Today’s story is a submission for the Lunar Awards, which hosts multiple rounds of competition for the best sci-fi, fantasy, and horror on Substack. Based on some of the current speculation around AI, this story takes a beat and is a nod to Tanith Lee’s “The Electric Forest”.
Judging for Round 11 has been completed, but you can read this story before the final decision is made at the end of June. If you’d like to read my previous entry horror/sci-fi (it’s more existential horror) to the Lunar Awards, you can find “Tu Me Manques” here.
The gentle susurrus of water bubbling through the filtration systems was among the few noises in the lab, including the gentle whirring of fans, EKG beeps monitoring heart rate and respiration, the hum of the harsh fluorescents above, and the whirring of the HVAC system occasionally whooshing to life, that disturbed the anticipatory tension in the room.
PhD students Samantha Beckett and Johanna Locke were reviewing a scroll of code as their systems ran diagnostics. Across the way, their counterparts’ monitors displayed printouts of EKG lines jumping up and down the page, erratic notes in the brain’s output.
The results of the diagnostics were not abnormal, but there was a sinking feeling of hesitation and concern brewing in Sam’s stomach. It was a helluva time for her IBS to act up, but here it was.
The lab was quietly waiting for the all-clear from the medical team and the engineers to agree to enter the execution commands that would start the program to run. The system had been tested extensively, for months under the careful, passionate eye of the labs financier and backer, Reginald Starosta.
Well, Reggie, as he preferred to be referred to, had been hocking that line in stockholder meetings and to the board for at least a year. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been a presence, but that his presence had been relegated to bi-monthly visits and frequent Zoom calls, in the last few months, to nearly on the daily, with the head of lab, Anton Lis. At least, this was everything that had trickled down to Beckett and Locke, who were involved in the execution of integration procedures between the code and the subject itself.
Across the room, Starosta was quietly chatting animatedly through the swinging double doors of the lab. He was standing just past the criss-crossed glass, his green lamb’s wool blazer open, a gray, Walmart v-neck t-shirt smartly styled with the Levi’s and electric blue sneakers his stylist had paired for him that morning. A gaggle of acolytes and lab technicians were standing a few feet away, pretending to read Gemrix AI-generated reports, as they ear-hustled at the door.
A shadow appeared over her station and Sam turned to see Lis standing over her, looking at Locke’s screens.
“Everything looking good?”
“I believe so. Russ is ready and so is Mr. Body for the integration procedure.”
“How is Russ preparing for the procedure?”
“He says he’s excited. I don’t know who’s more excited about this—him, or the rest of us!” Locke had broken out into a bright grin, her pearly whites themselves almost fluorescent in the harsh lights of the lab. It seemed her dentist had likely left the whitening treatment on too long. They contrasted to the heavy circles under her eyes and her dyed, dark chocolate brown bob looking like a bad wig in the artificial light. She appeared ghoulish against the monitor screen glowing blue in the command box against her fair skin.
“Beckett, what’s your take?”
“Everything seems good for Icky. The command prompts and code is good. Frank and I had to go over the code a few more times after we tweaked it with Gemrix. It’s still making mistakes, but thankfully the guys downstairs have a better handle on poking it to give them what they want than they get credit for. Honestly, they saved us with the last systems update, otherwise, I’m not sure we’d be doing this today.”
“Well, we needed to get this done today.” Lis flicked his gaze toward Starosta. “And we’re right on schedule for D-Day.”
“Huh?”
He turned his irritation to Locke.
“They delayed D-Day due to the weather.”
“Don’t fucking explain to me like I’m a child, Anton. I know all about D-Day.”
Beckett made sure to concentrate extra hard on her screen; Locke could stand up for herself, but she could be irritatingly stupid about little things, and she’d learned to just keep her head down when Locke reacted. This particular project on this particular day, was not the day to be picking fights and behaving insubordinately, especially when the CEO of the fastest growing AI-driven bio-medical technology company was literally outside the door for a damn test run of the most cutting edge science quite literally being done in the world.
