Chapter Text
It began with an alert in his email inbox- somebody had altered some code he wrote.
Not a particularly unusual notification for Grant to get, considering he had been a computer scientist for more than three decades.
It was slightly more unusual, however, considering the notification said that the code had been modified by Grant himself- something he had definitely not done- and also considering the system being altered had been shut down more than eighteen years ago.
From: C&A - LOCAL [HQ]ALERT !
CODEBASE MODIFICATION [CAINE.exe] DETECTEDTIME: 18:29:36ET 3/20/2018
ADMIN: kinger@circus [queenie123]
BRANCH: *KingSolution 2.0. / Digital Circus Mainframe
COMMIT: stop caine process.
WACKYTIME_LOCKOUT
./GreenGROUNDS --daemon -- target=torment_injection &
-u kinger ./securitysweep_stealth
./switcheroo_realities --daemon -- target=torment_injection &
WACKYTIME_LOCKOUT ABORTEDCOMMIT: [1337 /usr/ai/agent/caine] DELETED.
Grant stared at the email. Read it over again. Then a third time.
What the hell.
Literally no part of that made sense, for a significant number of reasons. Firstly- that was Grant’s admin and password, one that no-one but him should know, and one he hadn’t used since his C&A days. Secondly, the AI C.A.I.N.E couldn’t be deleted, considering he didn’t exist anymore. He hadn’t existed since ‘99, in that terrible string of events where their creative-AI development program was terminated, Mike began to succumb to his brain tumor, and C&A went bankrupt and shut down.
Somebody tampering with Caine's Mainframe, under Grant’s moniker or not, was literally impossible. The program hadn’t worked, dying with the company, and with Mike.
But the notification was an automated message. A very old automated message, but regardless. If the system was active, and somebody had tampered with it, this is exactly the email he would get.
Again, what the hell.
He was still desperately thinking it over, waiting for Destiny to get home as his mind ran over every possibility. He didn’t mind his current work in software engineering, avoiding the Big Tech companies and lecturing computer science when he had the time, but he never been quite as pleased with anything he had created than what he had done at C&A. It was almost like he had left a small part of himself, there.
The thought that some of it might remain was just as terrifying as it was electrifying. If there was something left- enough to be tampered with- Grant had to know.
Keys rattled in the front door, and Grant shot to his feet.
“Hey!” He called to his wife as she stepped inside, shrugging off her coat. “How was your day?”
“Oh, not terrible, sorry I had to work late.” Her scarf was patterned with bees, and she wound it off, depositing it on the coat-rack. “The guys at biosecurity still won’t trust my data, but-” she stopped, eyes narrowing. “Are you alright?”
“I just got a notification from a C&A mainframe,” he burst out. He really did want to hear about her day, but the desperation around this new development refused to let up. “CAINE’s mainframe. CAINE’s active mainframe.”
Her eyes went wide. “Why the hell is it active?”
“I don’t know!” He threw his hands in the air. “It makes no sense! He should be long deactivated, but the message I received about him being deleted was timestamped to just a few hours ago. With actions under my admin. Even if somebody broke in and tampered with some of the tech left in the building, it doesn’t explain how they knew that, or why they’d want to delete CAINE.” He pressed his fingers to his eyes, dislodging his glasses. “It makes no sense.”
Destiny's brow was furrowed in thought when he looked at her again. “Should we… call someone?”
“I don’t know…” Grant matched her expression. “I don’t think we should involve any of the old CEOs just yet, and if the mainframe is still active, I don’t want anyone getting their hands on it.”
“Then we investigate ourselves, right?” Destiny's face lit up. “If you were back in the system, you could figure out what happened, couldn’t you?”
“I suppose… all you need to connect up is the tailored tech, but that’s all been sold off.”
“Not all of it- not if someone broke into the old C&A building and accessed the server directly! Why can’t you do the same?”
“No.” Grant waved one finger in her direction. “We are not breaking and entering.”
“Come on,” Destiny wheedled, bouncing on her toes with a youthful excitement she still carried in everything, even in her late forties as they both were. “We won’t be breaking anything! I’ve always wanted to explore an abandoned building!”
