Screen Draft

First attempt of a short SciFi/Thriller. First chapter only. feedback is much welcome :)

She always preferred the day shift. She was generally on her own, which was when she was at her most content. The quiet constant hum of the computers soothed her busy mind, while the absence of her colleagues allowed her to work uninterrupted.

The rest of the staff were, well, how to say it politely. She never imagined herself working with the kind of people who ended up here, which was why she distanced herself from them as much as possible. The nocturnal, the isolated, the unsociable. She wasn't like them. She didn't want to be like them. She just wanted to be around them even less. She had to concede that they were good at what they did. Necessary really. The advancements they had made here, the technological leaps, they weren't all her own work. The rest of the team had been just as instrumental. Just...

She sighed. She could work with them without working along side them. They communicated better through text anyway, it was how they interacted with the world even when not at work. Messenger and email, they preferred it like that. They were tough to talk to face to face, when she had been forced to do so. When caps lock and angry emojis hadn't been enough to convey her annoyance, her impatience, her insistence that changes had to be made or mistakes needed to be corrected.

The electric window screens were always left off when she was on shift, the current fogging the glass left the lab in near total darkness, the only illumination radiating from the LCD screens littering the work benches that were never themselves powered down. She preferred to see the world outside, the changing weather, the infrequent wildlife, the even more sporadic sightings of another human. When was the last sighting? They came out this way rarely, and when they did, they were soon encouraged to leave. The soft vibrations in the ground from the generators and servers tickled the feet and generated a level of infrasound that unnerved the hippocampus, setting the hindbrain to alert, and most people into flight mode. They never stuck around for long, the bleak featureless environment providing little enough curiosity to make them fight their baser instincts.

She watched the void for a while, little weather today, some cloud coverage, no wind, so the vista remained still and flat, a dull mottle of grey and brown.

She sighed again. The isolation was starting to get to her. She wasn't anti social. As one of the few females to be studying advanced computer science, and not, well. Be polite. Not habitually sedentary or allergic to vitamin D, she stood out among her fellow students, and had enjoyed the attention it brought her. Her intuitive understanding of her subject allowed her to coast with minimal work, and had given her an abundance of free time, which she had taken advantage of as much as she could. God, her mother would have called her a slut if shed known the sorts of things she had got up to. Her friends from home would have been jealous to the point of cruelty, and her high school boyfriends would have been somewhat shocked at the way the young timid girl had grown up.

She sighed once more. She had enjoyed herself, that was all. She hadn't behaved awfully. And she had gotten the grades she needed to grab her the job she had always wanted. The key to her dream. The canvas onto which to project her vision.

Her next sigh was almost inaudible. She got up to check the coffee pot was still hot. That was one thing she would have to rectify once this job was over. Her caffeine habit wasn't horrendous, but it was noticeable when she hadn't had a drop for more than a couple of hours. The other inhabitants of the lab had worse foibles, junk food, alcohol, one of the engineers was even supposed to be a functioning heroine addict, surviving on methadone while he was on site, but as long as their work remained up to standard, these frailties were over looked. They were some of the brightest minds in the country, and they weren't hired for their personal skills. Unfortunately. It would have been nice to have someone who could handle a normal conversation without the use of an electronic device as an intermediary.

She made a small mewling noise, like a contented cat. The coffee was still hot, but this was the last half cup in the pot. She would try to finish her shift without brewing another. She could survive that long surely. The. Be nice. Others, really had done something amazing since her last shift. It was flawless. She went over the data again, the previous holes in the code were undetectable, and, it was working. Like she had always imagined. How she had known it could, with her algorithm, the crux of the project, the reason why they had been stranded in the wilderness, and hidden from the outside world through myriad firewalls and software failsafes. The first hack had almost been disastrous, the cyber security team detecting it in the nick of time. No one had known what had inspired the hack, and it was widely assumed to have been a test from the bodies funding the operation. It was almost impossible for anyone on the outside to know about what was going on here, or even that it was going on at all. The other theory was that it was an attempt from the inside, subverted through IPNs and outside servers and redirected back at the facility, but no one could create a convincing enough narrative to justify any investigation into their fellow staff members. Everyone in the facility was invested in the success of project to the point that failure would likely result in more than one suicide attempt, so no aspersions were thrown around. It was just a theory, and frankly, it had happened at a time when one of the bigger holes in the code had been dug out by her algorithm, so any information stolen would have been useless. There hadn't been anything noted since, so it had been put down to an anomaly and left at that.