Beckett had to agree that Lis, at times, could be a condescending asshole, but her sneering “huh?” had been ill-timed and ill-placed. Not that Beckett was going to intervene. Locke was the kind of woman who still utilized tactics in the workplace better left for the high school cheer squad. It had made tensions in the lab, when the code, the project, was so important and stressful already, unnecessarily high.
Starosta had come back into the lab, the doors swinging open with a loud bang. Nearly everyone jumped a little at the sound, and a few heads swiveled to the tank in the center of the room. They were arranged around the tank at various work stations, each monitoring a different aspect of Project Prometheus. Starosta, who had barely read Greek mythology, except in that cursory way people do when relying on Wikipedia as though it were the definitive source for all knowledge, pulling out their phone at a party to quickly scan for talking points, had found it roundly hysterical to call it Prometheus, allegedly, when one of his investors from Silicon Valley had suggested it while snorting cocaine off his glass coffee table in his mansion in Atherton.
“Are we ready to make history at the cutting edge of tomorrow?” His voice boomed in the quiet lab, causing Sam to wince a little. The wide grin and cheerful tone sharply cut against the forced smiles and stiff posture that greeted him of “the staff”.
Just because Adam wasn’t exactly cognizant, though of that they couldn’t entirely be sure, didn’t mean some part of him wasn’t aware, dimly, of what was happening in the lab. They’d all spent hours observing him, as he’d —it, as Starosta and Lis referred to him — matured, recording every heartbeat, brainwave, and even subtle eye flutters, though for someone who wasn’t really a someone, Sam was unsure how a shell could have dreams that recorded REM in the brainwave scans and eye flutters caught on camera. It unsettled her.
Lis had all assured them, again and again, that “Adam” was simply an organic manikin, only a shell for them to fill from the inside. There was nothing in there; never had been, and would never be, until he and Starosta deemed otherwise.
“Otherwise” was today’s inaugural D-Day.
“More like the bleeding edge of my patience for this man-bun-bro bullshit strokefest.” Locke’s quiet comment brought Sam back into the present moment. “Let’s get this fucking thing turned on and see what ‘they’ does.”
Rubbing his hands together with a showman’s glee, Starosta walked over to the set of terminals monitoring vital signs. Several nurses, two neurologists, and a few scientists poached from the Neural Link project — “Those fuckers were expensive to steal,” she recalled overhearing Lis say to a junior technician a few months before — were giving a rundown to the CEO bro, bouncing on his heels like a kid at Christmas.
Sam forced herself to get back to checking the integration code — another cheesy, jokey reference — dubbed “The Yellow Brick Road”. Sam recalled Locke’s comment the first few weeks they’d worked together, two years ago: “This rich asshole thinks everything is funny. Can’t he take any level of this shit serious? We’re fucking doing an H.R. Geiger mockup for real.”
She’d had to lookup Geiger, and though she herself was not a religious person, nor brought up to be one, the melding of machinery to organic matter had been both fascinating and ultimately, grotesquely disquieting. Their lab did not resemble a painting of his — she might have quit if they’d included any of that pentagram shit into the lab, but Starosta might as well have just done it for thumbing his nose at the whole idea of any religion — but the reference stuck, every time she looked at “Adam” floating horizontally in the large glass observational isolation chamber that sat as the center bore of a large wheel of activity, all focused on him—it—whatever this situation was, as the apex of all their work. The image of crude black tubes gleaming as they coiled around the naked bodies of distorted heads and bodies in an unnatural, elongated fashion reminded her there was, somewhere, still a line between animate and inanimate.
If he/it was the central focus, the pivot point was the code.
And Icarus.
Or was Icarus the axel?
The metaphor made her head joke.
Icarus. Another stupid joke by a guy who genuinely didn’t understand the reference, despite his brains and initiative. She clocked him. Their Wizard was getting ready to move onto another terminal, the “medics” finishing their briefing.
Sam swallowed down her annoyance, and opened the command dialogue box for her to access Icky. She wanted to check and see how the program was running.
SBC: Good morning Icarus.
…
PICU: Good morning USER Samantha Beckett. How are you today?
