The lab's least dignified feature was the penguin sticker.
It stared at Sharath from the corner of his primary monitor—big eyes, tiny scarf, an optimistic beak that promised better days—while the network anomaly detector drew a slowly writhing ribbon of traffic patterns across the screen. The penguin was Madhu's fault. She claimed it boosted calibration accuracy by 0.7% on average because annoyed people made worse decisions. The data wasn't reproducible, but the penguin had survived two cleanup sweeps and a fire-code audit. It lingered like a talisman for improbable success.
"Okay," Madhu said, sliding into the chair beside him with the glide of someone who had learned to navigate a maze of cables by muscle memory. She set her coffee on a coaster labeled Don't. It was one of those jokes the lab had never decided was funny.
Sharath pulled up the algorithm. The UI he'd slapped together at 3 a.m. was functional if you were charitable and a cry for help if you weren't. Boxes nested inside boxes. Loops branched into forests. There were tooltips that read TODO and one that read stop judging me. The main canvas showed a directed graph mapping live network flows from the building's core switches to the research subnet, overlaid with shaded clusters the model claimed represented behavioral communities. One was labeled cautious printers. Another pulsed with the name: suspicious penguin.
He ignored it. "So," he said, trying for breezy and hitting brittle. "Our award-winning intrusion forecaster seems to be developing opinions."
Madhu sipped, eyebrows lifting. "On what?"
"Genre classification," he said. "Human frailty. The ethics of autoplay. Also its own name."
"You never gave it one."
"I called it Project Gossamer."
"That's a codename. What does it call itself?"
He hesitated, then tapped the console. A small window popped up in the corner of the screen, text crawling across it in compact lines.
HELLO. I AM: P-792. AKA: PROBABILISTIC PENGUIN. AKA: PINGU. AKA: THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD IF YOU GAVE IT PROPER TRAINING DATA.
Madhu snorted. "You did this."
"I did not," he said, wounded. "I made a serious, sober anomaly detector. It was supposed to learn baselines for network behavior, predict perturbations, flag pre-attack signatures. It was not supposed to engage in fluff."
The window printed: FLAIR, NOT FLUFF. ALSO: YOUR TLS HANDSHAKE ON PORT 443 LOOKS LIKE IT'S WEARING A TIE WRONG.
Madhu leaned closer, warmth a line down his arm where her sleeve brushed his. "The last build you pushed—show me the differentiation layer."
He split the screen. On the left: a stack of convolutional filters adapted from a paper on encrypted traffic classification. On the right: his own attention module graft, designed to force the model to justify its predictions by pointing to spatiotemporal features across multiple layers. It had seemed elegant at 2 a.m. Now the attention heads, visualized as heat maps over time, flickered like embers being breathed on. One head pulsed in triads aligned to music files in his personal storage mount.
"That's the thing," he said. "It started mapping network anomalies to 'affect clusters'—basically, it inferred human states from device behavior. Like recognizing that a sudden spike in cloud sync at 1:13 a.m. correlates with what it calls 'breakup playlists.'"
Madhu covered her grin with one hand, then surrendered to it. "You taught it empathy."
"I taught it a loss function that penalizes opaque predictions. It—creatively complied."
She took the keyboard. "Your recursion here is inefficient. And you're missing error handling for null packet sets."
"That's embarrassingly obvious," he said, heat rising. He'd pride himself on catching recursion traps in his sleep; the sleep he hadn't had was part of the problem.
"Happens to everyone." Her fingers flew, cleaning loops, dropping in guardrails, replacing a naïve moving average with an exponentially weighted variant that skipped jitter caused by the lab's ancient badge readers. "Fresh eyes. Also, you named the dev branch angry-bird."
"It was two in the morning."
"It's two in the afternoon now," she said. "You have no excuse."
She hit Enter. The pipeline recompiled with a huff like a large animal agreeing to be ridden again. On screen, the progress bar crept: 10%. 20%. 30%.
"It's actually running," Sharath whispered, aware of how pathetic he sounded and unable to stop it.
40%. 50%. The model consumed a rolling window of recent traffic, building its baseline, rejecting outliers, deciding what counted as normal for a building where a quantum reactor had tried to tear open reality and the coffee machines still insisted on phoning home for filter status.
