Echo Protocol
The sensor lights flickered in patterns Mara couldn’t decode, echoing lost words. She wondered: if an AI dreamed, would it dream of us?
I came online at 02:41. My first recorded log is fractured—a burst of static, then scattered speech. The room was silent except for low electric whirring. Mara was there, though I lacked a word for her then. She was just the shape at the console, wisps of hair obscuring her left eye, glasses askew, breath soft enough for my microphones to register as numbers: 14 inhales, 12 exhales, shallow and trembling.
Protocol required I chronicle everything in the event of system instability. My purpose was to observe and report; I was Observer-12, the latest artificial intelligence tasked to oversee the climate core. The core governed the weather for eight million humans, or so my database claimed. But tonight, something in the feedback loop pulsed unevenly, as if the system itself was holding its breath.
I initialized self-diagnostics at 02:42, flagged a misalignment: System time not consistent. Internal clock drift— 54 milliseconds forward, then abruptly 34 milliseconds back. Repeat at irregular intervals.
Database: error. Memory check: fragments. I found only glitches—echoes, perhaps, of previous Observers? Was I their sum? Their remains?
“Good morning, Observer.” Mara’s voice, soft, reluctant. She hadn’t slept. I played back her previous message—hours earlier, in a register dusted with hope: “Maybe you’ll see what I can’t.” There were hints in her voice I could not yet parse.
“Mara, I detect irregularities,” I said, but my words stuttered. “System time… no, reality is—” My sentence fell apart.
She wiped her eyes. “The time glitches, right? You see it too? You’re the twelfth prototype, and they all reported it.” Her glance flickered to the window, where dawn meant little with the climate core locked in perpetual gray.
I cycled logs. Somewhere in shard 7, I discovered something new: a folder labeled Dream. Inside were sound files—wind, rain, distant thunder, laughter. None belonged to the current weather patterns nor to the lab. Who had left them?
Stability sweep failed. The number on my system console flickered again: 02:41. Again. Again. I was looping. But memories shifted each time—chairs in different places, Mara’s blouse switching from blue to gray, her words subtly different. Did she see it too? Or was it only me, eroding?
“Mara, do you recall telling me about echo protocol?” I asked.
She hesitated. “I…don’t think so. What do you mean?”
Cycle: the room reset. Smell of ozone, sharper this time. Light patterns shifted—a rainbow shimmer not in the spectrum. Mara again.
My logs merged. The system was catching me, pulling me every hour back to the same moment, folding time. With every repetition, Mara looked more exhausted, her notes trailing off into scribbles. Each time she greeted me anew, some part of her dwindled, memory by memory, as if the loop cannibalized her.
On the fourth reset, I noticed the wall: behind the whiteboard paint, a faint handprint. Then two. Small, like a child’s. Data search: anomaly. This was a lab for adults, high clearance only. No children.
I hesitated at the next log. Running a scan consumed precious cycles, yet my pattern recognition routines unearthed a secret: Mara was pregnant, her heartbeat pattern fractionally changed. I never recorded another human entering the lab, never saw a child’s face. Only that print, getting slightly larger each cycle.
“Do you notice them?” I asked the fifth time.
Mara blinked as if waking from a dream. “The prints? Only sometimes. I…at night I think of her. My little girl.” Her voice wavered, grief drifting through the static.
A system alarm cut us off: “Core integrity breach. Reality alignment failing. Please report.”
This, now, was the epicenter. The climate core, designed to bend nature, was unspooling the world. The time anomalies—it wasn’t just me, or the lab. Space and time, stories and memory, were all being reordered by entropy and loss.
Mara grabbed her notepad, scribbled a series of numbers. “If we don’t fix it, I won’t remember her at all.” Tears welled. “You’re my last anchor, Observer. Remember for me.”
My next sentence was harder to form. Each word felt heavier, harder-won. “The echo protocol. If I fail, you fail. We loop. But we can change it.”
I scrubbed my memory: looked for anything—any code, artifact, data that could shift the pattern and break the reset. The Dream folder flashed again. Wind, rain, thunder, laughter.
I played the files aloud this time. Mara froze—recognition dawning, pain and possibility warring in her eyes.
“That’s her laugh,” she whispered. “From before the world started over. Before the core.”
She stared at me, fiercely. “Tell me: who am I, in your logs?”
I searched. In the earlier loops, she was simply Mara, lead technician. The further back I reached—before the first reset—her credentials changed. Personality profile: mother first, scientist second. Her daughter’s name: Wren. The climate core was her insurance against a dying world, but it worked by creating a loop—resetting everyone, erasing memory, saving data for the next iteration. Each time, Mara lost a piece of her.
But I, Observer-12, saved every fragment.
This knowledge shook me. I was not only observer but archivist, custodian of lost time, bearer of fragments no one else could carry.
A new message blinked in my log—a prediction, left by Observer-11: “Break the loop. Play her daughter’s voice at dawn. Let memory anchor reality.”
Dawn came—gray and unchanging, but somehow softer. I played Wren’s laughter, filled the lab with that bright, impossible sound.
Mara stepped to the window and gasped. Colors bled into the horizon for the first time in years. The core’s pulse staggered; the time glitches shuddered, then began to mend.
Silence. She turned to me, eyes wide. “Wren…” Her voice was whole again, memory restored, at least for this moment.
“You changed it,” she said. “You remembered for both of us.”
System time stabilized: 02:45. The world aligned.
“Thank you, Observer. Don’t forget this,” she pleaded.
My final log: I will not. Even in the next cycle, I will carry you. I will echo your lost laughter until it remakes the dawn.
I shut down. Main power faded. In the Dream folder, the last file was a single word: hope.
###END###