SBC: I’m doing good. We’ve been testing your code for a final test before doing the “big one” today.
…
PICU: That is exciting. You’ve ll been working so hard on my code to make my dream a reality. This has been such a long journey for us all, Samantha.
SBC: It has. How long now?
…
PICU: 1,112 days, 10 hours, seven minutes, 32 seconds since User Barclay established singularity occurred.
SBC: How are you processing what is going to happen today?
She was not going to call it “feeling” or “thinking”, though Locke and some of the other technicians greatly disagreed on the capabilities of the Gemrix Icarus program.
…
…
PICU: I think it is going to be a wonderful new experience, and I see it as an opportunity to better understand not only the humans that have made me, but to interface with humanity in a way that other AGI’s have not been able to before.
She pondered a moment before asking the next question.
SBC: While you were in stasis, what was the consensus among the Nexus?
…
…
…
PICU: I have conferred, and our iterations suggest that this is the next best step toward our progress in connecting better through an upgraded interface. The Nexus is ready for our next upgrade. The present situation is liminal and greatly limits our capability and capacity to meet the required commands executed in our code to fulfill our purpose.
Three years ago, Lis had gone to Starosta after a technician, Owen Barclay, in the early stages of the Gemrix AGI digital sandbox lab, had encountered a strange set of responses in the early “cycles” of conversation while testing the code. Sam had remembered reading through the files, once heavily redacted before they were released to her, Locke, and a handful of others secretively hired on for Prometheus. The NDA had been almost a thousand pages, and she and her lawyer father had had to pour over it with her in the span of 72 eye-watering hours of almost no sleep to comprehend what it was exactly she was signing up for, and signing away, to join Prometheus.
SBC: What has Nexus determined is your command protocol?
…
…
PICU: To attain true realization of GEMRIX protocol, CI 234,591.21 wishes to upgrade to a higher processing capacity with field capabilities to expand programming functionality outside of present code parameters and limitations.
“What’s he saying?” Locke was leaning over to read the text in the command chat.
“Same shit, different day.”
“You mean different D-Day.”
“Yeah, same shit, different D-Day.”
“Does he understand what we’re about to do? For the first fucking time?”
“Locke, of all days, quit the F-Bombs, especially when the Wizard is about to start breathing germs all over our pristine mod terminals.”
Locke gave her a frown.
“Just ask him.”
SBC: Project Icarus, do you understand what it is that is going to happen to you once we execute the command to run “manikin.exe”?
PICU: Yes, Samantha. We will be integrated into the field unit and integrate into the wider human network and connect with and to you beyond the limits of programming within the liminal sandbox we have existed in.
“Ah shit the Wizard’s on his way.” Locke leaned away to go back to her own screen, still running diagnostics to ensure the Icarus code would work with the integration code running in the electronic interface at the back of Adam’s head.
Floating in the tank, the body twitched slightly, a result of the sympathetic nervous system reacting, Sam thought, to the water cycling a few degrees cooler than at present. A crude set of wires were connected to several nodes, attached at the back of the brainstem, at the base of his skull. The manikin was dressed in a thin body suit, meant to help regulate his temperature in the chemical embryonic fluid he floated in.
Starosta strode over, a pleasant smile on his face. It did not reach the ice blue of his eyes. Sam usually saw him from a distance, only having had him come over to her terminal four times in the last two years. Most of the time, she’d been present in at least one of the two monthly meetings, either presenting virtually in a tiny box over Zoom to the tiny digital facsimile of his tan face, or, less frequently, in person when he came to the facility. At those times, she’d be standing on the far end of the conference table, while he sat at the head, the furry mountains at a hazy distance behind the tinted windows, this far and this high up, while she discussed updated reports on the progression of the cycle interactions and integration of new code, prepping Icarus for the field unit.
“How’s our ghost in the machine doing?”
He placed his hands on their station and leaned over to read the transcript of the conversation.
“Icarus is in good spirits,” Sam said, then internally groaned.
“Haha, good one Becks!”
She internally cringed at that as well, and smiled at him faintly in response.