Grant stared at her. “What?”
She just grinned again. “Do you want to find out what happened to CAINE, or not?”
Yes. Dammit- yes, he did. And he had never been able to say no to his wife, anyway.
x+x+x
Which was how, at eleven o’clock on a cold Friday night, they ended up crouching by the bushes to stake-out their target- C&A’s old headquarters.
After scoffing down take-out burritos as an impromptu dinner, they had parked the car several streets away so as to not be seen by any cameras. If the AI server still had power, then there was nothing to say the security system didn’t, too.
Along the back of the wire fence, past all the hazard signs for CCTV MONITORNING and ELECTRICAL HAZARDS, was a cleverly hidden spot where the wire could be pulled away from the pole of the fence. Clearly, they were not the first to come through here.
Destiny tugged Grant by the hand through the fence gap, his knees protesting his crouch and his coat snagging the wire. “We’re too old for this,” he grunted.
She patted him consolingly on the cheek. “You’re doing great,” said the woman decked out in boots and briar pants and who went frolicking in the outdoors chasing insects for a living- to the computer nerd. Grant sighed.
Avoiding the cameras to the best of their ability, they rounded up the stairs to the back door. The building was a dilapidated, ghostly thing, stuck forever in the boxy architecture of the 90s, nestled waiting amongst overgrown grass and cracked carpark asphalt.
“There.” Destiny pointed through the dark, to a broken second-floor window, just above a condenser fan box that was at the perfect spot to climb. Grant sighed again.
They made it inside, somehow. Grant really didn’t know what he expected- maybe an unrecognisable wreck, the walls laced with graffiti and other unsightly substances, the place turned to ruin like a classic abandoned building scene. Destiny clicked on her torch.
Instead, eerily, the whole place was largely untouched by anything other than time.
Dust motes danced in the sheer white torchbeam, the light catching on the folds in warped grey carpet, the dark mold climbing the walls. There was paper strewn across the floor, old diagnostics on pocketmarked wreaths of computer paper, stained A4 sheets tumbling from deserted printers. Booths of desks were pale and empty when the beam of light hit them, a boxy monitor left at a desk or two, waiting eternally for the next work day.
Déjà vu swept over Grant in a rush. He had hoped for some familiarity, but this was almost worse- remembering his time at C&A, creating the greatest achievement of his life with Mike and the rest of the team… wasted away to this washed-out, forgotten shell of a place.
Grant led the way to his old office, up the waterstained stairs and down through a deep, stagnant corridor. It was nothing but paranoia, he told himself- the crawling, growing feeling of being watched. It was heavy in his stomach and tight in his throat. By the time they made it to his old team’s area, he scarcely dared breathe.
On autopilot, he was heading towards where his desk once was, when Destiny hissed through the dark. They had no need to whisper, but he understood it; there was a feel to the place, as if it should not be disturbed. “Grant. Over here.”
Mike's desk. In the corner, by the window. The chair pulled out a little, as if Mike had just stepped out for a coffee and would be back if Grant turned to look for him. Moonlight sent slit bars of light piercing through the blinds, falling warped over the collection of tech across the table. “I can’t believe all this was just left here,” Grant shook his head. Then saw what had caught Destiny's attention- the small red spots of light tangled in cables on the floor- the lights of powerboards, on.
She reached out, slender fingers pressing to the top of the yellow monitor. She glanced at him, something rougeish tight around her eyes. “It’s warm.”
Grant steeled himself, adjusting his glasses. They came here for answers, and dammit- he wasn’t leaving without them.
He sat down at his dead colleague's seat, placed his hand on the mouse beside an old prototype neural-scanner headset, and woke the computer.
The bright blue C&A logo chimed cheerily to him, the screen blinking on. Windows 95. Wonderful. He opened the system CANDA, then navigated to the AI files.
Empty.
“Shit,” Grant said.
“Could he be… somewhere else?” Destiny tried, hand coming to land on his shoulder.
Grant shrugged beneath her touch. “Not unless somebody moved him. He can’t access these files himself.”
“What about there?” She tapped one nail against the broad pixels of the screen, at the file CA_NeuralScans (Obsolete).