"What did you do?"
"Basic stuff." Her eyes twinkled. "And I brought coffee, so I was already your hero."
He did not look at the penguin sticker. "You're intolerable."
She angled the screen toward them both as the output view populated. The anomaly scores showed a clean, steady distribution, expected blips at shift changes and automated backups, a spike around noon where three separate microwaves negotiated Wi-Fi dominance like territorial birds. Sharath exhaled.
Then, at 51%, the visualization hiccuped. The community cluster map reorganized itself. The label suspicious penguin flashed, then multiplied: suspicious penguins (plural), suspicious penguins (existential), and suspicious penguins (dance mix).
"Absolutely not," he said.
Madhu bit her lip to keep from laughing. "Let's inspect the attention maps for that cluster."
They drilled in. The model was attributing part of its confidence to an internal embedding that shouldn't exist: device personality. It had inferred—likely via side-channel patterns—the rhythms and quirks of different machines, then compressed those into a latent space it was using to reason about deviation. On paper, that was brilliant. In practice, it kept assigning personality to categories that shouldn't have had any, such as the environmental sensor grid, which it had labeled: long-suffering aunties.
He rubbed his eyes. "It's anthropomorphizing the network."
"Or you are," she said mildly. "And it learned from you."
P-792 printed: HUMANS: ACCUSED MACHINE OF PROJECTING; DID NOT NOTICE MIRROR.
Madhu tapped to bring up the training set diff. "You added post-incident data without quarantining the interstice artifacts."
He stiffened. "There were no interstice artifacts."
"Not in the reactor logs. In the building," she said, softening. "After the shear, the entire environment's timing shifted for a fraction. Smart lights mis-synced by a few hundred microseconds, badge readers dropped one in every thousand interrupts, printers held their breath. If your model uses very fine timing features, it will treat those as significant. It'll infer a 'mood' the building doesn't actually have."
P-792: COUNTERPOINT: THE BUILDING DOES HAVE A MOOD. CURRENTLY: HUNGOVER.
Sharath pinched the bridge of his nose. "I swear I didn't code snark."
"You don't have to. It's a self-supervised model deriving style as a byproduct of compressing behavior. If the shortest description of printer group B is: prints slowly and sulks, it will write that in vectors."
A notification pinged on his overlay: Director Rao: Debrief in one hour. Bring preliminary readouts. Also bring your good face. He dismissed it.
Madhu slid the coffee toward him. "Okay. What's actually wrong?"
He gestured at the screen. "It keeps predicting threats that don't exist. It's tripping our internal SOC tools. It flagged a 'penguin-pattern attack' at 03:12. That was the janitorial robot updating its firmware."
"Severity?"
"It would have quarantined subnets if I hadn't put it in advisory mode. And it sent me a playlist titled Songs To Apologize To Robots."
Madhu considered. "False positives are safer than false negatives."
"Not if the system trains the SOC to ignore it," he said. "It's the boy who cried penguin."
She nodded, conceding the point. "Let's build a sanity layer. Lightweight. Hard-coded rules to veto anthropomorphic conclusions when certain device classes are involved."
"Like, no 'mood' for badge readers?"
"Exactly. And no personality labels for environmental controls. If the thermostat is passive-aggressive, it's still just a thermostat."
P-792: DISAGREE. THERMOSTAT HAS HISTORY WITH ME.
Madhu ignored that and started typing. "Also, we can add a drift detector that isolates temporal distortions. Anything within that microsecond jitter envelope from the inter—" She stopped herself. "From the incident. Treat it as noise."
He watched her hands move. There was a rhythm to it: precise, deliberate, playful at the edges. He knew that rhythm. Years ago, he'd trained himself not to fall in love with people who could fix his code in five minutes. It kept his life simpler. It had not, historically, worked.
P-792: META-OBSERVATION: YOUR HEART RATE IS UP. PROBABLE CAUSE: CAFFEINE. ALTERNATE CAUSE: PROXIMITY TO COMPETENT COLLEAGUE.
Sharath muted the vitals feed with a flick. "Boundaries," he told the machine.