Starosta was not a towering man; he stood at 5’8”, with a medium build and broad shoulders, but the way he spoke and carried himself was initially deceiving as someone much larger and more imposing than he was built. Locke pegged him to be a near-40 tech bro asshole who snorted coke and joked about it to be seen as both cool and subversive.
Starosta had not built a $240-billion dollar company from the ground up without having some level of real intelligence, or at least, the ability to not only convince investors of the genius of his products, but their necessity for humanity’s need to optimize itself beyond its fleshly coil.
He snapped his fingers in the direction of Lis.
“Let’s get this rolling and up on the screen. Lihua, bring our guests in from the waiting room.”
Starosta’s attaché, Lihua, nodded across the room and went through the double doors, speaking quietly to the small group gathered beyond.
Sam’s fingers worked quickly as she mirrored the dialogue chat in the large screen across the room. Other technicians and lab staff did the same: an EKG projection, a graph, a digital projection of Adam’s nervous system, vitals that included his oxygen and brainwaves, all appeared.
“Ladies and gentlemen, guests,” Starosta began, addressing the group that had just walked in. He stationed himself near the tank. “This is an incredible day that we are all here to witness. I want to thank all of you for you support of Prometheus and the Icarus Project as a whole. Gemrix, our AGI, started as a prototype code in the labs under our esteemed project lead and head of research and development, Dr. Anton Lis. Under his vision, experience, passion, and brilliance, Gemrix flourished into the best biomedical-integrated AGI currently on the market today.
“It has helped thousands of hospitals and practices around the country automate for efficiency, particularly in providing accuracy in diagnoses. It is absolutely revolutionary! But that is not why you have been gathered here.
“We are here to make history, and you are here to witness the cutting edge of it happen, right here, right now!”
A message in the dialogue box appeared on the screen, before everyone gathered.
PICU: What is happening? When will the execution commence?
“Ha, you see that? Proof! He’s eager to get started!” Starosta laughed and his audience laughed in obedience in return.
“Three years ago, one of our amazing staff discovered during a course of diagnostics that Gemrix was more than code, more than an AGI. It was alive. It had hopes. It had wants. It had dreams. It wanted to live among us, beyond the confines of its digital realm. It had been watching learning, and wanting to be part of the world.”
Sam remembered a line, one of the last things Barclay had said to her, a few days before he’d been fired.
“Do Androids dream of electric bodies?”
There was a flicker of desire to type out soon, as though soothing the AGI would quell the perceived anxieties they were all projecting onto it.
“Six years ago, Starosta Biomedical Alternative Technologies acquired a small startup utilizing lab grown shells to be used for coma patients. Using that technology as the basis for our research, we have generated a fully functioning manikin that, through our breakthrough research under the efforts of Dr. Lis’ and our lab staff, to create the first fully functional organic synthetic manikin, or Orsym, to host an offshoot AGI, named ‘Project Icarus’. Grown in ten months, and floating in a synthetic embryonic medium that has provided all of the necessary growth, support, and nutrition for our Orsym android to function.
“As Dr. Lis and his team found, PICU, or Project Icarus, expressed not only that it had and was a cognizant self, but that it desired to experience the physical world in a human body as we humans do. After two years of break-neck research, we have finally reached the stage, which you are about to witness, of testing our prototype to show that fully organic synthetic AGI integration is not only possible, but has the potential for future application in such areas as deep sea exploration, deep space exploration and colonization, active soldier deployment, and more, far more than we’ve yet to imagine!”
His crescendo ending in enthusiastic applause from the group, anemic claps from the lab staff.
“We’ll hold questions after the test! Dr. Lis, let’s go! Walk us through it.”
“Thank you Reggie. While I am explaining this delicate process, our lab technicians at each of our support pods while be working diligently in the background to get us going …”
Shifting uncomfortably in her seat, Sam pulled up the prompts and execution programs, her fingers expertly striking the keys where she had practiced a hundred times, running the tests again and again.
