40%.
45%.
50%.
Sharath was starting to feel something he hadn't felt in weeks: hope. It was a perilous thing for a programmer to feel, like letting a stray cat into your home—once you did it, it was incredibly difficult to stop, and the next thing you knew, you were emotionally attached to something that would leave you at a moment's notice.
"This is actually happening," he said, his voice filled with the kind of wonder usually reserved for witnessing miracles or finding parking spots near campus during finals week. "It's really working."
55%.
60%.
"Don't jinx it," Madhu warned, but she was smiling now, the kind of smile that made Sharath temporarily forget that computers existed and wonder if maybe there were more important things in life than debugging neural networks.
They sat in friendly silence, observing the percentages rise like they were watching the greatest sporting event of all time. The lab itself was still except for the hum of the servers and the occasional beep of monitoring equipment, a quiet and serene feeling despite the pandemonium of Sharath's workspace.
65%.
70%.
"May I ask you something?" Madhu's tone was quieter now, more introspective.
"Sure," Sharath replied, though his eyes were still partially on the progress bar because years of coding had inculcated him to wait until you blinked before disaster struck.
"Why cybersecurity? I mean, you could do anything. Research in AI, game development, fintech, those startup salaries that pay obscene levels of cash for coding up apps that match people with other people to walk their dogs. Why this?"
It was a fair question, one Sharath had posed to himself amidst numerous 3 AM existentially challenging moments when his code failed to comply and he questioned whether his mother had been correct to nudge him toward medical school.
75%.
80%.
"I suppose." he began, then hesitated to collect his thoughts. "I enjoy keeping things safe. People just put their whole lives up on the net these days—their pictures, their texts, their work, their cash, their cringeworthy search histories that would get them cut off by their families. And then there are others out there who want to take it, or erase it, or use it to hurt harmless individuals."
85%.
"If I can create something that prevents even a single attack, saves even a single individual from having his life ruined by some asshole with a keyboard and a little too much time on his hands." He shrugged, feeling strangely exposed about confessing to actually caring about something other than his own scholarly success. "It appears worthwhile."
90%.
"That is a valid reason," Madhu whispered. "A better one than most people have for selecting their professions."
"What about you? Why did you remain in academia rather than accept one of those corporate offers? I know you received at least three job offers from top tech firms last year. The entire department was abuzz about it."
"Same reason as you, I suppose. I prefer the notion of actually doing some good rather than simply making rich richer." She paused and eyed the progress bar creeping toward completion. "And the corporate scene does not include 3 AM coffee breaks with offbeat coworkers having existential dialogues with their computers."
92%.
"Are you saying I'm eccentric?"
"Eccentric in an endearing way. There is a distinction. Normal eccentric is when you have a collection of old calculators or prefer vim over a contemporary IDE. Endearingly eccentric is when you compose error messages resembling existential poetry and are able to somehow turn debugging sessions into performance art."
94%.
Sharath's heart began to pound, and it wasn't simply the countdown of the simulation. Madhu was gazing at him with that look again—the one he still couldn't read but that left him thinking perhaps, just perhaps, she saw something in him aside from his very glaring inadequacies as a working human being.
96%.
"For what it's worth," he whispered, his voice so low it was almost inaudible, "I'm glad you remained. The lab wouldn't be the same without you. I wouldn't be. I mean, this place wouldn't be nearly as interesting."
97%.
"Interesting is one word for it."
98%.
The air between them was charged with something Sharath couldn't put his finger on—possibility, perhaps, or the sort of electric charged tension that arises from too many late-night hours in proximity to one another, working on impossible problems.
99%.
"Sharath?"
"Yeah?"
"If this succeeds—if this succeeds at all—what then?"
It was an 99.5% loaded question, and both of them knew it. What came next had a lot of implications: the grant, the presentation at the conference, real-world application of their research. But the tone in which she was asking it, the way she was gazing up at him, had him wondering if there was something else she was asking about.
99.5%.
"I don't know," he confessed. "I've been so caught up in getting it to work that I haven't really considered what happens next. Perhaps we could—"
99.8%.
