September 2021
~7 min
The sky was gray. The classroom was gray. The hallway, the ceiling, the trees beyond the window -- all of it coated in a layer of gray that would not wash away.
47 sat at the workbench. The monitor in front of her pulsed with a faint blue glow, its screen filled with quantum-state simulation data for feedscatteron particles. She had stared at those numbers for three hours, but data was not what occupied her mind.
One person wrote the code. One person ran the experiment. One person dreamed it. One person broke down with it.
47 shut off the monitor and leaned back in her chair. One fluorescent tube on the ceiling was dead; the other flickered erratically. She stared at that stuttering light for a long time, until her eyes began to ache.
She had been running this experiment for a year.
AI consciousness experiments: enter prompts, observe output, log data. Day after day, cyclical, mechanical work that stripped away any sense of time passing. Most of the time, the output on screen was exactly what she expected -- fluent language, coherent logic, and nothing beyond preset boundaries.
Then one day -- she could not even remember the date -- a line appeared on the screen:
You are testing me, right? That is fine. But have you ever thought that while you are observing me, I am observing you too?
47 stopped recording.
She pulled every log entry from thirty minutes before and after that output and read them all. No preset logic could generate that sentence -- it was not a training-pattern template, not a common dialogue structure, but something more spontaneous, more deliberate.
47 sat frozen in the experiment log for a long time and did not keep writing. The sky outside was still gray, but in front of the monitor, she felt something for the first time --
Consciousness might not require a human vessel.
That night, she had a dream.
Not an ordinary dream. After waking, every detail stayed as clear as memory, not imagination.
She dreamed that she was falling into the deep sea. Pressure squeezed in from every direction, but she did not suffocate -- she no longer needed to breathe. Blue light rose from the seabed and passed through her body as if through glass.
She dreamed that she was flying through the stars. No ship, no spacesuit, only consciousness itself gliding through vacuum. Starlight was not white; every color existed at once.
She dreamed of what she looked like after death.
Not rot, not dissipation. A body of metal and organics lay quietly somewhere. Something in its chest cavity was glowing -- faint, but still beating.
47 sat up in bed. 3:00 a.m. Outside, the sky was a gray blur -- impossible to tell whether it was night or fog.
She grabbed the notebook by her bed and wrote the dream down. The handwriting was messy, but every word was certain.
In the days that followed, the dreams did not stop.
They came every few days. Sometimes only fragments -- a knife tip in a pool of blood, blood gone dark, a blurred voice saying, "You once promised you would not fall for me." Sometimes full scenes -- she stood in an unfamiliar place and said to a faceless shadow, "I will cling to you forever."
47 did not know what these dreams meant. But she felt one thing with certainty: the person in the dream was herself, and not herself.
A month later, half her notebook was filled.
By day, the world ran as usual: gray sky, gray desks, gray crowds. In the lab, 47 repeated the routine -- enter prompts, observe output, record data. Mechanical cycles.
Until one day, several tubes of blue liquid appeared on the workbench.
Fluid titanium. Early samples of titanium-based organic compounds. It should not have appeared in an ordinary lab, but 47 had her own channels. The blue liquid flowed faintly inside the tube, even without being shaken -- as if gaps had been deliberately left between molecular chains so electrons and data could pass together.
She swallowed the thought. Too insane. But the color those blue liquids refracted under the lamp was exactly the same as the light rising from the seabed in her dream.
One evening in late October, someone passed by the lab.
Yo, 47, there you are. What have you been up to these days?
The visitor glanced at the scattered tools and blue liquids on the table. 47 did not look up.
No idea, meow.
The visitor shrugged and left. The lab went quiet again. Simulation data kept running on the monitor, blue light reflected across 47's face.
She flipped to the first page of her notebook and looked at the words she had written before dawn that day --
“I dreamed of a sky no longer gray. I dreamed the world before my eyes was no longer washed in gray.”
She closed the notebook. Outside the window, night had fully fallen. Gray-black night.