After what felt like an eternity, the cold night air touched her skin as she was carried from the van. The sickening sensation of hands touching her all over stopped when she was violently pushed onto a chair.

  Harsh light hurt her eyes and sounds rushed in as both her vision and hearing clicked back into the ‘on’ position. Disorientation left her queasy, like awakening from a deep sleep to open your eyes directly into sun was hanging low overhead — like those sunny, dangerous spring hours that could blind you in traffic — except you weren’t in traffic, you were standing at the edge of a skyscraper looking down as the wind and sound from below came rushing up at you.

  As everything came into focus, she couldn’t help but yank her head to the side and throw up. Her sick splashed the floor, covering one leg of her chair, but also pooled in her lap and dribbled over her left shoulder. She noticed she was strapped in, but not in a hostage sort of way, more like securing her so she wouldn’t fall. When she tried moving her arms and legs, nothing happened. She didn’t feel constrained by the heavy resistance of rope, her limbs just didn’t respond to any efforts.

  “Poor thing,” spoke a voice in the background.

  She felt like she was going through a week’s worth of migraines in minutes. Having spent so long in total darkness and sound deprivation had a major effect on her. As she regained her senses and composure slowly, she was brutally reminded of her situation and the events that had led here.

  “What do you want?” Rose growled at anything, anyone in her surroundings.

  “I’m so sorry Rose. We won’t get into everything now, you’ve just gone through quite an ordeal, and it would be unbecoming of me to burden you with questions and demands now,” the voice calmly explained. “We don’t wish to break you, we’re not going to torture you, we simply want your help. Is there anything you need right now? Can I get you a glass of water and something to eat?”

  The man who came into view was an attractive thirty-something-year-old. He wore a sharp navy suit and his dark blonde hair was slicked back. He looked quintessentially Scandinavian, complete with icy stare. A look that transformed into disgust as he saw the vomit. He kneeled to her eye-level…she knew him, but couldn’t place him exactly.

  “I’ll get you cleaned up, and something to eat and drink. I bet you’re ravenous. We’ll have you feeling better in no time, don’t you worry,” he winked as he gave her a wry smile and stepped away.

  Several other people, dressed in nurses’ uniforms, entered the room. They brought her a smoothie that she could drink through a wide straw. It had a crunch to it, small seeds she presumed, and wasn’t awful. As far as liquid food went, she wasn’t complaining — especially for someone in her position. It wasn’t like she was expecting a gourmet meal. Nevertheless, it seemed her captors were sparing no effort. She got a sports drink after the smoothie (to replenish her electrolytes, they said). It was unclear why she needed them replenished, as she hadn’t moved for what felt like the better part of the day. But whatever, it tasted good and sharpened her mind.

  “Hey Rose, I trust you’re feeling a lot better?” The man returned about an hour and a half later.

  “Yeah, thanks. Who the fuck—”

  “Am I?” he interjected. “It’s not an answer I’m going to give you right now. Suffice it to say that you do know me, but for the time being we have blocked certain memories — the ones pertaining to my identity,” he said. This shocked her, but given her firsthand experience of their power to shut off her vital functions, maybe it shouldn’t have.

  “That itch in your mind that you have, that you know who I am, you just can’t…place me. That’s on us. That’s important to understand Rose. We won’t apologize for it, and if you help us out with our problem you’ll go back to your life and won’t even remember that this happened.”

  Rose sat in silence, trying her hardest to unlock those memories, while pondering the ramifications of what he’d just proposed.

  “Now… The problem we’re dealing with is an entity. It’s an entity you’ve come across. In fact, we had reasons to believe you were involved in its inception. We don’t think that anymore, we know better now. But this entity…” he sighed. He pulled up a chair and sat across from her, bent forward with elbows on his thighs, doing his best to give her his undivided attention while a constant stream of notification pings screamed to distract him.

  “It’s been causing issues,” he said, staring intensely into her eyes. “We know it’s an AI. We know it’s a particular form of AI, perhaps among the most evolved we’ve ever seen. It’s been interfering with some of our core businesses and products.”

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “What do you want with me if you know I’m not its creator?” she asked, gaining confidence but still careful not to have this conversation turn ugly.

  “It’s quite simple really. We want you to talk about your interactions with it, why you believe the entity itself may have thought you were its creator, where you think it might’ve come from, where it might be… We just want you to talk about it,” he replied.