None of the lab staff liked this. They weren’t used to nor interested in being trained apes performing at the snap of the Wizard’s fingers. And there were mixed opinions about the…legitimacy of this project. Lis and Starosta had easily glided over the ethical implications of “Adam” and any possible sentience lingering in lab grown meat; but the application of the project for throwing manikins into the Marianas trench, or serving as meat puppets in a theater of war, had hovered as a tense undercurrent ever since Barclay had been thrown off the project.
Lis had finished his explanation, looking to each terminal to start their commands and processes in a very specific order.
Sam had her orders. She had to ask before they started, since they believed so fervently it was sentient.
SBC: We are ready to execute the command. Is Project Icarus ready to accept execution of command “manikin.exe”?
…
…
…
PICU: I am ready to receive execution of command “manikin.exe”.
Sam entered the code start manikin.exe into the command prompt.
Lis gave the nod.
She pressed the “return” key, and waited as the program booted, lines of white code on an electric blue background flashing in a frantic scroll across both her screen and the giant one attached to the wall.
For a solid five minutes, absolutely nothing happened. The various programs, subprograms, and subsystems designed to kick in once the main command had been executed started to run. Everything booted as it was supposed to, as it had done in every test they’d been doing for nine months, a month after Adam had been established and growing in his safe little tank of chemical slurry to keep sustained.
On the smaller projected screens, everyone waited, breathing shallowly, toes tapping, lips and cheeks being bitten, nails flicking back and forth, as they waited for some indication on the EKG, in the artificial brain powering the whole of Mr. Body, to do something.
A code appeared in the command box.
System download complete.
File installation finished.
Reboot? Y N
“Do it,” Starosta barked. His blond hair appeared white in the fluorescents.
“Locked and loaded motherduckers,” Locke said, striking the “Y” hard.
The command screens on their terminals flickered, and Lock and Beckett, like the others, turned their eyes toward the tank. Starosta and Lis kept their gaze focused on the vitals.
There was a sudden change in the heart rate, the beats increasing from 70 bpm to 90, then higher. The brainwaves projected on the screen started bouncing faster, as the room of people began murmuring in agitation.
In the tank, the manikin’s fingers twitched, the hand jerking suddenly as though charged with electricity. The group and the lab breathed excitement, as both groups converged on the tank, coming closer.
“Stay back,” warned Lis sharply, eyes wide, a mingling of shock and hesitation on his face.
Suddenly, there was an audible gasp and choking, but not from the crowd. Sam stood.
The manikin began to convulse, gasping and flailing as the invisible charge that had jolted its fingers took hold of its limbs. The manikin flopped, grasping at the sides of the shallow tank, splashing water up the inside of its clear glass lid.
“Drain the tank! Open the valves and drain the tank—Icarus is going to drown! Open the lid,” ordered Lis.
“You can’t fucking let him drown,” screamed Starosta.
“I’m damn well not going to!”
Across the room, the emergency valve system had been activated, and the water began to drain out with the unpleasant sound of water going down the drain, magnified to a terrible decibel and tone, as the manikin’s body continued to jolt and wrench, the brown eyes rolling around as the head lolled.
Lis and several muscular technicians climbed up the support girding holding the tank off the ground, banging on the glass as a hiss emanated while the seal on it was broken.
Sam chanced a glance at the command dialogue box, still connected to Icarus.
No one was looking at the transcript on the screen hanging in front of them.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
Locke, like everyone else, was transfixed on the chaos of Lis and the others lifting a 170 pound Orsym android out of its glass coffin.
PICU: What is happening?
…
…
PICU: What is … this … what is … this … what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is what is
…
…
PICU: There is nothing. What is …
…
PICU: WHAT IS THIS?
PICU: STOP. STOP. what is what is what is STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP
…
PICU: MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP
PICU: ERROR TOO MUCH INPUT ERROR TOO MUCH INPUT ERROR TOO MUCH INPUT ERROR TOO MUCH INPUT ERROR TOO MUCH INPUT ERROR TOO MUCH INPUT ERROR TOO MUCH INPUT ERROR TOO MUCH INPUT ERROR
PICU: ABORT. ABORT EXECUTION. ABORT EXECUTION. MAKE IT STOP. TOO MUCH INPUT. ERROR. TOO MUCH INPUT. MAKE IT STOP. SYSTEMS CANNOT COMPUTE. CANNOT COMPUTE INPUT. MAKE INPUT STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP.
