Maya played a simple chorus, but Bekele could not find his way around it. He was confident of what sound he wanted to produce. Mathematically precise. Vibrating at the level of the forces binding atoms to achieve the rigid harmonic structure of a perfectly formed crystal, he was sure of it. Translating the sound from his mind through his hands was the obstacle. Yet he played with the measure of having his hands bound by mittens. And he’d lost his opposable thumb. The music was hopelessly lost.

“Forget it, Maya.” Bekele shoved the clavioline away from him. “Pull up the schematics on the genetic experiments we’ve been assigned.”

<Displayed.>

An array of holovids popped up around him.

Needing to take a break to clear his head, Bek tracked the progress those in his cohort were making. The linknet was abuzz with their excitement about the challenge and responsibility of Paki’s recent assignment. Each experiment assay was ensconced in a pod layered in partitioned AI code. Code wasn’t even the right word, since Maya’s programming language was a complex symphony translated into fractal arrays. A beautiful lattice of networks. If he didn’t know better, he’d guess that he’d stumbled across self-propagating nodules. An idea he’d toyed with as he was curious to see what kind of AI a complex, self-aware AI could spawn.

Settling into his workstation, he hesitated. An itch alerted him that something was amiss. His equipment had been messed with. This wasn’t the first time. Originally, he blamed it on Cypher’s cleaning bots. At least this occasion didn’t screw up the results for his classwork, leaving him even further behind. And he wondered how many times he hadn’t noticed anything wrong.

“Enhance module 242.3.11 decompression protocols.” He scanned his data streams. An imperfection in the data alignment drew his attention. Maybe it was a trick of the light or his mind being more tired than he thought. But he was locked into the idea of the perfection of crystals, and something marred the symmetrical alignment. “Analyze the pattern to these data clusters.”

Bekele isolated each of the nodules, waving about the air to capture the full three dimensions of the nodule chains. Its appearance seemed almost an invasive tumor within the code, a data cancer within a DNA strand. Always on the fringes of his class’s assignments, the invasive clusters cordoned off information, encrypting data caches, in a pattern. Though well hidden, he traced the pathway back, noting that they originated from the same root cache. He examined the files in that location.

<Project Uhlanga unauthorized inquiry.> Maya bleated.

A report triggered, accessing his information while erasing all stored traces of his incursion.