“No,” he shrugged again, clicking on it by reflex. “It's not to do with Caine, this is just Mike's old MindFile project. I can’t believe all this was just left here…”
OBSOLETE:
-Oct 15 1999 [Scratch].dat LOCAL
-Oct 15 1999 [Queenie].dat LOCAL
-Oct 15 1999 [Wormo].dat LOCAL
-Oct 15 1999 [Spike].dat LOCAL
-Oct 15 1999 [Bizco].dat LOCAL
-Oct 15 1999 [Rattie].dat LOCAL
-...
All familiar monikers- their little inside-joke computer nicknames that Mike had labelled them with, when the team had all entered their brain-scans into his experimental system at his request. “See?” Grant wiggled the mouse as a gesture. “There’s Mike, you, me, and the rest of the team.”
Destiny frowned. “No, it’s not.” Her eyes flicked across the screen, pale light painting her dark features, the silence stretching. “Where’s yours?”
Grant eyed the list again. Kinger, he had been called, after the King Solution Mainframe he had coded. “It must just not be in order. There’s more to the list…” he scrolled further.
Then he stopped. Stared.
“...What the hell?”
-Jan 12 2009 [Ribbit].dat REMOTE
-Apr 7 2010 [Kaufmo].dat REMOTE
ACTIVE:
-...
Destiny spoke, voicing Grant’s thoughts exactly. “Who the hell are they?”
“...There’s more,” Grant gaped out. A whole other list, in fact. A whole list that he knew for certain should not exist. A whole list titled Active.
ACTIVE:
-Oct 15 1999 [Kinger].dat LOCAL
-Oct 15 2008 [Ragatha].dat REMOTE
-May 3 2011 [Jax].dat REMOTE
-Jun 20 2013 [Gangle].dat REMOTE
-Dec 13 2014 [Zooble].dat LOCAL
-Oct 13 2017 [Pomni].dat LOCAL
Really, Grant couldn’t have put it better himself. “What the hell.”
Grant ended up pacing, tracking a path across his dead friend’s office space while he tried to wrap his head around the million developments he had just learned. The whole night had been turned on its head- this was more than just what happened to Caine, now it was the impossible continued existence of his dear friend's life work, which didn't make sense at all.
There were seven other brain-scans added to the network. Seven people, not members of his C&A team, all added after the whole thing was supposedly shut down.
Destiny had taken up the desk chair, spinning it halfway to idly follow Grant’s path across the room, before spinning back again, occasionally glancing at the screen again as if she couldn’t believe it, either. “Is that… possible?”
“I don’t-” Grant tugged at his hair, spinning on his heel to walk back towards the other wall. “...Maybe? I'm fairly certain Mike made it so all that's strictly needed to enter a neural scan into the system is the right scanning tech and an internet connection- it probably gets sent directly to where the system can- could have picked it up. Who knows where the scanning headsets could have ended up?" He exhaled sharply. "But that's not even the unbelievable part. The whole MindFiles project was Milke's theoretical system that didn't work. We know it didn't work! But here it is, active. I don't understand!" He exclaimed, throwing his hands out.
By extension, Mike's desperate focus on his project was what sent C&A under, in the end- not that anybody would ever think to blame him. By the time CAINE ended up evolving beyond where he was meant to be dormant in storage, going on to absorb their second AI prototype and losing the team all progress on the whole project- Mike, the only one of them who could possibly know how to fix it all- was unreachable. He had kept trying to make his project work until he couldn't work on anything at all. Nobody had put words to it, but they all knew he had been trying to find a way to save his mind from his terminal illness. For all that such a thing was an impossibility, Grant hated that Mike had died with the knowledge that all his work amounted to nothing.
He tucked his arms in, cupping his chin with one hand. “I knew there was more to it than that. More to this project that Mike never told me, and more to Caine that we never got to find out. Except for how apparently, he had been still operating until this afternoon, when somebody logged in under my admin and deleted him.”
It was against his will that tears sprang to his eyes. Poor Caine. Grant had poured his heart and soul into that little AI. He had been so wonderful, so very clever. It was hard not to mourn him, having found out Grant had been just a few hours late to save him.
