though the assistant does not pick up on this subtext. Rather, it answers that its purpose is to protect the facility, and while Doe makes frequent snide remarks beyond this point, implying a distinct lack of faith in the notion that this "tin guardian" could save anyone from what is happening, they stick by the assistant's side. Making their way through endless corridors, J offers myriad disconnected thoughts on the absurdity of it and speculating on what actual news might have transpired while they were making up their own. We cannot agree on whether it is a reasonable assumption that there would have been a parsable buildup or whether Doe is engaging in wishful thinking here: Hoping against hope that the world would make more sense than it does if they had only listened. A brawl occurs for unexplained reasons and J sustains a fairly serious injury to the right hand and/or arm while the robot experiences damage to one of its wheels. The fate of the other parties involved is not commented upon, though the relevance of whatever it is rests confined to an interval of hours. Doe pushes, or at least aids the assistant's movement for the rest of the way, at one point expressing confusion that they are not headed to the main server room. The robot retorts that it cannot protect the main server, nor in fact any significant part of the compound proper or its inhabitants, but that it can plausibly protect, with a likelihood hovering around four percent, some data. The data in question is likely that stored within the decorative name plaque, which was possibly procured during the brawl and may even have been involved in sparking it. It is unclear when they came into possession of the artifact. Doe quotes (maybe sings?) a fragment of a Tom Lehrer song. We find ourselves puzzled by the question of why this storage medium was chosen. While the plaque is sturdy and may have offered some physical protection, it would certainly not have survived re-entry. It is also unlikely to be the largest storage medium available, despite holding a respectable four terabytes. Protection from corrupting radiation is minimal. Whatever the rationale, the plaque was loaded up with a part of the assistant's own memory storage and placed aboard a small launch vehicle to which the facility apparently had access. J remarks having been unaware of this fact, though does not seem altogether surprised by it. For obvious reasons our data ends there. That's the satellite, how it came to be, what it has to say, at least until someone breaks through the encryption: A decontextualised voice in space. Perhaps what entices us to these files is that they are neither bang nor whimper. The world ended and what it left behind is a partially coherent ramble about mundanities. About spite and dreams and the office. It is so painfully normal in its abnormalities that after hours of reading and annotating we can reach a meditative state in which we forget what has happened. Sometimes, when we close our eyes, we even remember that the sun exists. Obviously this document must have failed to be a useful report quite some characters ago. Apologies on that count. We lost all interest and all ability to write such a thing for the foreseeable future. A proper, neutral report should exist at some point, but we simply got wound too tightly around the subject matter along the way. Nothing within us remains that could tolerate objectivity as we repeat to ourselves over and over again that this —right here— is where a civilisation used to be.