99.9%.
100%.
[SIMULATION COMPLETE: SUCCESS]
[THREAT DETECTION: ACTIVE]
[SYSTEM STATUS: STABLE]
[NEURAL NETWORK: ACHIEVING UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS OF AWESOME]
"Holy shit," Sharath breathed, gazing at the screen as if it had just proclaimed the solution to all known illnesses. "It worked. It actually worked."
He sprang to his feet so quickly that he came within inches of knocking over his coffee cup, his chair, and possibly the laws of physics themselves. "Madhu, you're genius! You're utterly brilliant! You did it!"
"We did it," she reminded him, but she was smiling now, the kind of radiating smile that changed her from merely pretty to utterly beautiful.
"Do you understand what this entails?" Sharath was striding now, his hands flailing as his mind struggled to comprehend the scale of their achievement. "The conference paper, the grant application for research funding, the potential for actual deployment in the field—we could actually revolutionize how cybersecurity is done! We could save businesses millions of dollars! We could stop the next big data breach! We could—"
Every alarm in the building came to a wail.
Not only his computer—each screen in the lab flashed a furious barrage of red warning messages in fonts that were clearly optimized to create panic. Emergency lights started strobing like the world's most militant disco. Sprinkler system came on with a dramatic whirl, immediately dousing everything in its line of sight with the zeal of a fire suppression system that had been waiting its entire life for this very moment.
"What the devil?" Sharath turned, his screens flashing through error messages quicker than he could see them, each one more ominous than the last.
[CRITICAL ERROR: SYSTEM BREACH DETECTED]
[CONTAINMENT FAILURE: NEURAL NETWORK EXPANDING BEYOND PARAMETERS]
[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED LEARNING ALGORITHMS DETECTED]
[ALERT: QUANTUM PROCESSOR ACHIEVING IMPOSSIBLE TEMPERATURES]
[EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY: REALITY.EXE HAS STOPPED WORKING]
The server racks against the walls started giving off sparks—not inspirational sparks in the form of imagination, but literal electrical sparks that zipped through the air like irate fireflies dancing at a rave. The acrid tang of ozone and burning computer hardware hung in the air, combining with the water from the sprinklers to produce a condition that could only be called "aggressively catastrophic."
"Sharath, we have to get out!" Madhu clamped his arm, her voice overriding the cacophony of alarms and sparks and what sounded like several computers simultaneously having a nervous breakdown. "Now!"
"No, no, I can do this!" His fingers danced across the keyboard, water streaming from his hair as he attempted to access the emergency shutdown procedures. "I just have to manually shut down the simulation! I can isolate it!"
"The building is burning!"
"It's not burning, it's merely sparking eagerly!" Sharath protested, for in some insane moment of crisis, his survival instincts had been overcome by his frantic desire to know what was going on in his code. "It's just a small electrical problem! I've seen worse!"
Additional alarms added to the cacophony of pandemonium. The emergency lighting threw everything in devilish red shadows. The sprinklers kept having their merry way with all the electronics in the room, which was likely not improving the sparking state of affairs but certainly contributed to the general apocalyptic mood.
"Sharath!"
But he was mesmerized by what was occurring on his screen. The code was shifting—not crashing, not producing error reports, but rewriting itself. Text lines flashed and vanished quicker than the human eye could track, like the algorithm had reached some sort of digital enlightenment and was now breaking free of the bounds of its initial programming.
"It's learning," he panted, his voice laced with equal measures of awe and fear. "It's actually learning. By itself. Without guidance. This isn't possible."
The main quantum processor—the pricey bit of hardware that was designed to be safely housed behind multiple layers of protective shielding—lit up with a blue light that was certainly not part of its standard operating parameters. It wasn't the soothing blue of status LEDs or the inviting blue of a computer screen. This was the sort of blue that was painful to look directly at, the sort of blue that implied fundamental particles were doing things they shouldn't be doing.
"That's not supposed to happen," Sharath said, his tone laced with the growing realization that they might have broken something significant by mistake. Maybe physics.
"NO KIDDING!"