"A Shadow from the Subconscious"
Professor Miller disliked mysticism. He was a man of formulas, logic, structure, and proof. But he was no fool either. He knew that if a phenomenon doesn't fit into the usual framework, it doesn't mean it's inexplicable - it just hasn't been found yet.
Tom's words - disjointed, jumbled, almost childish in places - still struck a chord. A mind from the subconscious. A tulpa. A thought-form. He didn't know these terms, but they sounded suspiciously familiar.
He walked around the lectern as if through a museum of his own past. There was the old oscilloscope on which he'd once seen the "breathing" of a signal for the first time. There was a blackboard with traces of formulas - the remnants of long-ago lectures. There was the corner where the very monitor stood, on which the pink silhouette first appeared.
"A thought-form," he heard again. A fear-induced reaction. A signal amplified by emotion. An error that became a pattern.
He returned to the board and began writing. At first, just diagrams. Then blocks. Then arrows, dependencies, signal levels. He added variables he'd previously ignored: instability, distortion, noise. In the conventional model, they were considered interference. But what if they weren't interference, but fuel?
An hour and a half later, the team reassembled at the podium. Even Sarah, still pale, but with a clear interest in her eyes. Jonathan held her hand. Tom, nervously twirling a screwdriver in his fingers, stood by the door. Everyone waited.
"We'll do one more experiment," the professor began. "But not in an abandoned building. And not in a cemetery. We'll try to recreate what happened. Not from the outside - from the inside. In the code. In memory."
"How?" Sarah asked cautiously.
"We'll add a new block to the system. It will respond not just to signals, but to emotional markers. We'll create a buffer where errors will accumulate, not be discarded. We'll give the machine the ability to remember fear."
"Is it... dangerous?" Jonathan asked.
"Everything connected to the mind is dangerous," Miller replied. "But we can't stop. We're too close."
They worked for three days. No sleep. No breaks. Sarah wrote a new module - she had the best sense of what exactly had to be "wrong" in the code for it to work. Jonathan worked on the interface, increasing the sensitivity of the sensors. Tom assembled a new buffer - from old components, with unstable memory, and power failures. Everything that would normally be considered defective now became the key.
Professor Miller coordinated. He didn't write code. He watched. He thought. He felt they had reached the limit. And if they stepped over it, there would be no turning back.
On the evening of the third day, they turned on the system.
The screen lit up. Noise. Then flashes. Green. Yellow. Red. Everything as usual. But now there was a pulsation. It wasn't coming from external stimuli. It was coming from within.
"It's...," Tom began, "it's like breathing."
"No," Sarah said quietly, "it's like waiting."
"What?" Jonathan asked.
"Us," the professor replied. "It's waiting for us."
A shadow appeared on the screen. Not a silhouette. Not a shape. Just a shadow, like something you can't see, but it's there. It trembled. It pulsed. It was pink.
"We didn't just create an interface," the professor said. "We created a mirror."
"A mirror of what?" Sarah whispered.
"The subconscious," Miller replied. "Not just human. And not just machine. Something new."
They were silent. The wind howled outside. Only one screen flickered on the podium.
And on that screen, something was looking at them.
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