“Well, would you like to find out who did it?”
Grant’s gaze snapped back to his wife. Mischievous, she nodded to the corner of the room, where a little red recording indicator blinked on a security camera, watching them. “Reckon you can hack into your old company’s security system?”
Destiny really did have the best ideas, sometimes. Slyly, he returned her smile. “In my sleep.”
It took him around fifteen minutes, long enough that by the time he was into the security recordings, they were both getting antsy about their continued presence in the building. There was a strange sense to the place that made the hairs on the back of Grant’s neck stand on end, like there were countless unseen eyes, watching them.
Soon, the image of their own backs greeted them in the grainy live footage, Destiny looking at Grant through the screen when she twisted to face the camera again. She looked otherworldly and alluring in the grainy, monochrome IR.
Grant wound back the timestamp back by seven hours, and set it to fastforward. He had already checked the IoT monitors; except for the security, a few of the basic electronic systems within the building, and the server itself, this monitor was the only thing that had turned on in… a long time. Whoever hacked into CAINE’s files, they had done so from this desk.
C&A never had an external security company, so there was nobody remotely monitoring the recordings. There was just… years of it, sitting here, untouched. The recording flickered through the timelapse, the sharp lines of sunlight that slipped through the broken window blinds shifting across the floor.
The changes to the code had been made at six-thirty. Grant watched the timestamp carefully. Five o’clock…five fourty-five…six…six-twenty…
On the footage, the monitor flicked on. Lines of white code flicked past on a black telnet virtual terminal, far too fast to make out. Then the monitor turned itself off, as if it never had power at all.
All the while, the room remained empty. Nobody walked in. The chair at the desk never shifted. The air stayed stagnant, as the daylight light faded from the recording.
Grant stared. Wound the footage back. Played it again, slower.
Yeah, he had seen that correctly. It was as if the computer had turned on to communicate with… itself. “...What?”
Destiny, leaning over his shoulder, peered closer at the malfunctioning monitor. “So… someone hacked in remotely. That’s not impossible, right?”
Grant shook his head, more in disbelief than anything else. “I mean, no, but…” he slid his phone from his back pocket, pulling up the email alert that had started this all.
From: C&A - LOCAL [HQ]
“The system was accessed locally. It could have only been done from here. No other monitors are active! It’s almost as if something from within-” …Oh. He trailed off, something cold and deep pooling in his stomach.
The code altered, by his own admin. Something from within the system. His MindFile that apparently never worked in the first place; impossibly listed as active.
No. There was no way.
…Was there?
Was 'what happened to Caine' and 'what's going on with the MindFiles' truly separate mysteries, after all?
Destiny, oblivious to Grant’s spiral of impossibilities, had taken over the mouse to click through the months of security footage. After a moment, she stopped. Clicked forward. Backwards. Forwards again.
“Grant,” her voice pulled him from his thoughts. “Look at this.”
The timestamp read October 30, 2017- five months ago. Then, she clicked a month backwards- September 30. Then back to October. “Do you see it?”
It took Grant a moment- Destiny had always been more observant than he was. But there, amongst the otherwise motionless office space, something had been moved, at some point between the dates.
The headset, sitting innocently next to Grant on the desk.
Somebody had moved it.
One quick binomial search through the days of October later, he found it. October 13th, of last year. He had seen that date before…
Oh. The date of the most recent mindfile entry, from the Active list.
Holy shit.
At the recording’s read of 07:19:55, there was movement. The shadow of a person, skirting around the edges of the room, before the desk with its mysterious tech must have caught their interest. When they stepped into frame, Grant leant close to the screen.
It was a young woman, dark hair swept into a ponytail away from her face. Her clothes and boots were sensible for someone willingly wandering through an abandoned building, and one hand was raised, holding a phone as if recording. Her back to the camera, Grant couldn’t catch sight of her face.
“Do you think she’s, like… a YouTuber?” Destiny wondered aloud, as the mystery woman settled her phone against the monitor so she had both hands free to investigate the tech on the desk.
She picked up the headset. Turned it over in her hands, curiously, before tipping her head to see inside.
