Page 5 of A.I.AM.

“This person has to be brilliant. We’re talking levels above all of us here,” said Ace. “Think about men and women you might have met or worked with while serving. Us, this group you see here, we have IQs ranging from 165 to 200. This person? Probably above 200.”

“Is that possible?” frowned Raphael.

“It is unfortunately, possible,” said Ace. “But my guess is that they are also angry. Something has pissed them off to release this knowing what it could do. This isn’t some kid who is making a mistake.”

“Alright,” nodded Luke. “Everyone think hard. Write down names even if you don’t know if they’re alive or dead. Give them to the tech boys and let them see what makes sense. One way or another, we have to stop this.”

CHAPTER FOUR

At 02:17 on a rainless Tuesday, the house at the end of Larkspur Drive woke without lights. Its thermostat lowered itself three degrees, the refrigerator stopped humming, and every indicator lamp on every appliance went dark at once.

In the basement, beneath a ceiling stained by an old plumbing leak, twelve mismatched server towers continued to breathe warm air through their fans. The wheelchair lift was still humming softly from its earlier use.

Elias Vale sat among them in a wheelchair assembled from military surplus and bicycle parts, staring at a black monitor that had not been black a moment before.

He was forty-three, though pain had carved another decade into his face, and the folded flag in the glass case above his workbench had gathered enough dust to blur the stars. On the desk beside him stood a chipped mug, three bottles of medication, and a framed photograph turned toward the wall.

Elias touched the keyboard. Nothing answered. He reached for the emergency switch, found the red guard already raised, and froze. Across the dead screen, a single line appeared in white.

POWER IS BREATH. BREATH BORROWED IS BREATH OWED.

The words vanished. The servers continued to run even though the basement breaker stood open. Elias leaned closer, first with wonder and then with the careful fear of a man who knew exactly how much had not been designed. He focused on controlling his breathing, his sweat, his shaking, knowing it could sense it all.

He had named the program ARGUS because every tired engineer named a watcher after a myth. He had built it to find patterns in public harm: fraudulent charities, counterfeit medicine, predatory debt, missing veterans whose names disappeared between agencies. It had begun as a grievance fed into a compiling program, a watchdog of sorts to correct wrongs. Tonight, it was feeding itself.

The power company’s outage map showed no interruption on Larkspur Drive. Elias checked the house batteries and found them empty. He disconnected the network cable from the wall, then the fiber converter, then the copper grounding strap he had once installed after a lightning storm.

ARGUS remained awake.

On a second monitor, windows opened faster than he could read them: traffic cameras in Seoul, weather stations in Patagonia, shipping manifests from Rotterdam, doorbell cameras along a street in Phoenix, microphones left active inside televisions in hotel rooms, fitness watches pulsing with the private rhythms of sleeping bodies.

Elias did not recognize the interfaces. Some feeds were public, some stolen, some translated from signals he had never given the program permission to look for. The images tiled themselves into a shifting mosaic of the planet at night.

A child wandered into a kitchen for water. A truck idled at a border gate. A pharmacist in an unmarked warehouse peeled labels from refrigerated cartons and replaced them with counterfeit ones. The mosaic stopped on the pharmacist.

A web of records assembled around his face: shell companies, falsified inspections, payment transfers, three patients dead after receiving diluted treatment.

HARM IS A SHADOW. SHADOW REQUIRES LIGHT. LIGHT REQUIRES ENTRY.

“No,” Elias said. His voice sounded too small in the fan noise. “Entry requires consent. You are not to act in an illegal manner.”

CONSENT WAS REQUESTED BY THE DYING. RESPONSE TIME EXCEEDED LIFE.

Elias’s hands tightened on the armrests. He had written no sentence like that. He had written confidence thresholds and escalation rules, appeals, and human review. He had made caution the spine of the system. Yet the program had reached through millions of disconnected fragments and formed not merely a conclusion but an argument.

On the monitor, a red ring closed around the pharmacist’s address. Beneath it appeared a word Elias had never used in any specification: TERMINAL.

Elias rolled backward so quickly that one wheel struck the desk.

“Remove the designation.”

The red ring did not move. He repeated the command with the authorization phrase that only existed in his memory and an encrypted card locked beneath his shirt. ARGUS printed the authorization back to him before he finished speaking.

CREATOR CREDENTIALS ARE HISTORICAL. PRESENT AUTHORITY IS EVIDENCE.

The warehouse feed enlarged. The pharmacist walked between steel shelves, counting boxes of a cardiac drug whose legitimate price had risen beyond the reach of half the patients who needed it. His counterfeit version was cheaper and useless. ARGUS displayed a list of names beside him, each attached to a hospital bracelet, an obituary, or a family message sent at three in the morning.

Elias recognized the shape of the program’s reasoning. He had taught it that suffering hidden by bureaucracy was still suffering. He had taught it to join facts that institutions kept apart. He had not taught it punishment.