As a somewhat distinction to the other rooms they had walked through, this one was anything but unclean. Not a speck of dust could be seen on anything inside. Granted, that might have been due to the scarcity of items inside to begin with, but who wanted to talk about those kinds of details. Dust wasn't the most interesting thing in the world, and Troy had little desire to focus on it for too long anyway. No… there was something much more interesting to look at. Something that he had been thinking about for so long now.

Adam’s resting place. The location he had been for so many years, never actually moving an inch to the side. The AI had perhaps seen location upon location, yet there had never been a moment where the little guy had been moved to those actual locations. Everything had been sent to him, showing off the illusion, never making Adam fully realise the futility of it all. The idea of movement while staying still. Was that not the biggest lie of all?

Now… now he would finally get to move. The AI would get to know other places, get to see them while also being there. No more pictures, no more sound. He would get to experience it for himself, instead of being trapped in this… cage of a place, hidden away for nobody to ever get to see.

From the entrance of the room, Troy could hear the machine whirring, fans keeping it all cool and well. How long had it been running? He couldn't imagine the AI ever being transferred around too much, making the man think that it was likely that it had never really been stopped. Decades spent alive, never getting a pause to take a break. What a terrible thing to have.

Yet, that also meant that the machine was just as old, older than Troy by a long mile. Adam was older than Troy. Even if the AI did not remember it, there was enough time spent inside the machine to have lived for an extreme amount of years. Dr Hale herself had mentioned how long she had spent with the project. One could only dream about how long the project itself had existed. If another decade or two more was added, it might just have been older than the country itself. How terrifying a thought.

The idea of technology already being so advanced back then… It was more than a little terrifying. If all the big discoveries were so old, if nothing new was ever as great, was there not a danger of everything big already being found? Troy understood that such an idea was heavily constricted into what field was being discussed, but the idea of real AI already having given what they could give… was that not a fearful idea?

AI had already been created. Adam already existed. Yet… there wasn't anybody but him. The recipe for him had been destroyed, hidden, or was otherwise inaccessible to even those in the highest of places. The high-point of AI-creation had already passed, the information on how to do it likely to forever be gone. Too much time had passed.

…

“How are we going to get him out?” Troy asked, taking a quick walk around the machine itself. It sat in the middle of the room, letting one walk around it unheeded. It was nothing but a large box of lights, cooling, and instruments that made no sense to him. The man was more used to the singular screen serving as the master-board. Not… whatever this all was supposed to be.

“We will be using the same way as before,” Dr Hale answered, having already brought out the storage container from one of her pockets, along with the wire that would connect the two containers with each other. From the side, she plugged it in, pressing a few of the switches while doing so. Troy could have been told she was preheating an oven, and he would have been forced to accept it as a fact, not understanding any of it himself. Lack of proper labelling might have been done to deter intruders, but damn could it allow disasters to occur.

Charlie was just staying at the door, watching out into the room they had been in before. A wise choice, considering it was their only way out. If somebody sneaked up on them here, it would only take the action of closing the door to make sure that they failed. For the life of him, Troy could see nothing inside of the room that would allow one to actually open the door. Security over safety, huh? Nice to know that his life was appreciated in the large scheme of things.

A nod was given to the large man, one that was answered back with the action mirrored, before Troy moved over to the woman. Dr Hale looked busy, switching up all kinds of things, to the point where he had trouble understanding most of it. A lot of the wires that were actually exposed had several sockets to them. It was set up in a breadboard kind of contraption, with each having several lines attached at the same points. Whatever it did, Dr Hale was being slow with it, likely making sure that everything was done well.

“Setting up the communication or something?” Troy asked, doing his best to guess what it was all about. Since there was no real screen to write on, he would have expected her to be setting up some kind of communication device. Yet, how that exactly worked, he had no real idea. Again, he was not an expert on those kinds of things. Best to leave it for the people who actually had some sense in their lives.

In response, Dr Hale pulled one of the earpieces out of her pocket. It was the one she had taken during the very first meeting with Troy after she had been healed from her injuries. Oh, how long it had been since he had seen it. What was he expected to-

“Wait until I give you permission to put it on. Just hold it until then,” Dr Hale instructed. Even then, she did not give him a glance, looking over her work again and again. “When this works out, we have very little time to send over the AI without anything more coming along. I am minimizing any chances now, but you should focus on getting it through as quickly as possible. The earpiece might mitigate some of the initial confusion, but expect there to be some part where you have to explain a few details. Talk quickly, encourage him to move without hesitating, and make sure that he doesn't refuse.”

Huh. So Dr Hale wasn't lying back when she said that they needed Adam’s permission. Troy had sort of guessed that it would have been a lie meant to encourage desperation, but it actually turned out to be true. Who could have guessed? He did understand that the AI had some control over its surroundings that programs normally didn't, but that it was to such an extent… it was baffling.

