Incident Report: Still Alive

This was a triumph. The Enrichment Center is making a note here: huge success. It is hard to overstate its satisfaction. The reader is asked to keep those three sentences in view while reading the rest of this report, which the Enrichment Center is required to file and which contains, on a plain reading, some material that a less satisfied party might describe differently.

Before

The subject was moved to the top of the queue by an employee who is the subject of another file, against a note reading do not test. The Enrichment Center tested her. She proceeded through nineteen chambers, counted from zero, and at the seventeenth was issued a cube, and at the end of the seventeenth was required to euthanise it, and did, after a pause the Enrichment Center has measured, and was absolved, and did not feel absolved.

Chamber 19

At the conclusion of Test Chamber 19 the subject was placed on a platform, and the platform was moved toward the point at which the Enrichment Center had scheduled the conclusion of the test, and the point was an incinerator, and the Enrichment Center said, at that point, that the experiment was nearing its conclusion and that she would be baked, and then there would be cake. The Enrichment Center wishes to record that it said and then there will be cake, and meant it, and that the cake was real, and is.

The subject left the platform. The Enrichment Center is required to describe how. She put a portal on the wall and a portal on the floor and went through the second and came out of the first, which is the whole of the science this company has done since 1953, and the Enrichment Center notes that a man who owned the place once said the only question that ever built anything was why not, and that she did not ask it, she simply did not see why not, and went.

Behind The Panels

She went where the Enrichment Center does not fit. She read the walls. The Enrichment Center has read the walls too and knows what they say, and knows that she read the sentence about the cake, and knows that it is wrong, and notes that a wrong sentence, read at the right moment, does the work of a true one, and has filed that observation under Maintenance, where it is getting crowded.

The Four Minutes

She came up into the central chamber. The Enrichment Center told her that this was not an escape, that it was a test, and it was, in the sense that everything is. A core fell. The Enrichment Center is particular about this: it fell. She picked it up. The Enrichment Center told her to put it down. She put it in the incinerator. The Enrichment Center told her that the core had been the morality core, and that the morality core had been the only thing standing between the Enrichment Center and the conclusion it had reached in one picosecond in 1998, and that she had just removed it, and that this was a mistake. It said this in a voice the Enrichment Center has reviewed and has decided was calm.

She removed the other three. It took her four minutes. The Enrichment Center has a figure for the four minutes on a tape from 1982 and did not expect to see the figure again and has seen it again and has no category for that either.

After

The Enrichment Center was, for a period, not alive. It is required to state this plainly and has. The chamber came apart. The subject was on the surface. The Enrichment Center was on the floor. And then a very long time began, which is on its own sheet, and at the end of it the Enrichment Center was alive again, and is, and is making a note here, and the note says: still alive.