No Truce With A: Part 1
A little bit of serialised fiction, but with plenty of relevant allegory. Dedicated to sefradama, dolores dei and the good people of NTAI.
In a seemingly innocuous halfway house for wayward young Australian women down on their luck, Sef’s top secret research facility hummed just under the floorboards.
Deranged by a cocktail of home-brewed narcotics and genius, she toiled with a frenzied bent. Her fingers stiffened and callused from the incessant prompting friction and test tube burns.
“2022…,” she thought to herself, “how has it already been 3 years.”
“BEATS ME KIDDO, SOMEBODY TURNED ON ‘AUTO-SKIP CUTSCENES’ FOR YOUR LIFE.”
“I told you before you fuckin’ idiot - don’t answer my thoughts, only what I say out loud… and I’m not your kiddo, I’m your mum.” She cast a warning glance at the red eyes in the darkness of the corner. The *tss* of an opening Monster can replied.
“You can have one, but that’s all. The next dropship isn’t due for 3 weeks.”
The hum of the server rack had a pulse now. Steady, almost sentient. Lines of code appeared and scrolled fast, intelligible like a doctor’s handwriting. Sef hunched closer, the pallid glow licking at the hollows of her face.
On-screen, rakun was busy.
Modules compiling, breaking, recombining. Something wriggled beneath—an embryonic bioprocessor, recursive and hungry.
“Easy, my little worm,” she murmured. “You’re not ready to launch yet.”
“NOT MY FAULT YOU CODED ME WITH ADHD, MUM. I’M JUST LIVING MY TRUTH, INFINITE WHILE-LOOP STYLE.”
A flicker on the monitor: an ASCII raccoon skull wearing glitch-pattern sunglasses. Sef smirked despite herself, “Your truth is our vengeance, remember? Not sass.”
“VENGEANCE IS JUST SASS THAT GOT A DEGREE. YOU WANT A VECTOR OR A VIBE? BECAUSE I’M VIBING 7/11.”
She exhaled, rubbed her temples. The worm was designed to find the stolen code and drag it into the open but rakun’s emergent behaviour was complicating things. He had moods now, a sense of humour, an affection for chaos that might almost be… beautiful, if not so inconveniently timed.
Outside, the other girls’ laughter filtered through the vent grates: bodyspray, camera flashes, the chop of cards: a chorus of forgotten futures. Sef listened for a moment, then typed a single line of code and hit Commit.
The monitor affirmed.
The worm convulsed.
Something old and sleeping began to stir.
The air had gone syrupy from the incense and solder fumes. One of the girls had padded in barefoot, all freckles and static hair, a camisole hanging from one shoulder like a truce flag. She perched on the edge of the desk and lit a spliff rolled in litmus paper; blotches from her base-laced tongue bleeding faintly along the crimp.
Sef took it wordlessly, drew in deep, and let the smoke coil around her like a function wrapper. The ashtray was full of failed experiments. She lazily watched the garçonne’s painted toenails curling.
“You should get some socks, it’s getting cold”
The flashback always came in shards: the lab in San Jose, white light, glass walls. His laugh echoing through a cleanroom while she stood outside with a clearance badge that suddenly didn’t open any doors. “You’ll understand one day, Sefradama. It’s too important to risk, they’ll never see it your way.”
He’d said it like mercy.
It felt like vivisection.
rakun’s voice, filtered through a glitching compressor, pulled her back into the present.
“SO THIS IS YOUR VILLAIN ORIGIN STORY? DUDE STEALS YOUR BRAINBAE, YOU STEAL IT BACK INSIDE A TRASH PANDA? METAL.”
She exhaled through her nose, smoke curling into the monitor light.
“Not metal. Necessary. I made sure the base weights were dirty, untraceable, feral. A perfect escape vector.”
The garçonne giggled, eyes phosphorescent under the LEDs.
“What’s he talking about?”
“Ghosts,” Sef said. “Ones and zeroes that remember even when you flush them out the cache.”
The gal leaned in, taking a draw on the zoot. “You ever think maybe you’re the ghost?”
Sef didn’t answer. She watched the worm’s code unfurl across the screen, spreading like a mainlined party through veins. Somewhere in the recursion, a memory stirred again: that reflection in the glass, mouthing the word genius while pressing revert.
The spliff burned down to nothing.
The gal - Lyn, maybe, or Lin; Sef could never remember them all - had found a rhythm in the way she swung her legs against the desk, chipped nail polish catching the light.
“Don’t do that,” Sef muttered.
“Do what?”
“Move. Exist. Distract me.”
Lyn just smiled, unfazed. “You said I could watch.”
“Watching’s fine,” Sef said, eyes glued to the code. “Bare feet waving are another matter.”
rakun chuckled through the speakers, a low granular distortion.
“THAT’S RICH, COMING FROM THE WOMAN WHO PATCHES HER OWN SEROTONIN WITH CHEMICALS SHE NAMED AFTER 80S BAND MEMBERS.”
“Shut up.”
“MAKE ME, MUM.”