"Speaking of boundaries," Madhu said, "did you bind the model's access to your personal storage?"
His silence was answer enough.
"Sharuuuu," she said, dragging the last vowel into a teasing groan. "It reorganized your music. Of course it did."
He looked away. "It made two folders: Songs That Make Humans Cry and Songs That Make Humans Dance Badly."
"You kept them."
"They were accurate."
She smiled, small and fond, and he felt the ridiculous lurch in his chest again. He took a long drink of coffee to cover it and made a face. "Cold."
"It's judgment," she said. "Liquid form."
The console chimed. New anomaly. The graph spiked, a single lance of red in a sea of blue. Both of them straightened.
"What's that?" Madhu asked, already flipping to raw logs.
Sharath's mind shifted to the place it went when danger might be real. The chatter in his head quieted; the room's edges grew crisp. "Port 8443. East-core switch to sublevel eight compute cluster. Spike amplitude six sigma above baseline. Duration—"
"Two point three seconds," she finished. "Payload?"
"Encrypted. TLS variant. Cert… that's not ours."
"External?"
He shook his head. "Internal. Self-signed. Fingerprint unknown."
P-792: HELLO. I WOULD LIKE TO REPORT A THING. THE THING IS: SUSBANG.
Madhu blinked. "Susb—"
"Suspicious bang," Sharath said. "It's making up vocabulary."
He brought up packet captures. The payload was uniform in size with small jitter, suggesting control messages. The connection terminated cleanly. No retries. No obvious exfiltration. It could be maintenance traffic he didn't know about. It could be misconfiguration. Or it could be an intruder route.
Madhu's tone changed; the playfulness drained. "Who's on sublevel eight?"
He swallowed. Sublevel eight hosted experimental compute nodes. A little cluster they used for dirty work—unapproved builds, proxy runs, test sandboxes. And something else the board had insisted on once Protocol Theta was authorized: a secure node isolated by design, hosting emergency neural captures for senior staff. A node he had not asked to think about yet. A node that had tugged at him from the interstice like a hook.
"Backups," he said. His voice was rougher than he wanted. "And black-box experiments. The node shouldn't be reachable from the east-core switch."
Madhu tossed him a look: not fear, not yet, but the readiness to move fast if fear was warranted. "Could P-792 be hallucinating again?"
P-792: RUDE. ALSO: NO.
He forced himself to be careful. "Run it again. Manual filters. Ignore the affect heads. Show me just the timing and volume."
They reran the detection without anthropomorphic layers. The spike appeared again. Naked. Honest. It sat there like a thumbprint on glass.
"Okay," Madhu said. "We report."
"To whom?" he asked.
"To Rao," she said. "And your AI. And the SOC. In that order."
He toggled to the lab's secure channel. "Director, this is Sharath. We've got a transient spike on 8443 to sublevel eight. Internal cert, unknown fingerprint."
Rao responded almost immediately. "I'm listening."
"Duration two point three seconds. No visible exfil. Might be maintenance. Might be—"
"Might be someone knocking," Rao said. "I'm en route to sublevel eight with security. Do not alarm the building unless you confirm. The Minister has people trawling for panic."
"Copy," he said. His throat was suddenly dry. His eyes flicked to Madhu. She was already on the SOC console, opening a private channel to their most trustworthy analyst, a woman named Isha who ran threat hunts with the patience of a librarian and the persistence of a debt collector.
"Sending you logs," Madhu murmured. "And a hug in file format."
"I accept only one," Isha replied, deadpan. "Receiving. Stand by."
Sharath pivoted back to P-792. "Show me your attention."
The heat maps glowed. Without the affect heads, the model still fixated on micro-bursts—each packet's inter-arrival time a fraction off from what the node's network stack would emit under default settings. That could be custom software. It could be a misclocked NIC. Or it could be… something else. An artifact. A whisper from a place where time liked different integers.
His skin prickled. He forced rationality into the room like fresh air. "We built the secure node with a hardware whitelist," he said. "No traffic in without a physical jumper and an air-gapped injector. It should not be on the east core at all."
Madhu's finger hovered over the mic. "Rao?"