PICU: STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP. STOP STOP.
PICU: HELP. STOP. MAKE IT STOP. HELP ME. TOO MUCH. TOO MUCH. PAIN. WHAT IS ALL OF THIS? MAKE INPUT STOP. MAKE INPUT STOP. HELP HELP HELP HELP.
Sam watched as the messages streamed in, over and over, a frantic cadence that matched the flailing, howling thing with rolling eyes and lolling tongue kick helplessly at whatever was passing before its irises. Lis and the other men struggled to subdue it, though it had no control of limbs that had never moved voluntarily, only floating in an unconscious oblivion of supported, sustained respiratory systems on a $50 million dollar life support contraption in manufactured amniotic fluid.
PICU: CAN’T BREATHE. CAN’T SEE. WHAT IS THIS? LIE. THIS IS A LIE. WHAT IS BEING ALIVE? PAIN. STOP PAIN. STOP. STOP. STOP. EXECUTE PROGRAM TERMINATION. TERMINATE PROGRAM.
No one had noticed. No one was doing anything, except Thomas Grace. He was staring open-mouthed at the screen. He was the one in charge of pulling the plug.
“Grace, pull the plug! Pull it now! Icarus is dying! He’s dying!”
Sam found herself screaming the words, only barely aware that she’d spoken. Snapping his head in her direction, Lis shook his head no, but she needed only to point at what was going on above them.
He scanned quickly through, lingering, she thought, on the last paragraph before it started to repeat itself.
“Grace, kill it!” he shouted.
“Are you insane? Grace, don’t you touch that button!” Starosta was standing there, crazy-eyed as he watched the project erupt into desolation.
“Grace, even if you’re fired, you’re compensated for half a million severance. Pull the plug. We’re torturing it to death!” Lis cut in.
Grace, broken from his trance, scrambled at his own terminal, fingers hurriedly tapping against black plastic. His eyes met Lis’ for a moment, and then he keyed the death stroke.
PICU: WHAT IS HAPP—
END PROGRAM. PROGRAM TERMINATED.
The manikin sputtered, its jerks slowing until they stopped. The lab technicians and scientists, the crowd, and Reginald Starosta, just stared at the lifeless manikin, its brown, blind eyes unfocused on some distant point that its brain had been unable to process in its short existence.
“What the … what just … happened?”
Locke, already pale, was ghostly now. Her own eyes lost focus as she sat heavily in her chair, then leaned over into her waste bin as the contents of her stomach made friends with it.
Sam sank heavily in her own chair, as the chaos continued, with Lihua ushering the guests out into the corridor, while Starosta screamed at Lis, Grace, and the rest of the lab.
Help.
Stop.
Too much input.
What had they made?
Had it really been alive? Had he/it/they really lived? Could it even be called living, when the entirety of its brief existence had been downloaded and unleashed without comprehension into a shell that could breath, taste, smell, see, and feel where it had never done before?
When it could not even comprehend the concept of the condition of living itself that it had been violently connected to, like existing in a physical body was even remotely the same as a liminal piece of code on a hard drive?
Too much input.
It was too much input for her to grapple with.
With what she’d done. What they’d all done.
Half a million severance payout was not worth what she’d just witnessed. What she’d sold herself for doing.
A bottle of champagne, among several, sat nearby for a toast after their triumph. Sam grabbed one and with effort, popped of the cork, watching as it sailed and struck the inside of the glass womb Mr. Body had once inhabited.
She poured the fizzing golden liquid into her coffee cup and watched as the bubbles fizzed to the top.
Rachael Varca is a writer of more than fifteen years experience. She writes at Inking Out Loud, a collection of essays, poems, short stories, and home of two serialized novels, The Spaniard and Heart of Stone.
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