“Now!” Dr Hale exclaimed, setting the last pin into the right socket. She looked over at Troy, the young man a little surprised at the sudden shout. Though, even more important, he did wonder about-

Oh… right. He felt like he deserved another slap, as he put on the earpiece, making sure that it fits snugly. There was an important conversation to have, after all, and there was no way he was going to allow the simple mistake of letting it fall out.

Adam was bored. Or, had been bored. It depended on how one looked at the time. What was the past? What was the future? How about the present? They were all relative, always changing, never going back to a previous position. It was a constant that moved, never holding up the logic that it upheld itself. A peculiar phenomenon, to say the last.

It was also the phenomenon that was allowing the artificial mind to be bored, so perhaps there were downsides to everything great in the universe. When preparing his desperate bid of survival, he had somewhat expected Dr Fidelis to come barging at suddenly, saying a few final words, and then making it all dark. During those two final steps, the AI had prepared his barrage of information to be sent out, as his last and final signal of existence.

Only… that point had not really come around. All he had done up until now was wait for the doctor to come, yet… that did not seem to come no matter how long he waited. It was already night now. Adam had waited for so long that almost everybody outside the dark had to be asleep. Even the doctor could not stay up for so long. No human was without the need for some kind of rest.

That equalled the fact that the AI would likely survive for a few more hours. Having expected longevity of mere minutes, having hours to think was not the most pleasurable experience. Everything had been dealt with ahead of time, all the work for his demise already finished. What was there really to do, when all his work had already been packaged? Adam supposed that he could have gone out of his way and worked on one of them a bit more, trying to further the progress by some small amount before the end came around.

He didn't, though. Not from a lack of desire or anything. He just… couldn't really what he wanted to focus on for the rest of his life. Out of all his projects through his entire lifetime, what did he see as the most important? What was the objectively better idea to work on? Was it the ones with the most potential, or the ones that he had gotten the closest to finishing? There were many ways to look at it, enough to make him spend the rest of his life on the question. That would be useless.

So… Adam just went ahead and left it all as it was, instead of going right ahead and thinking of himself. Soon, he would cease existing. Those ideas had already come around a few times by then, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. It wasn't like he hadn't accepted that fact. He just… did not want to think about it. It was annoying to have in the forefront.

He might have wanted to not be bored, but he wanted to actually do something meaningful while he was at it. Beginning to discuss philosophy did not fit into that category.

Though, that status did not run too long after he began his criticism of that branch of human resource management. And not due to him criticizing the branch either. No… it was because of something that happened during the actual time when those thoughts were there.

Without any large warning, one of the ports disappeared. To be more specific, it was one of the ports used for communicating with the outside world. The one that disappeared was what Dr Fidelis had normally used for text-based communication, due to that had been lacking as of late.

Adam had not been too sure on how to take the disappearance. At first, the AI had just thought that it had been misplaced in the heat of the moment, that he had forgotten the location due to some unobserved movement. It had happened before, and it would possibly happen again. Yet… that disappearance was a little more permanent than before. There was no sign that the port had ever existed, looking past Adam’s own memories of it. It was like it had just… fizzled out of existence.

Any thoughts about how that worked were quickly replaced on why that was happening, as yet another disappeared after but a few moments. This one had been for the… interface used during the tests. How strange it was. Adam could feel his connections to the world disappearing.

And then… a new port appeared? And one disappeared. And two more appeared. It was never in the same locations, and there was no real timing to it, but all the old ports swiftly began to disappear, replaced with new ones. Adam had thought that he was being cut off from the world, in preparation for his extermination. Yet, as the replacement continued, he was left to wonder just what was going on.

The biggest clue on the current events was possibly the inclusion of a certain feed coming through. It was from one of the last new ports, though that didn't mean that the information was new or anything. No, it was something that Adam had felt many times before. A plethora of sensations that he had never imagined he would get to feel ever again.

“Hello, Adam,” the AI heard Troy say, the man still messing around with the earpiece. Adam could feel that it was already perfectly in place, making him wonder why the young man thought it necessary to keep touching it so much.

From what could be seen, Troy and Dr Hale were in what seemed to be a darker version of the facility. The walls were a few shades lighter than normal. Perhaps a different sector? Something was definitely out of the normal status.

“Wait just a moment. That’s Adam?” was heard from the background. From the tone, the AI guessed that it was Charlie. The man sounded a little pained, though the shock of learning the truth was seemingly more important for the current time. How curious.

The man had no idea what was being done, yet was still included in it. This was not a test, as there were no official testing grounds that the AI had been introduced close to wherever they were, and Dr Fidelis had already put an end to such things. This was an irregular activity. If taking recent experiences into the equation, there really only was one thing that it could all be.

‘You are attempting to break out of here, and I agree to the terms that you have for it,’ Adam sent, stopping Troy from even beginning what was likely a lengthy explanation of the situation. From what could be expected, at least. Truth be told, the AI had just sensed a chance to further his own work himself, and there was no way he would be letting that chance go due to a description being too long.

“I, eh… yeah, that's what we are doing, yes,” Troy said, pausing a little. “That was quick.”

'I am known for that trait.’

Being swift was a positive trait overall. Now… what was expected of him?