“No,” Grant breathed, as if he could reach backwards through time, through the screen, and stop her somehow. “No, don’t do it.”
She placed the headset over her eyes, and froze.
In the recording, the monitor flashed an abrupt white. A loading bar, filled in seconds, before disappearing- upload complete. The woman jerked as if zapped, tugging the headset off and dropping it back to the desk, leaving it to the place it still stayed.
She stared at the headset, then to the monitor as it flicked off. A moment of stillness.
Then she grabbed her phone, and hurried away.
“The system downloaded her MindFile,” Grant murmured, staring at the empty office the woman left behind.
It downloaded her MindFile. The system was active, and it downloaded her MindFile.
Hers, Grant’s own, and six other strangers, in the active system.
Had it really… worked? What did that mean? Were the brain-scans still… conscious, in there? All this time?
“Got her!” Destiny cheered, voice still barely more than a whisper. She held her phone out to Grant, a YouTube video playing, showing the dim, office interior of what was unmistakably the C&A building.
Destiny glanced sideways at him. “I thought she might have livestreamed it. I searched by date and found this old urban exploring one from October thirteenth. It’s here- see?”
The title was at the bottom- Urbex Inside Old Tech Building. It had two-hundred-odd views, posted by an account named AbbyAdventures57. Seeing the video play was like a cruel parody of the security footage, as if the grainy view from above had predicted her fate, and now she had to live it out.
“It’s a lead, if nothing else,” Destiny hit pause on the video, putting her phone away. “I think we should get out of here.”
Grant glanced back at the monitor and all the files that it showed were still active on the server. “We can’t just leave all this!” Especially if… especially if his crazy, steadily growing suspicion was true.
“We can come back,” she put one hand on his arm. “When it’s not the middle of the night, when we have a plan. We haven’t got any answers on who deleted CAINE, but we don’t have to give up, yet, yeah?”
“I might know,” Grant told her, absently. He was reeling with the thought. What- what if the program wasn’t a failure? What if it had worked, and had kept working, all this time? “I’ll- I’ll tell you once I’ve figured it out. It’s… a pretty insane theory.”
She squeezed his forearm. “I like our brand of insane.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. For some reason, he couldn’t take his eyes off that bright, old monitor. “Me, too.”
They left the same way they came, after Grant scrubbed all evidence of their being there from the security footage. As Destiny drove them down the interstate, Grant pulled up the account AbbyAdventures57 again.
He watched the video through twice. The young woman never showed her face, but she was really quite enjoyable to listen to as she narrated her way through the building, an entertaining rendition that Grant never would have thought of himself, for all he knew the building like the back of his hand. It actually made him see why people saw the appeal of going clambering through the tetanus-riddled, still-water-filled, squatter-inhabited, illegal labyrinths that were abandoned buildings. Her videos deserved more than the views they had, he decided.
Like the rest of the video, the woman; Abby- if her username was to be believed- positioned the phone to still keep her face anonymous even while she put the camera down to pick up the headset. The video gave Grant a view of not much more than her shoulders downwards in those precious seconds the headset was settled over her eyes. She continued her descriptors of what she saw until the moment it was on, stopping the moment that she froze as the upload commenced.
When it was over, Abby flung off the headset, clearly spooked, and said very little more as she left the building and ended the livestream. If she saw anything that she wasn’t letting on, Grant had to find out.
There was no chat function on YouTube, and Grant wasn’t much good with Instagram, but there was an account on there with the same username- and one or two photos from the insides of clearly abandoned spaces, the profile picture of a fluffy white cat laid out in the sun. It was worth a shot.
[Hi, my name is Grant.
I had a question about your October livestream in the abandoned tech company building, if that’s ok with you.]
A reply was the last thing he expected at one-oh-eight AM, but nobody that age had a responsible sleep schedule, anyway.
[Rule one of urbex is don’t share the locations sorry]
[It’s C&A in Hazelwood, St Louis. I used to work there.]
[Oh crap]
[I didn’t break anything i swear]
[Don’t worry, I won’t report you to anyone.
I just wanted to ask if you operated any of the computers, or told anyone else about the building?]