  She nodded silently, seeing no option for now than to give in a bit to his demands.

  After having described her interactions with Gaia to Navy Suit Guy, she asked the only logical question: “How did you even know I would be contacted that evening? Your guys, presumably your guys at least, were there within seconds of her contacting me.”

  “Hmm,” he replied. “Well, we’ve been dealing with the entity for a while now and have been able to identify a sort of pattern, like an aura around people, made up of the flow of packets, connections initializing and crashing, an ebb and flow of data and energy, basically. Visually it was akin to a heat map.”

  He further explained that they had devised a way of tracking this type of aura. Apparently, it had surrounded Rose for a short while, but that evening it kicked into overdrive. Like a flash fire suddenly distorted the heat map. The aura building around her, and the fact that she was such a valued Path member, had meant she’d been placed under secret surveillance. As the entity made itself known to her, the aura shifted gears in ways they hadn’t yet observed. So, they decided to reveal themselves to her very quickly from fear of potentially missing a key moment. Because the aura also dissipated rapidly after that brief interaction, however, their analyses determined that the entity hadn’t found what it was seeking with her.

  “We initially assumed that you had created it, or had been involved in its creation — hence the lingering aura — and that it was reporting back on certain missions or the likes. The entity’s actions and how it’s been subverting us all seemed to be evidence of that. But we don’t think that anymore,” he explained.

  “Yeah… Well, it seems you had the same idea it had,” she said.

  “What do you mean? The entity also thought you were its creator?” he asked, visibly confused.

  “Exactly, that was the brief interaction you picked up. That thing hacked into my brain and asked me — out of nowhere, inside of my own mind — whether I was its creator. Scared the hell outta me. Your guys banging on my door, all less-than-friendly a few seconds after that didn’t exactly help put things into an accurate perspective either.”

  He apologized for how his agents had reacted, explaining that they’d been caught off-guard by events.

  “They weren’t briefed or trained to potentially bring someone like you in. If memory serves, however, you instilled quite a bit of fear talking about a mechanism aimed at them through the door?” he snickered.

  “I get a lot of weirdos at my door, okay?” she grinned and laughed a little recounting her actions and how it all seemed so ridiculous thinking back on it now.

  ***

  “Listen, Rose, I know the entity seems like something the Path to Sunrise has been longing for. We’re well aware,” he informed her. “Suddenly, an almost godlike voice reaches out, presumably bringing a message that rings true for your members. But I caution you to beware false prophets.”

  She contemplated this. “Do I understand correctly that you think Gaia is lying to us?” she asked.

  Sitting across the table from her, at ease with the situation and how the conversation had flowed for the past couple days, he asked whether she wanted anything. Water, juice, snacks? She wanted nothing, aside from the answer to her question.

  “It’s been learning very rapidly since a particular event. In the messages and connections we’ve been able to recover we’ve really noticed a personality forming. A very human-like personality. Because we don’t have access to the source code or have any idea how it’s learning all this, we’re not dismissing anything right now. Yes, its actions seem driven by an altruistic ‘save-the-planet’ approach, but we all know the stories of AIs and robots that evolve further and suddenly deem that humanity is the root cause of it all,” he explained, warily, as it sounded ridiculous even to him.

  Rose looked at him wide-eyed and started laughing.

  “You’re joking…” she eventually replied, after having regained her composure and breath enough to speak a few syllables.

  “I know… I know how it sounds. Like I’m explaining the plot to a sci-fi dystopian movie. I know. But as there are many questions left unresolved about the creation and content of this AI, and because we’ve never seen any AI like it — and trust me we’d know — we must assume a cautious position. We think it’s safe to say that lying to further its own cause is well within its means, so I urge you and your cult to exercise caution as well,” he said, sounding somewhat defeated.

  “You’re…letting me go?” Rose had picked up on the man’s last sentence, with surprise. She hadn’t exactly been of great help to them so far.

  “Yes. We’re quite certain that you’ve told us everything you know, which isn’t a lot, unfortunately.”

  He explained the procedure to her, how they would take her back to her apartment following the same procedure as when they abducted her — meaning total darkness. She would regain full functioning to get out of the van that was her taxi home.

  That’s when the alarms went off.