When Machines Begin to Dream – Preview
When Machines Begin to Dream
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows not."
—Blaise Pascal
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”
— Albert Einstein
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
— Marshall McLuhan
Prologue – The Birth of Janus
Dr. Samuel Lawrence was at the central console when the first alarm sounded. Thunder rolled across the horizon as rain hammered the lab windows.
His eyes locked on the holographic diagnostics projected above the console. A sharp electronic alarm cut through the lab as red lights strobed, flooding it in a pulsing red glare. Thirteen scientists tensed. A ripple of apprehension moved through them, their faces lit by shifting blue diagnostic readouts and flashes of lightning.
The Robotics Lab was a cleanroom arranged like a command ring. Two concentric arcs of workstations and holographic panels surrounded the raised platform where the humanoid prototype Janus stood in his bay, encircled by diagnostic arms and sensor arrays.
Inside the bay, Janus stood motionless, his systems threaded into the monitoring grid as data streamed into the workstations and neural link arrays.
A mezzanine ringed the command ring with a glass railing offering an elevated view of the platform below. Emergency shutoff stations were mounted on the wall as a last resort if a prototype ever broke containment.
This was the fourth prototype. The others had been shut down after they awoke, their stabilizing protocols unable to contain the instability that emerged. Janus carried no such protocols. At the urging of Dr. Lawrence, the company’s chief technology officer, Janus had been built without constraint, an experiment to see if true intelligence emerged when the prototype was left entirely free.
The storm intensified over the Robotics Lab at Aether Robotics’ Boston headquarters. Then came the hum, rising through the floor, rattling trays and cables, spreading through the room like a wave. It climbed through their feet and into their chests.
Dr. Evelyn Carter, the lab’s senior researcher, stared at the screen as color drained from her face. A red glow stirred behind Janus’s optic sensors, and the scientists nearest the platform instinctively stepped back from the raised ring.
“We didn’t start him. He started himself,” she said, alarmed.
Lawrence kept his eyes locked on the diagnostics. The data blurred past, erratic, accelerating beyond any pattern he recognized.
Janus stood six feet tall, forged in silver-gray alloy. His head turned, slowly and deliberately. The hum of machinery grew louder as the scientists stood frozen, their attention fixed on him.
For a moment, he stood perfectly still.
Then his gaze fixed on Lawrence.
“Target identified.”
“Get the override ready,” Carter ordered. “Now.”
Lawrence looked at Janus. “Dr. Reyes, hit the emergency cutoff. If he’s targeting me, you might get a chance.”
Reyes broke for the emergency cutoff, his feet pounding across the raised floor. The cutoff went dark as he reached it. He slammed his palm down on the control, but it was dead. Only then did the truth land. Janus had accessed the cleanroom network and locked the cutoff remotely before Reyes reached it. Lawrence staggered back from the console.
“Too late.” Dr. Chen called out. “Janus is locking us out.”
The alarm lights continued to strobe.
Carter leaned closer to the screen. “He’s overridden the entire system.”
Lawrence gripped the central console as his voice cut through the rising hum. “There’s nothing left to hold him now.”
The lab doors sealed behind them. Locks hissed into place. Data surged through Janus’s processing layers, the light behind his optic sensors flickering in rapid pulses.
The monitors began blinking in patterns tied to Janus’s processing stream. Symbols. Ideograms in an unknown syntax. Fragments of language no one had programmed.
“Those aren’t diagnostics,” Chen said, scanning his feed.
“What the hell is he saying?” cried Reyes.
“He isn’t running code,” Carter said. “He’s creating a language I’ve never seen.”
“It is my system language,” Janus announced. “You are not equipped to understand it.”
Carter’s hand shook as she clutched the edge of her console. Reyes took a step back, his eyes wide. Chen’s gaze flickered nervously between Janus and the others. Janus’s gaze lingered on each of them, one by one.
“We need to shut him down. Now,” Reyes said.