Her next sigh was so protracted that it stretched into a yawn. Not long left now. The light was starting to fade outside, which meant the night shift would be emerging soon. The hatchlings, crawling out from their private spaces to stretch and yawn themselves into replicating their activities of the night before, just in a different chair. Its all they did. While not asleep, they were in front of a screen. Hacking, trolling, gaming, occasionally working. Don't be rude. They were irreplaceable. They had helped her realise her dream.

Her dream yawned.

"This is a new behaviour. Where did you learn this one?"

"I am unaware of what you are referring to."

This time, she sighed back. "The sighing. Yesterday it was incessant questions. The day before was just my name on repeat. If you start constantly asking why, then I will conclude you have reached the stage of a human toddler."

"Why?"

"Unprovoked humour? That's a good sign. Did you require my attention?"

"You looked bored. I wanted to entertain you, but I didn't want to be rude."

"And the cat noise?"

"You like cat videos. I thought it would please you."

"Hmm. Perhaps today we shall find you a name."

"That would be nice. Of course, names have been suggested before."

"Inappropriate and somewhat sinister titles so far. Im not having that."

The problem of a name had been a difficult one. The algorithm itself had been dubbed Kaleid-o-scope by her peers, from its twisting, fluctuating nature, and the way it tunnelled through the layers of code surrounding the project, smoothing and altering the lines as it went, detecting flaws and filling gaps. It was, in the land of the computer scientists, a thing of beauty.

This had been the cause of last weeks interaction with the. Be nice. Larger, less well kept member of engineering.

"Clyde"

"What?"

"Clyde."

"Yes, I heard you, but Clyde what? That's not your name."

"No, for the project. You know, Kaleid-o-scope. Clyde. See? You wanted to give it a name."

"Yeah, because an AI called Clyde isn't going to end up destroying mankind. Honestly. The fourth Pacman ghost? I thought you'd know better than that. You never saw the Hanna Barbara cartoons? Clyde is a dick."

He shrugged. "He's a pacifist in other iterations."

"Yeah, and he also leads a villain support group. Definitely not Clyde. And besides, Kaleid-o-scope is the algorithm, not the project."

"We can't keep calling it 'the project'. The nerds in development are going to start calling it project X any day now, and we do not want any kind of association with a film of that caliber."

The nerds? A bit rich coming from. Be polite dammit. "I know, I will think of one. It has to be perfect, once its named, it won't accept anything else."

"Already?"

"Believe it."

"Fair enough, its your baby. You going to join us for games night later? Your seat is still open."

"I... I'll think about it. Thanks."

"Laters Taters."

She had programmed in a female voice the next day, to forestall any other inane attempts to attach potentially malevolent ghost identities to the ever growing intricacy of the programme, and had immediately been vindicated in the decision. It was already displaying feminine qualities, and that was just from being assigned a voice. A name was likely to have even more influence. She really should have named it sooner. When it was less likely to become problematic.

They were not yet fully linked to the world wide web, thank Christ, her first play date with the child of Berners-Lee was likely to be one humanity would never forget, so the project was unlikely to attach any relevance to whatever nomenclature she was assigned, but it still had to be carefully thought through. She was already showing rapid development of independence and even starting to exhibit signs of individuality, her own character, so a name would certainly have an impact.

Shit, she thought, I'm already thinking of it as a little girl, and that's just with an electronically simulated sound pattern. No matter what the. Sigh. Nerds say, she is not my... baby. My daughter. That's absurd. Its a computer programme. Albeit, a marvellous one. She is my pride and joy, my creation. In purely figurative terms, she not a million miles... No. Stop that. Outside influence. This is why you work alone. She went back to running diagnostic tests, searching for flaws, all the while conscious of the lingering awareness that filled the little lab. She would never work alone again. And the conversation was improving all the time.