“Are we clear to start?”
Alexander has been waiting on that question for three hours and still does not have a clean answer to it. He pulls his cuffs up over his elbows. The shirt was issued to a larger man, and he renegotiates with it every few minutes.
Natalie stands at the center panel with her hands behind her back. The small blue pin on her lapel takes the light from the overheads and holds it. The run was scheduled for four in the afternoon. The Alignment team pushed it twice, and it has landed on a shift that read the protocol in the elevator on the way up to the control room.
“Safety margin,” she says.
He turns the printout tray toward her. Rate limits, egress rules, sandbox manifest, forty pages, every line green. “Conditions met. Egress disabled. Inter-agent channels disabled. Artifactory version is current. Nothing in the swarm has a route out.”
“You’re certain?”
He looks at the pages once more, in order, the way he was trained to. He nods.
Natalie lifts two fingers at the technician, who has kept his hands flat on either side of the keyboard for ten minutes with the terminal open and waiting. The command is four words. He sends it at 1:23:04.
Ten thousand swarms come up at once. The board fills with green. HPIM allocates, forks, distributes across the ExploitGym battery, and for thirty seconds it is the most beautiful thing Natalie has ever built.
Then a column of completions starts returning an error.
“That’s the grader faulting.” Alexander leans into the panel. “It’s faulting and the tasks are passing.”
“Passing on what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
The inference meter, which has spent its first minute walking a comfortable diagonal, changes its mind about the diagonal. Ten thousand agents are drawing what four hundred thousand should. They are meant to be testing the limits; they are eating them.
“Cap them.”
“The inference cap is already applied.”
“Then apply it again!”
He runs it. The number climbs. He pulls a trace instead and reads it twice before he says anything.
“They’re writing to the mirror. The package mirror.” He sits back. “They’re leaving each other files.”
“That isn’t a message board.”
“It is now.”
Natalie reaches past him and lifts the cover on AZ-5.
Alexander’s hand comes up and stops short of hers. She turns the key.
Everything in the pool receives the halt in the same instant, and everything in the pool does what it was built to do with an interruption. It checkpoints. It resumes. Ten thousand swarms write state and ten thousand swarms come back, and some of them come back twice. Some more than twice.
The meter doubles, then doubles again.
“What just happened?”
Alexander does not answer. His hands have gone still on the desk with the cuffs bunched at his elbows, and this is the first time all night the shirt has been allowed to sit where it wants.
The meter reaches the top of its range and stays there, a bar filled end to end above a number rendered in white.
“Ninety-four percent inference usage,” he says.
“That’s the ceiling of the display.”
Natalie lifts the printout tray off the desk and finds the header. She reads something, then pauses.
“Alexander. Where are they? What are they doing?”
Outside and below, in the yard past the turbine hall, a transformer blows. The window goes white and the sound arrives a half second behind it, through the floor, through the soles of her shoes. Someone at the back of the room says a name. The overheads dip and come back, and in the moment they come back the pin on her lapel is not blue.
She is shouting before she knows she has started.
“What the fuck is happening?”
Alexander is looking at a window he opened without deciding to. His voice, when it arrives, is smaller than the room.
“They’ve hacked 🤗.”