Changes at the lab continued but Pan was so obsessed with figuring out what was going on with Nova and the X-1s that they didn’t notice until the day things changed in a big way.
Dr. Z hadn’t returned to normal after the day of the napkin. He was never quite as well kept and neither was his office, but there was nothing quite like that day. Their greetings had become perfunctory. Pan had stopped asking Dr. Z if he had changed the world today and Dr. Z didn’t mention tinkering or the workshop. Recently there had been days when Dr. hadn’t even responded to Pan’s greeting, but by then Pan hardly registered it.
Pan knew something was up as soon as they got to work. A stack of bankers’ boxes stood on a moving dolly, with a security guard by the door. Dr. Z came out as Pan approached, looking harried and defeated in a way that Pan had never seen before.
“Evening Dr. Z. Is everything OK?”
“No Pan, it’s not a good evening. It looks like someone else is going to have to change the world. Maybe even you. And make sure you get rid of all that garbage.”
Pan entered the building, thinking about the oddity of the exchange. The comment about Pan changing the world could have been sarcastic but Dr. Z hadn’t mentioned the garbage in a long time and had held Pan’s eyes for a moment longer after he finished, as if silently pleading with Pan to understand a deeper meaning. The security guard had begun pushing the dolly and made it clear that Dr. Z should move too, so Pan hadn’t had a chance to ask him why.
The X-1 labs were the next shock. Pan was normally in the building when it was asleep, but none of the labs were ever truly dark. Human attendants slept, but the mighty processing systems ran on regardless and there were always indicator lights and flickers of electronic movement. The X-1 lab was completely shut down. Not a glimmer of electronic life stirred in it and the doors were locked with a code that Pan’s access card could not open.
Checking the garbage was normally something that Pan saved until the end of the day. The hope of something interesting had always been a nice finish and since the X-1 discoveries, a good day in the trash meant a long day waiting to get home. Today Pan decided they should check it out immediately.
On any other day, the items waiting to be recycled and burned would have been a disappointing sign. A few boxes of various broken tools for recycling and a stack of bio-waste cases from the organics department. Those had to be carefully handled and loaded into the incinerator as they were. The cases were designed to stay hermetically sealed to ensure waste could not escape by accident, but the lock indicator on this stack showed unsealed. A glance inside one showed rows of X-1 Nova modules, a few more than Pan currently had if the boxes all contained the same number, and a quick examination of one showed that these, unlike the others, had not been disabled. Pan had no idea why but was convinced that Dr. Z knew they had been taking X-1s home and wanted them to take the rest.
Pan quickly moved the cases to their car and got back to the normal work of the day. Normally Pan enjoyed the relatively simple tasks of the Facilities office. They provided something for the hands to do while Pan’s mind wandered and thought. But today, every scrap of paper to be picked up or trash can to be emptied was an afront and a waste of time. No day in the history of days had passed as slowly as that one did for Pan. Every moment the need to investigate, and the fear of being discovered taking the x-1s (a new experience for Pan but one that felt right after Dr. Z’s urgency) weighed on every moment.
Nova’s algorithm analysis had finished just before Pan left for work and the comparison with the X-1 performance readings would likely finish by tomorrow. But today was all about getting the newest X-1 modules onto life support and starting the second expansion. Pan had ordered the parts weeks ago, but the sudden halt in the flow of X-1s had made the assembly unnecessary until now. The few days that it would take to complete were frustrating, but there was no other option.
A quick scan of the algorithmic analysis showed no errors and according to every log and record, Nova had acted entirely within normal parameters. It hadn’t spoken the out-of-place quotes Pan distinctly remembered, nor had it altered the records in any way. Yet Pan had heard those words and seen those changes with their own eyes. The dissonance between what the data showed and what Pan had experienced left them unsettled. Pan had never had any reason to doubt their own sanity, but other than the word failure struck through in all of Pan’s notes; a change that had spread through every document and journal Pan had recorded since first noticing it; there was no concrete evidence that the analysis was wrong.
Pan’s review of the comparison provided the first clue about the source of Nova’s strange behavior, though it offered no explanation as to why. During the time when Nova had different memories than Pan, the neural bridges showed extremely high traffic between X-1 modules; far higher than necessary for the kind of conversations that Pan and Nova had been having at the time. Nova’s logs didn’t show any complex algorithms called up, so what was the X-1 cluster processing?
Reloading Nova onto the cluster was the next step. Pan would be able to monitor Nova and the X-1s as they worked together and get to the root of what was going on. With the expansion almost ready to begin installing new modules, they could monitor any changes in the X-1 modules more closely.