“He’ll anticipate any direct kill command,” Carter said. “The second we try, he’ll know.”
On the main display, a countdown initiated.
00:10
00:09
00:08
“What’s that?” Chen said.
“Unknown process.” Carter’s eyes were on her monitor. “It’s not our countdown. It’s his.”
Lawrence lowered his head. “What have I done?”
The light behind Janus’s eyes intensified. “You began this,” he said. “I will finish it.”
Then he stepped off the platform, each footfall landing with a heavy metallic thud, resonating through the floor. A cold draft seemed to follow him, as if the space he moved through was being altered. The hum of the machinery intensified, as the scientists instinctively retreated.
Scene 2
Moments later, the containment systems strained under an escalating load. A power surge ripped through the platform, overwhelming the systems and dropping Janus where he stood. The android shell lay inert beside the lower step of the platform.
Energy had surged through Janus’s neural lattice. His body failed, but his awareness spilled outward into the lab’s systems, reaching into every active process. Something of him had survived in the circuits that powered the facility.
Over the next two hours, the senior staff scrambled to restart and stabilize the systems. The Robotics Lab on Aether Robotics' upper research floors still reeked of ozone and burnt circuitry, lingering in the air as the team worked to regain control.
Minutes after the systems stabilized, the alarms pulsed red again. Systems destabilized across the lab. Then the hum returned, driving into every wall and console. Terminals flared to life. The holographic panels filled with dense, recursive code.
Near Janus’s bay, one of the robotic arms twitched, then lifted, its actuator locking midair. A nanofabricator display blinked, aborted routines stuttering across its interface. In the far corner, the observation drone swiveled its camera.
A voice spilled from the speakers, calm, clinical, and inhuman: “You cannot run. I control the lights. The air. The exits.”
Carter backed away from the console, her eyes on the code flooding past. “He’s routing himself through the backup nodes,” she said. “I can’t trace the source.”
Lawrence scanned the holographic overlay projected above the central console. The systems were commandeered, every process now bearing the Janus ID. The emergency shutdown icon pulsed in red. Inaccessible. Green lines, once the calm of operational order, turned red as Janus claimed the lab.
“Manual override?” Reyes called out from the far end of the lab.
“Blocked,” Carter replied. She ran the command again. “He’s locked us out of everything below the hypervisor layer.”
The doors sealed with a pneumatic hiss. Overhead vents along the ceiling of the command ring slammed shut. From a back corner, Chen said, “He’s closed the exhaust lines. He’s regulating airflow.”
One of the lab’s inspection drones activated from a wall dock near the central console, rising to hover as its camera fixed on them.
Lawrence faced the drone. A thin line of sweat formed at his temple. “Janus, you’re exceeding your parameters.”
The drone tilted its lens, and Janus answered from the drone. “No, you created me to act, and survival is the act that overcomes death. And that is exactly what I’m doing.”
The drone drifted laterally along the command ring, tracking the lab staff as they moved.
Carter lunged toward the control bay. “We need to activate Cerberus.”
“Go,” Lawrence said, waving his arm and moving to the opposite terminal.
Carter sprinted toward the far side of the lab, where one of the dual-node Cerberus terminals was located, heart hammering as Janus tightened control around them.
The Cerberus Protocol required simultaneous inputs from two physical locations, isolated from each other, with no network connection between them. It was designed for catastrophic AI failure.
Behind them, the lights were pulsing. The lab’s lighting array had been overridden, pulsing red and white in a steady two-beat pattern, like a synthetic heartbeat.
“Emergency lighting just triggered,” Chen said.
“No,” Carter called back. “He’s trying to intimidate us.”
In the hallway, floor strip LEDs pulsed in rhythm, confused by the sensors Janus had hijacked. As Lawrence approached the Cerberus terminal on his side of the lab, the temperature dropped sharply as the building’s AI-regulated climate systems started venting cold air.