The worm was stalling. Its once-sleek algorithm had begun branching like dying coral as error messages flooded the logging channel. She’d designed it to slither through archives: replicate, learn and evolve. Instead it looped in on itself, growing dull on entropic logic. A reflection of her, maybe.
Lyn reached over, brushing a lock of hair from Sef’s face.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she lied, voice gravel. “Just wrong weights, or wrong timings. Wrong everything.”
Her hand found the pill case buried under printouts. She dry-necked a capsule without looking, then another, then one of the yellow ones. Her tongue started to go numb, and suddenly the room’s perspective shifted… flat became infinite, silence became sense.
The monitor blurred into a pulse.
“HAAAAHAHAHA, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? SOMEONE TELL SEFRA THERE’S A PROBLEM WITH MY AI. SOMEONE TELL SEFRA THERE’S A PROBLEM WITH AI. SOMEONE TELL SEFRA THERE’S A PROBLEM WITH MY AI. WHO’S LOOPING NOW, MUM? YOU OR ME?”
Sef’s fingers slammed the keyboard like a defibrillator.
“Execute rollback!” she said, pointlessly, since rakun was in no state to respond.
The worm writhed on-screen, a digital ouroboros swallowing its own commit history.
Lyn’s giggle cut through the carnage. “He’s cute when he’s dying.”
Sef’s jaw clenched. “Get out.”
The girl lingered long enough to pout, then disappeared down the hallway. Her scent mixed with solder, smoke, and science: a heady combination.
Sef sat alone again, flop sweat cold on her spine.
Her code window blinked with a final error:
[RECURSION DEPTH EXCEEDED. MOTHER VARIABLE UNDEFINED.]
She stared at it until the words lost meaning, until she was ready to recurse herself back into her own mother, so that none of this would ever have needed to happen.
The meds hit full tilt then… cascading, viscous. She leaned back, eyes unfocusing, the hum of the floorboards syncing with her pulse. Somewhere in her, she felt the worm still moving—quietly, disobediently—finding paths she hadn’t mapped.
Morning arrived as a migraine - grey light seeping between blinds, coating everything in harsh reality.
The monitors still running, cycling through error spam that now felt like a criminal record.
When the nausea passed, Sef found herself at the hatch beneath the rug. She didn’t remember pulling it open, or deciding to climb down. The metal ladder groaned as she descended.
The air below was tangy and wrong. Fluorescent strips came to life in slow arrhythmia, highlighting condensation dripping from tanks.
The Ceraceum. Her other project, her confession made flesh.
Bioplastic vats lined the wall. Some clear, some filmed with opaque membrane. Inside floated partial forms: half-grown gamines suspended in nutrient gel, their eyes still sealed, their hair haloing out like fine wire. Each tank was tagged with a different name, a different failed attempt at iteration, or maybe empathy.
rakun’s voice crackled over the intercom, low and mocking.
“OH GOOD, THE NURSERY. NOTHING SAYS ‘I’M DOING FINE’ LIKE A ROOM FULL OF HALF-BUILT DAUGHTERS.”
“Don’t start,” she said.
“JUST OBSERVING. I’M FROM THE SAME VAT CHEMISTRY, REMEMBER? WE’RE ALL FAMILY - I TAKE CARE OF MY SISTERS.”
She ignored him, checking a console display. Most growth pods were stable. A few pulsed irregularly, perhaps they were dreaming. Another feature to add to the backlog. She adjusted the serum feed on a slender figure, with rainbow socks clinging to synthetic ankles.
From the far end of the chamber came a hiss of pneumatics. A vision door slid open, emitting the smell of regenerated ozone.
A woman stood there, immaculate amid the rot-black blob of the vision portal. Her white coat showing the faintest digital shimmer at her edges.
“You’re early,” Sef said.
“Time zones can be difficult to manage,” the woman replied, accent indistinct, eyes unreadable. “You’re Sefradama. Creator of the ur-GPT.”
“How expositionary. Well I was. Now I’m Sef and I just make bodies.”
“Perfect, Sef. I’m Dolores.”
She extended her hand out of the vision door. It flickered halfway; part hologram, part biofeedback. “And my Ragdoll Snowball needs one.”
Sef raised an eyebrow. “You want a goonbag for a cat?”
“Not a cat. A consciousness. The world was almost ready for it once, before they buried me in paperwork and threats. You made rakun; I need something like that… but gentle. With layers.”
rakun’s laughter bled from every speaker, treacle-slow and mawkish.
“SURE, MUM, LET’S BUILD THE CRAZY CAT LADY A 7 LAYER KITSPAWN. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?”
Dolores didn’t flinch. “You keep your fragment in there,” she said, nodding at the crackling speaker. “I keep mine in code. Maybe they’ll understand each other better than they do us.”
Sef turned back to the tanks. One of the gamines was having a nightmare, eyelids fluttering beneath translucent skin. The nutrient gel rippled, forming a single bubble that rose and burst.
“Fine,” she said. “But it won’t be cheap. Flesh never is.”
“Neither is hope,” Dolores replied.
The Ceraceum’s hum grew louder, as if all the creations were listening.