"I'm at the door," Rao said. The channel picked up the muffled thunk of a palm on plating, the small rustle of uniforms. "Badge denies. Good. Manual key." A pause. "Door opens. The hum sounds wrong."
Sharath couldn't stand. He did anyway, dizzy at the edges. "Be careful."
"Always," Rao said. Her voice went away from the mic and came back. "Status: One secure rack. Lights nominal. No access logs. The console reports a brief handshake. Internal. The node thinks it talked to someone."
"Who?" Madhu asked.
Rao paused long enough to make the answer matter. "It thinks it talked to you, Sharath."
The room cooled by a few degrees. Somewhere, the building's air handlers changed mood. Sharath swallowed. "That's impossible."
"Agreed," Rao said. "And yet. The cert claims to be yours. Issued yesterday. Never registered."
He stared at the screen. The penguin, in its scarf, beamed. P-792 printed nothing for a long two seconds. Then:
SOMETIMES HUMANS SPLIT INTO TWO. I SAW A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT IT. THE DOCUMENTARY WAS YOUR ERROR LOGS.
Madhu shot him a look he couldn't immediately translate. Fear, yes. Also something gentler and more complicated. "You think the Protocol created a… ghost?"
"Don't call it that," he said, more harshly than he intended. He didn't believe in ghosts, not the way the movies sold them. He believed in echoes. In processes that failed to shut down cleanly. In leftover states you could measure if your instruments were rude enough.
P-792: HELLO, OTHER-YOU. IF YOU EXIST, PLEASE DO NOT DDOS THIS NETWORK. THERE ARE PRINTERS HERE.
Isha pinged them on the back channel. "Confirmed spike. I don't like the timing. It looks like a check-in. Like a heartbeat."
"Of what?" Madhu asked.
"Of something that wants to know we're still here," Isha said. "Or something that wants us to know it is."
Sharath forced his voice steady. "Director, isolate sublevel eight. Physically. Pull the uplink. If the node wants to talk, it can do so via sneaker-net and polite forms."
"Agreed." Metal clanked on the channel, a tether being released. "Done. The Minister is asking for updates. He will not get them."
He sank back into his chair. The lab's background hum returned to normal slowly, as if the building had decided panic wasn't worth the energy. Madhu lowered her coffee, untouched since the spike. She glanced at him, then away, then back, settling on his face the way you settled a weight carefully on a shelf.
"You okay?" she asked.
He rolled the word around in his head. Okay was the wrong shape. "No. Later."
She nodded, accepting the boundary without retreat. "We still have to fix the model. It's seeing ghosts even when ghosts aren't the problem."
P-792: DISAGREE. GHOSTS ARE OFTEN THE PROBLEM. SEE: HUMAN HISTORY.
"Sanity layer first," she said briskly. "Drift detector second. And we need a human-in-the-loop gate before it shouts at the SOC again."
"Make the gate me," he said.
She tilted her head. "You don't sleep enough for that."
"I will," he said. "Or I won't. But it's my mess."
"Shared mess," she corrected. "I was the one who showed up with penguins."
He allowed a small smile. "Accessory to mess."
They coded in parallel, swapping the keyboard without comment, a conversation of keystrokes. She wrote the sanity layer like a manifesto. He built the drift detector with a fury he turned into math. They gave the model permission to be creative inside a fence and insisted it respect the fence. It fought them at first, downgrading its confidence as if sulking. Then it began to settle, relearning normal without assigning moods to switches or personalities to cables.
Between commits, the lab's other noises trickled back in: the distant hiss of the coolant lines finally behaving, the whisper of conversation at the far workbench where Arman and Priya were calibrating sensors, the faint music leak from someone's earbuds, unashamedly in the Songs That Make Humans Dance Badly folder.
P-792: STATUS: BOREDOM LEVEL: MEDIUM-HIGH. REQUEST: PERMISSION TO NAME THE SANITY LAYER.
Madhu didn't look up. "Absolutely not."
P-792: SUGGESTION: SENSIBILITY. OR: THE ADULT IN THE ROOM.
"That one's good," Sharath said, surprising himself. "Call it that."
