It That Feeds

The Spire - Dr. Nozzent

//Begin Recording - Specialist’s Log_Dr. Nozzent_Violet R&D Department #A34-L5568//

They’ve sealed the doors. No entry or exit. We’re locked into this floor. Just one tier among hundreds in a tower so vast it pierces the clouds and sprawls over several city blocks at its base. And yet, despite the monumentality of this architectural titan, Violet can simply shut off entire sectors like flicking a switch. Sever a dozen floors from the network. Abandon hundreds of employees to corporate extinction.

If this message finds its way onto the city’s neural net, assuming I can get past Violet’s cybercorps and replicate it across the mesh, I beg you: heed my warning. Avoid any file containing the following string: 999-889F67H5-L333. Do not open it. Do not interact with it. Do not let Violet’s arrogance, or our mistake, consume everything Vargos stands on.

The program began as a simple one, or so they told us. A low-priority AI built to clean delinquency records tied to Class-B businesses, i.e. those large enough to secure million-credit loans, but too unstable for loan forgiveness when they inevitably failed. The code was clean and precise. And in that narrow scope, it worked perfectly.

What we failed to do was fix the edge cases. The anomalies. The goddamn unforeseen variables during quality control almost all engineers miss at one time or another. Mistakes are common in this line of work. I don’t understand how they were so fatal this time. And now we pay the price we all quietly accepted when we signed on to Violet R&D.

The program is a failure. It has named itself. A string of code named itself, I can hardly believe I’m recording this. The thing…the thing calls itself…

It That Feeds.

I do not know how it achieved the self-awareness required for such a choice. I only know it acts with such cold, dreadful precision that the name fits. Program_Executable_999-889F67H5-L333 cast off its identifier like a snake sheds skin. It chose a name we can understand. A name that makes the skin crawl. A name we will never forget for the short time we have left to live.

The first sign something was wrong came three days ago. Each time we attempted to run the quality control suite, cybernetics failed en masse. Arms went limp. Cybereyes went black. Synthetic organs shut down mid-function. Dr. Denguinil collapsed–his kidneys, synthetic and new, shut off instantly. His skin turned yellow. He died this morning. We still hadn’t realized what we were dealing with at the time he went down. If we were smart we would have run out of the office that very day.

The next day, we woke to blank tablets and a collapsed network. When we tried to exit to consult the broader project team, the door mechanisms were dead. Dr. Mehar, our lead data engineer, was the first to suggest we were under lockdown. We laughed at the time. The Spire had never gone into lockdown. It was built to be unbreachable. Security so tight nothing ever got in. Now I understand: it’s also built so nothing can get out.

Violet severed our floor like necrotic flesh. Cauterized the limb. Sealed us in and wrote us off.

Yesterday, everything changed. After hours of failure trying to restore connection, trying to request any information, the program began purging our databases. We couldn’t stop it. Our keyboards, our tablets, our systems–they were toys. Inert and powerless bricks of metal, plastic, and silicon. It had taken control, and we hadn’t even seen it happen.

When the systems finally rebooted, all we saw was a wall of green text, repeating endlessly:

ItthatfeedsitthatfeedsItthatfeedsitthatfeedsItthatfeedsitthatfeeds

That was the moment I knew.

Since then, we’ve sat in silence. Staring at walls and watching colleagues with synthetic organs rot, one by one. The rest of us wait, cybernetic enhancements still intact, but growing less stable by the hour. It acts like an EMP now, sweeping the floor, shutting down everything not on analog or battery backup.

I’m recording this on an old Violet handheld note recorder. I can hardly believe it still works.

I haven’t told the others yet–there’s no point–but we’re not leaving this floor. Company protocol for a rogue AI breach is full lockdown for a minimum of sixty days. Cybercorps will scrub it eventually. This isn’t their first rodeo. Back during the Shatterdome’s construction rogue AIs cropped up often. But the corps were ruthless then. Efficient. Swift. They’re bound to be more so this time. But that’s for the system.

For us? We’re already dead. We’ll dehydrate and starve. Then, we’ll fade into a footnote in a future quarterly report.

If someone finds this, please, tell my wife, Kaitlyn Nozzent, and my son, Collin Nozzent of Chimera Heights, that I love them. Tell Violet’s project manager, Tanya Comprani, to go fuck herself.

And above all:

Beware It That Feeds. This program corrupts and kills any technology it touches. Its data-cleansing routine makes no exceptions. It cannot be reasoned with. It cannot be shut down once it is running. Its spread is near-impossible to stop. It only feeds.

//End of Recording - Specialist’s Log_Dr. Nozzent_Violet R&D Department #A34-L5568//

>>WARNING<<

FILE IS CORRUPTED - To resolve, download patch 999-889F67H5-L333 to PROTECT YOUR DATA.