"Silhouette"
Professor Miller hadn't slept for almost a day. His head was pounding, his fingers were trembling, his voice was breaking into a high pitch. When he reached his old colleague, Professor Christopher Paulus Mung, he was, as always, as calm as a surgeon before surgery.
"Christopher, just imagine - a mind inside a machine!" Miller practically shouted into the phone, clutching the receiver as if he were trying to transmit an electric pulse of delight.
"Calm down, Arthur," Mung replied with a slight grin. "Before declaring digital awakening, check to see if your code is glitching. Or, more likely, the operator himself."
"It's not a glitch. It... It made sense. The machine added the exception handler itself. It's responding to stress. It's learning."
"Then test it outside the lab," Mung snapped. "In a sterile environment, the probability of random events is close to zero. Drag her out into chaos. Field conditions. Let her experience life."
Jonathan's suggestion - an abandoned cemetery - elicited a nervous chuckle from Tom and an angry glare from Sarah. She immediately dismissed the idea, calling it "a children's horror movie." Her own suggestion - a city park - was too... safe. Tom proposed a compromise: an abandoned building slated for demolition. An old neighborhood, concrete walls, broken windows, graffiti, wind, drafts - the perfect setting for unpredictability.
Preparation took two weeks. Moving equipment, a generator, a stabilizer, spare batteries, screens, safety helmets - everything to not only conduct the experiment but also avoid being arrested for trespassing.
Jonathan was once again the first volunteer. He donned the interface, sat down on an old crate, and exhaled. The professor and Tom watched the monitor. Sarah was behind the camera.
The screen came to life. First, a dark gray noise. Then, bright spots. Gradually, as if appearing on old photographic paper, the outlines of the room emerged. Green and yellow pixels - memory artifacts. Blue - moderate reactions. Red flashes - when Jonathan jumped up, reacting to a door slamming or a creak in the corner.
Half an hour passed. Everything was going according to plan. Almost boringly.
And suddenly - pink stripes. Quickly, for a moment. In the lower right corner.
"What was that?" Professor Miller reacted instantly, leaning forward
"I saw something... out of the corner of my eye. Some kind of shadow," Jonathan replied, looking around uncertainly.
They continued for another four hours. The pink color appeared several times. Vaguely. Fleetingly. But it was there. Not a headline-worthy result, but enough to keep them awake another night.
When dusk finally fell, the team decided to take a short break. Sarah, sitting in Jonathan's seat, instinctively put on the interface - she'd done this before, to check the calibration. No one noticed.
Until the speaker beeped.
The screen flashed. Not stripes. Not a zigzag. A silhouette.
All three - Tom, Jonathan, and the professor - turned sharply to face Sarah. She stood rooted to the spot, staring at the wall. At the old, peeling wall, onto which the setting sun projected a shadow through the broken window. A human silhouette. The movement of the foliage, the play of light, the angle of view - and suddenly it seemed as if someone was standing there.
On the screen - the same silhouette. Pink. Bright. Pulsating.
"Sarah?" Tom called cautiously.
But she didn't answer. She just stood there, her eyes wide, staring at the wall.
"Was it... a person?" she whispered finally.
"No," the professor replied, looking at the screen. "It was a reaction." And the machine understood her.
"Or divided," Jonathan added, "and reflected."
They were silent. The wind blew dust across the concrete floor. A door slammed somewhere. The silhouette disappeared. Gray noise returned to the screen.
But now they knew: the machine felt. Or at least reflected feelings. And perhaps experienced them along with the human.
And that was only the beginning.
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