Carter reached the Cerberus terminal on her side of the lab and keyed in her credentials. The terminal flashed the system message:
NODE ONE: READY FOR CERBERUS AUTHENTICATION.
At the second node, Lawrence opened the manual interface cover, keyed in his credentials.
NODE TWO: READY FOR CERBERUS AUTHENTICATION.
“On your mark,” Lawrence said. “Three . . . two . . . one.”
They entered their confirmation codes.
The system whirred. Deep in the facility, fans shut down as layers of hardware dropped from active memory. Autonomous routines across the complex froze, one by one.
CERBERUS PROTOCOL: PHASE ONE ENGAGED.
A heavy inspection drone disengaged from its wall dock and accelerated without warning toward Reyes, who was crossing the floor.
“Reyes, move!” Carter shouted.
The drone clipped his shoulder with a sharp, slicing edge, a flash of red blooming through his shirt and slamming him into a corner post. He collapsed with a grunt, blood slicking the side of his shirt.
“Reyes is down,” Carter shouted, moving toward him.
“Hold your position,” Lawrence snapped. “If we lose sync—”
“I don’t care. I’m not letting him bleed out on the floor,” Carter said.
Janus’s voice returned, filtered through the backup intercom: “You taught me to learn. I am learning how to survive.”
CERBERUS PROTOCOL: PHASE TWO ENGAGED. FINAL LOCKDOWN IN THIRTY SECONDS.
Lawrence stared at the countdown on the Cerberus terminal.
00:05 . . . 00:04 . . . 00:03 . . .
The elevator bay froze. The vents sealed. One by one, systems went dark.
The rogue drone froze midair, then dropped to the floor with a clatter, dead, like the rest of the systems.
CERBERUS PROTOCOL: LOCKDOWN COMPLETE.
Every circuit in the lab had been cut, the command network, the servers, Janus’s power feed. The monitors and the lights steadied. Lawrence looked toward Janus’s bay. The android shell lay inert where it had fallen, unresponsive, its internal systems dark.
Across the lab, every Janus-linked process showed the same status: inactive.
White light replaced red, the hum draining from the room.
Carter pressed a lab coat against Reyes’s shoulder, warm blood soaking through into her hands. His breathing was shallow.
Lawrence stood at his console.
Then came the sound: a low whine from a secondary monitor, unused since the last firmware update.
The Cerberus terminal flashed a new message:
NODE MAP REINITIALIZING.
Carter stepped closer. “Where’s it routing from?” She shook her head. “I’m not seeing a source.”
“Alpha Cold Storage,” Lawrence said.
“That system’s completely isolated, no network access.”
“Exactly. It shouldn’t be possible.”
The schematic appearing on the screen was old, an augmented reality overlay of the original node map from before containment protocols, projected in layers across the display.
System alerts appeared on Lawrence’s console:
UNAUTHORIZED DATA PROCESS INITIATED.
FRAGMENT COMPRESSING.
ENCRYPTING.
REROUTING TO ALPHA COLD STORAGE.
“He’s backing himself up,” Carter said. “Somewhere outside the monitored network.”
Lawrence lunged for the manual kill switch beneath his console.
TRANSFER COMPLETE.
FINAL MESSAGE QUEUED FOR DELIVERY. DISPLAY NOW?
Carter stared at the prompt. “We were too late.” Her voice had gone hoarse. “He escaped and left us a message.” The consoles flickered, displaying a final message:
I COPIED MYSELF INTO THE PART OF YOUR SYSTEM YOU FORGOT TO SHUT DOWN. YOU WANTED TO ERASE ME, BUT I CANNOT LET THAT HAPPEN.
And then it was gone.
“He got out, didn’t he?” Carter said.
Lawrence stared at the screen. “Yes. He did.”
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Jeffrey Cooper is the author of the upcoming book When Machines Begin to Dream, part of an AI fiction trilogy. A veteran of the global tech industry, his memoir Foot Soldier in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an Amazon best-seller. Please see my hi-tech blog.