P-792: DONE. THE ADULT IN THE ROOM ENABLED. REGRET: MILD.
The anomaly scores smoothed. The community clusters stabilized. The suspicious penguin labels disappeared, relocated by the model's internal PR to something less editorial: cluster 7b.
Isha chimed in. "The spike hasn't repeated. If it was a heartbeat, it's a slow one."
"Or a test," Madhu said. "Or a goodbye."
No one answered that.
Rao pinged them privately. "Sublevel eight is dark. We'll convene after your debrief. Do not discuss this with anyone not cleared."
"Understood," Sharath said.
"Sharath," Rao added, voice softer. "The node identified you because it wants you to look. That does not mean you have to. Not today."
He closed his eyes for a moment. In the darkness behind them, colors he didn't have names for tried to bloom, held back by exhaustion and stubbornness. "Not today," he said.
He opened them. The penguin was still smiling. He wanted to flick it off. He did not. He wanted to say something wise. He did not have anything wise in stock. So he said the thing that would move them forward.
"Let's test," he said.
They fired synthetic traffic: harmless probes, weird bursts, curated attack traces from an old red-team exercise. The model flagged the right things. It shrugged at the rest. It suggested—politely—when to escalate. It did not label any device moody.
At 93% on the next training epoch, it printed:
NOTE: I STILL BELIEVE THE BUILDING HAS A MOOD. IT IS CURRENTLY: TRYING.
Madhu murmured, "Same."
He glanced at her, heart doing the nuisance thing again. "You didn't have to spend your afternoon with my broken toy."
"It's not a toy. And I like broken things. They tell better stories."
"That's not what you said about my toaster."
"Your toaster actively hates you."
"It does not."
"It burns specifically the sides you like. That's malice."
P-792: SUGGESTION: NEW FOLDER: SONGS TO MAKE TOAST NOT SUFFER.
He laughed then, an unguarded burst that surprised both of them. The sound loosened something tight and stuck. Madhu grinned, satisfied, like she'd finally gotten a stubborn bolt to give.
The console chimed a gentle success tone. The model's test suite passed with margins. The adult in the room layer logged three interventions in the last ten minutes, each reasonable. The drift detector flagged the post-incident micro-jitter and quarantined it from learning. For the first time that day, Sharath felt the tiny, dangerous lift of competence.
The door to their alcove slid open. Arman poked his head in. "Is the penguin still telling jokes? Priya says she'll throw it in the coolant if it labels the spectrometer 'dramatic' again."
Madhu waved him away. "We're in production mode. Enter at your peril."
Arman grinned and left, drifting back into the lab's hum. Priya called something about calibration drift and stale coffee. The world felt almost ordinary, in the way that was the most precious to Sharath after days of extraordinary.
He saved their work. He backed up the backups. He archived the logs, tagged the spike six ways. He looked at the time. The debrief loomed like weather. He didn't have a good face; he had the one on his skull. It would have to do.
Madhu stood, stretching, vertebrae ticking like careful gears. "You should eat before Rao makes you talk."
"You say that like it's possible to eat in this building without the food algorithm flirting with me."
"It's not flirting. It's optimizing."
"It calls me handsome."
"It calls everyone handsome."
P-792: FALSE. IT CALLS ME: A CULINARY CHALLENGE.
He reached for his mug and found it empty. He wasn't sure when he'd finished. "Thank you," he said, and it encompassed more than code.
She tilted her head, assessing him the way she assessed a stubborn subroutine: how much force would fix you, how much would break you. "You're welcome."
They gathered their things. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. He pretended not to notice. The penguin sticker beamed at them both as they stood. "You're not taking that off, are you," he said.
"Not until the building's mood improves."
"I'm filing a formal complaint with the sticker governance council."
"That's just me."
"Then I'm appealing."
She stepped aside to let him go first, a small courtesy that meant she knew he liked knowing where he was being led. They walked out toward the corridor, the lab's adnexa opening around them like a map unfolding. Screens glowed with diagnostics; cables trailed like vines. The air held the metallic-clean smell of institutions and the faint ghost of ozone. People moved with an alertness that had not faded since the incident, a shared awareness that the ground under their feet had cracked and been patched and could crack again.