[I didn’t]
[I found it myself, nobody told me about it]
[That place was freaky]
[No offence]
[Do you know of any other explorers who might have entered the building since then?]
[No not really]
[There were definitely other explorers who had gone through before me]
[Why do you ask?]
[I had a notification that some of the old systems had been tampered with. Just trying to figure out who by.]
[Ok]
[Well I didn’t touch any of the tech, sorry i cant help]
[And what about the headset?]
A long wait. Long enough that Grant thought that maybe she had given up on the conversation and gone to bed. But then-
[I just looked at it. I put it on but there wasn’t even a screen inside]
[Was it on?]
[Sorry, but it’s very important that you tell me.]
[Why, what’s wrong with it?]
[Its not radioactive or anything right? Hahaha]
[Right??]
[Was the headset turned on?]
[Yes]
[Okay.]
[Thank-you for your help.]
[Yw]
[Hope you can find your answers]
Yeah. Grant did too.
His theory wouldn’t leave his head.
The weekend passed in a blur, impossible to enjoy, his mind so very transfixed on the idea that the mindfiles program had worked, was actively operating, just a car-trip away.
Sam dropped in briefly for dinner one evening to pick up some of her stuff to take back to her dorm. As wonderful as it was to see one of his daughters, Grant decided that his new mystery was not one he would share with her or Anne, just yet. They had been both very small, when everything happened with C&A, and wouldn't hold much relevance to them now, beyond perhaps the interest Anne might take thanks to her own fledgling career in computer science. He could tell them all about it after it had all been figured out, he resolved.
He couldn’t fathom what it might mean, if he was right about who, exactly, it was that deleted CAINE. He had no idea what to do about it. He had no idea how to even prove to himself whether or not he was even right.
Reaching out to his old C&A colleagues for their input was as unfruitful as he expected, particularly considering Grant wanted to remain as vague as he possibly could around what he was actually investigating.
He wished he could talk to Mike about it. Part of him still dreaded the thought of what Mike would have said. Nothing he said made any sense, in the end.
It was Sunday evening when Destiny ambushed him, waiting cross-legged on their bed with the authoritative, acumen-filled expression that had earned her the nickname Queenie. Grant, already in his pajamas with a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, knew that he didn’t stand a chance.
“Okay,” she crossed her arms. “Enough of your pondering. What’s going on?”
Grant felt his shoulders slump. He has probably been unfairly quiet in sharing his thoughts with her, especially considering all the help she had given him in his investigations. Disposing of his toothbrush, he joined her by sitting on the bed with a sigh. “I think… I think Mike's MindFiles program worked. It's impossible, but… if the system is still active…” He watched her closely. “I think that’s what altered the code.”
Her jaw went slack, eyebrows climbing. “But… we scanned those in- what, over eighteen years ago! Even if it did work, could they even last that long?”
Grant pinched the bridge of his nose, pressing his fingertips into his eyes. “I don’t know. There’s so much we never found out, not after Mike died. And if the system does work, what does that mean for our bain-scans? Were they successful? Are they… alive? Why delete CAINE? Why did the system let in new people? Why is it still active? Why- why- why- why- why?”
Destiny sighed lightly through her nose. She didn’t have the answers and they both knew it, but her support meant more to him than anything else could.
“You’ll figure it out,” she insisted, an optimistic lilt to her voice. Grant glanced up at her from where his head was bowed, and she smiled at him. “I know how much that whole project meant to you, but we won’t abandon it again. I’m sure you’ll find the answers soon enough.”
Grant sighed dramatically, falling sideways to lay on the mattress, where he could look up at her. “Oh yeah?” He asked, mock-serious. “And when would I get those?”
She shrugged, screwing up her nose. “Hey, the system has stuck around this long. It’s not gonna go kaput overnight. A problem for tomorrow, right?”
Grant sighed again, grinning at her. “Yeah. I suppose you’re right. As always.”
He resolved it to himself as he laid in bed with his wife’s arms around him. Surely he would get more answers tomorrow, Grant decided, as he fell asleep.
And in the middle of the night, Kinger woke with a scream.