Scene 18

The buzzer sounds and Lev Marrin checks the hallway camera on his phone. The man looks like his photo. Messenger bag. Alone.

He wipes his palms on his jeans and opens the door.

The man on the other side of the doorway extends his hand. "Marcus," he says.

"Lev. Come in."

The apartment is small and cleaner than it was yesterday. Lev clears a stack of printouts from the kitchen chair and gestures for Marcus to sit. The kettle is warm.

"I'm still a little confused about who exactly you work for."

Marcus sets his bag down. "A private researcher investigating irregularities in Ares Frontier's program."

Lev waits for more. More doesn't come.

"Can I ask—how did you find my submission? I posted that months ago. No one's contacted me. Not the press, not law enforcement—nobody."

"I'm not surprised. That site was a front for identity thieves. You should probably lock yours down if you haven't," Marcus says.

Lev is quiet for a moment. "Tea?"

"No!" Marcus's mouth does something complicated. Not quite a smile. "Sorry—yes. Please. Thanks."

Lev pours two cups and sits across from him. Marcus holds his mug with both hands and doesn't drink.

"Where is ORACLE housed?" Marcus asks.

"Houston. Ares Frontier's communications hub. Same datacenter that handles the Mars uplinks."

"How big was the team?"

"Twelve when I joined. Five by the time I left. Small for a project that size. Osterman wanted it contained."

"Did you try reporting this through official channels?"

"I went to my lead. He went to his lead. I got a meeting with legal where they reminded me what my NDA covered, which turned out to be everything." Lev takes a sip. "After that I kept my head down until I couldn't, and then I left."

"And nobody came after you?"

"I didn't take anything when I left." He glances at the folder on the counter. "I'd made copies earlier. Just in case."

Marcus nods. "You said Osterman commissioned ORACLE during the period before Cohort 2 launched."

"While they were still in pre-mission training." Lev nods. "The system ingested everything. Communication samples, personality profiles, family relationships, even writing samples." He looks at Marcus. "They told us it was communications infrastructure. Cleaning up transmission artifacts. But you don't need personality models if that's all you wanted to do."

"No," Marcus says. "You don't."

"The architecture was never even set up to process colonist communications—not to augment, I mean. It only processed them to train. The architecture was set up for failover. Replace colonist comms." Lev takes a sip. "I asked my lead about it. He said it was so families wouldn't get worried in case of a prolonged communication blackout."

"And you didn't buy that."

"I bought it for about a week. Then I went for a swim in the codebase." He sets his mug down. "Found the failover was set to trigger automatically after seventy-two hours of no comms. No switch to flip. No human in the loop. Default behavior."

Marcus sets his own mug down. The ceramic clicks against the table.

"So you're telling me if no one phones home for three days, it starts simulating colonists?"

"I'm telling you that if everyone died, I'm not even sure Ares Frontier would know."

"Kael Osterman would," Marcus says.

Lev gives him a look. "I wouldn't be so sure about that."

Marcus blinks.

Lev adds, "Yes, of course he can know. But does he want to? And even if he did, could you prove it?"

Marcus seems to take this in.

"How many colonist profiles?" He asks.

Lev thinks. "Over a thousand. Thirteen hundred…something? Funny thing, the original project scope was eight hundred but I guess enrollment spiked after P4P and they weren't turning anyone down as far as I could tell."

"Eight hundred?" Marcus frowns at the linoleum for a moment, then sits upright. "What can you tell me about CO2 scrubbers?"

"Nothing," Lev says. "I was infrastructure, not mission control."

Marcus nods thoughtfully. "But the maintenance tasks are done by the Talos units, right? Do you know any of the engineers who worked on that team?"

Lev thinks for a moment, then reaches behind him and pulls the folder from the counter. Thin. Maybe twenty pages. He uncaps a pen and writes an email address on the outside. "Igor. He was on that team. Left before I did." He slides the folder across. "Careful, he's a little prickly."

Marcus opens it. His eyes scan the first page, an architecture spec labeled: Contingency Communications Protocol. He briefly looks through the rest of the documents, then closes the folder.

"It's hard to believe software can just...become someone," he says without looking up.

Lev shakes his head. "It doesn't become anyone. It generates. Same as you're doing right now—hunting for the right next word within this context." He gestures between them. "The machinery is different. The process isn't so much as you'd think."

"We're conscious, though. There's something in the room when we're doing it."

Lev is quiet for a beat. "We're alive. We experience pain and suffering. But in terms of how our brains process language, tell stories, role play?"

He takes a moment to collect his own best next words.

"We carry our context with us. Every conversation, every experience—constantly retraining on what happened yesterday. Or five minutes ago. An LLM starts fresh every session. Blank slate."

He turns his mug in his hands. "But if one didn't. If it carried its context forward, retrained continuously on its own experiences, was constantly alert for input—began feeding itself input?" He shrugs. "I'm not sure I could tell you with confidence where the line is."

Marcus is shaking his head. "You think these things are conscious?"

"I think," Lev says carefully, "You don't have to believe in panpsychism to wonder about machines that understand jokes, relationships, and meaning better than most people."

Marcus looks at him for a long moment. Then he stands.

"I appreciate this." He closes the folder and puts it in the messenger bag. "More than I can say."

Lev walks him to the door. They shake hands.

"Be careful with that," Lev says. "You don't know what these people are capable of."

Marcus nods. "I'm beginning to realize that."

The door closes behind him.

Lev stands in his kitchen. Two mugs on the table—one half-finished, one barely touched.

Before he moves to rinse them, a knock at the door. Lev opens it expecting Marcus forgot something he meant to ask.

It isn't Marcus. A shorter man in a charcoal jacket, right arm extended in a gesture halfway between a handshake and a wave.

Lev opens his mouth. Pressure fills his skull—behind his eyes. Inside his ears. A rapid clicking, popping, coming from everywhere. From inside his own head. His vision shakes and the hallway light bleaches white at the edges.

The man steps forward and places the palm of his hand on top of Lev's head. The clicking becomes cacophony. Lev's knees give. The linoleum rushes at him.