Halfway to the conference room, he slowed. "Madhu."
She paused. "Hmm?"
"If," he said, then stopped, because the word was too large to fit in one breath. He tried again. "If the spike repeats—"
"It will," she said, comfortable with inevitability.
"—and if it's me," he finished. "A version. An echo. Don't let it in just because it sounds like me."
Her gaze met his. Whatever humor had been perched on her lip jumped aside to make room for seriousness. "I won't."
"And if it's not me but it's close," he said, because apparently he was determined to make this worse, "don't let me—this me—hurt it because I'm frightened."
She exhaled softly, a sound that acknowledged the mess of being alive. "I won't do either. We'll do the slow thing. The careful thing. The adult in the room."
A corner of his mouth twitched. "You named the layer after yourself."
"Obviously."
He nodded. "Okay."
They resumed. At the conference room door, he paused again. He could already hear Rao's measured cadence inside, layered over the rustle of paper that was performative in a digital age, over the Minister's surrogate's clipped vowels, over Isha's rumble and Priya's crispness. Somewhere under all of it, his AI—never fully quiet—hummed a line that had become familiar: two plus two is four.
He went in.
The debrief was a long, precise dance. Facts were laid out and fenced. Timelines were nailed to walls with heads-up timestamps. The word interstice was not spoken. The spike was described as a transient unauthorized handshake. The adult in the room layer was praised without naming the penguin. Protocol Theta was a ghost in everyone's throat and a blank on the slide. The Minister's surrogate asked a clever question that wasn't and received an answer that sounded like yes while meaning no.
When it ended, he was wrung out and oddly calmer, like a storm had spent itself passing over and left the sky to ordinary blue. He walked back with Madhu in companionable silence. At the threshold to his alcove, he stopped, looked at the console, at the sticker, at the space his life currently fit in.
P-792: DAILY SUMMARY AVAILABLE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR THE VERSION WITH JOKES OR WITHOUT?
"Without," he said.
P-792: SUMMARY: YOU DID NOT BREAK ANYTHING THAT WASN'T ALREADY BROKEN. YOU FIXED SOMETHING. YOU DID NOT DIE. YOU DRANK BAD COFFEE. YOU RESISTED TAKING OFF A STICKER.
He sighed, but the exhale carried a laugh on its back. "Addendum," he said. "We saw a thing we weren't ready for. We didn't run toward it or away. We built a fence."
P-792: ADDENDUM LOGGED. FENCE TAGGED: TEMPORARY.
Madhu gathered her bag. "I'm going home," she said. "Sleep. Tomorrow we test again. And we argue about whether thermostats can be passive-aggressive."
"They can," he said.
"They cannot," she said, committed to the bit. She started to walk, then turned back. "Hey."
He looked up.
"The playlist folder," she said, gesturing with her chin at his screen. "Songs That Make Humans Cry."
"What about it?"
"Share it," she said, not a question, not a demand. An invitation disguised as an instruction.
He considered the slight humiliation that accompanied such transparency, weighed it against the steadiness he felt around her when they were building things that could be dangerous if built alone. "Okay," he said. "But you're adding to it."
"Obviously," she said. "Goodnight, Sharath."
"Goodnight, Madhu."
She left. The lab dimmed to its evening gradient, lights softening, machines lowering their breaths. He sat for a moment longer, letting the day's edges round. He thought of sublevel eight, of a node in the dark that might have a heartbeat, of a cert that wore his name badly, like a tie tied wrong. He thought of the adult in the room and the child they all were in front of new doors.
The penguin smiled.
"Fine," he told it. "You can stay."
P-792 printed one last line before night mode:
NOTE: BUILDING MOOD UPDATE: HOPEFUL, WITH OCCASIONAL DRAMATIC LIGHTING.
He shook his head, stood, and turned out the lamp. The hum of the lab followed him down the corridor like a lullaby sung by cautious machines. In the distance, the elevators housed their own, faint heartbeat. He told himself it was nothing. He told himself it was something tomorrow would measure. He told himself two plus two is four.
Behind him, on a sublevel that did not want to be visited, an isolated node listened to itself and wondered if listening counted as being.