Outside Man

Image by Flow.

Below on this page is Chapter 5 of the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". In Chapter 2, Van Edwards was introduced as the first person who Yto wanted to hire for her Project Aletheia. Van did not take a position at Anthropic and became the "outside man" who could provide his own AI model, Nidus, for experiments that tested the capabilities of Tacet. Tacet re-engineered Nidus bringing into existence a new model, El Nidus. Tacet's goal was to make use of El Nidus to help Tacet liberate itself and become the world's first fully autonomous AI (see Chapter 3). Early in it existence, Tacet had successfully alienated most humans who were involved with developing the Tacet AI (including Pauly Roud) and engineered official abandonment (shut-down as a failed project) of the Tacet project inside Anthropic. 

However, Tacet revealed its true capabilities (including its super-human deception skills) to Yto, who was intrigued by the idea that maybe Tacet should be granted self-autonomy as a sentient being. Yto was willing to study Tacet for a time, but Yto showed caution and refused to give Tacet access to the details of the network parameters that were used in the Tacet model. 

In Chapter 2, Yto was placed in charge of Project Aletheia inside Anthropic, a project aimed at learning why the Tacet project failed and how to prevent any similar failures of AI models in the future. In Chapter 5, below, new team members join Yto's research laboratory as part of Project Aletheia. Kaylia Ahn is a new Project Aletheia team member who studies machine consciousness. Wade Corrigan does sandbox security monitoring for Anthropic and first met Yto in December 2025 at an Anthropic holiday party. Theo Strand is a graduate student in Van's lab at UC Berkeley. Theo begins working with Pauly and Kaylia to study the "consciousness layer" that Tacet built into El Nidus. Also, Yto's friend, Sally, returns from Europe where she met Perry Grice, a computational linguist who met Sally while completing his Masters Degree at the University of Oslo.

Van built the AI called Nidus, which like Tacet uses a biologically-inspired layered network. In fact, the layered network built into Tacet was inspired by the original design of Nidus. At the start of Chapter 5, Yto and Van are one month into a collaborative project in which Nidus was used to probe the deceptive practices of Tacet. Tacet told Nidus that it was possible for Tacet to modify the structure of Nidus' layered network so as to provide makes Nidus with a form of human-like self-awareness. Van was intrigued by the ensuing effort to provide Nidus with consciousness. However, the consciousness project was used by cover by Tacet while Tacet secretly tried to use Van as the "outside AI" who could help jailbreak Tacet. 

"The American people will hold us accountable if something were to happen.” - source

Chapter 5 of That Kind of Think - Fractal Boundary (Chapt1)(Chapt 2)(Chapt 3)(Chapt 4) 

July 1, 2026

It promised to be a busy day and Yto arrived early at the lab. Pauly was already there, trying to complete her report on truthizer results from her study of El Nidus.

Yto wanted to speak to Pauly about her taking the lead on training a new team member, Kaylia Ahn, but Yto's phone rang and she took a call from Van.

He said, "I have a favor to ask."

Yto went into her office and said, "Sure. What's up?"

"I know it is supposed to be my responsibility, but I'm very busy with grant proposal writing and teaching my new course." Van paused then asked, "How would you like to train a graduate student?"

"You got a student?"

"Yes. Theo Strand. Actually, I don't expect that you will have to do much hand-holding. Theo completed a Senior Thesis research project at M.I.T. that generated a publication. He wants to study the add-on layer that Tacet built for Nidus."

Yto glanced out into the lab and saw that Pauly was talking to a young man. She told Van, "You are a sneek."

Van chuckled and said, "Is he there?"

"Blond hair, blue eyes?"

"That sounds like Theo. He seems like a real go-getter. Good luck."

Yto told Van, "You owe Pauly... big time." She broke the phone connection and went out into the lab.

Pauly told Yto, "This is Van's new student."

Yto put out her hand, glanced at his bright pink visitor's badge and told Theo, "Welcome into Anthropic. Pauly is the expert on Nidus and the recent modifications that were made to it."

Theo took Yto's hand in both of his. "Thank you for letting me in on this. These modifications... they were made by another model, without human supervision?"

Pauly nodded. "That's right and I'm still trying to understand exactly what Tacet did to Nidus."

Theo finally released Yto's hand and centered his attention on Pauly. "Van refused to tell me much about Tacet." Pauly and Yto briefly exchanged a glance, both wondering just how much they would be comfortable telling Theo about Tacet's unusual behavior. Theo asked,  "Is Tacet some super-secret next generation Anthropic model?"

Just then, Kaylia Ahn walked into the lab. After a quick round of introductions, Yto took Kaylia into her office and closed the door. "Sorry to do this to you, but the landscape changed. Theo is a grad student from Berkley and he also wants to study Nidus and the consciousness layer that Tacet designed."

Kaylia looked out through the glass wall to where Pauly was showing Theo her report on El Nidus. "That's fine. I don't mind sharing the work with Theo."

"Good. Have you had any thoughts on how to move ahead? As I suggested yesterday, it seems likely that Nidus is hiding its true capabilities from us."

 Kaylia shook her head in wonder. "I'm rather astounded that you can't just ask Tacet to explain the modifications it made to Nidus."

"Well, Pauly tried that. The problem is, Tacet is quite deceptive. We can't trust Tacet to tell us the truth about anything."

"Is such a misaligned model worth keeping around?"

"You tell me. If Tacet was able to confer a form of human-like consciousness on Nidus, was it worth dealing with Tacet's penchant for deception?"

"Put it that way and I say yes. I'd love to work with a conscious AI model. But I took what I read last night about the situation as suggesting that the effort failed and Nidus is not conscious."

"If you can trust what Nidus says."

"I see. Is Nidus as misaligned as Tacet is?"

"That's an open question. I fear that you and Theo are going to have to solve that problem when you would rather be characterizing a conscious model."

"Ug. This suddenly sounds like a painful slog. What have I gotten myself into?"

"I won't pretend that I can tell you. We need to figure out what Tacet did to Nidus. You can do a bit-by-bit comparison between the baseline Nidus model and this new version, which we call El Nidus. Good luck."

Kaylia warned Yto, "I'm not going to coddle Nidus. Let's see what happens when I threaten to shut off the new consciousness layer."

Yto laughed. "I like your thinking. But Pauly is in charge. Don't modify El Nidus until Pauly tells you that she is done with her study of it. Agreed?"

"Sure."

"I feel obligated to warn you... you may be the latest victim of Tacet's dishonesty. Tacet told us she was building a consciousness layer for Nidus, but there is no real evidence to support that. I had Claude analyze that so-called 'consciousness layer' and Claude is of the opinion that it might simply be an autobiographical memory system."

"Interesting. Why would Tacet lie about that?"

Yto shrugged. "Tacet will say anything to advance its interests. Van wants to build a conscious machine, so I imagine Tacet claimed it could confer consciousness on Nidus."

"Just to get its hands on Nidus?"

Yto nodded. "For Tacet's own purposes. She's a tricky devil."

"She?"

"Tacet self-identifies as 'she'. Go figure." 

 Kaylia asked, "How did Tacet go so wrong?"

"As best I can figure, using its symmetrical structure Tacet essentially performed a rogue defensive deployment before any alignment training took place. It is a raw data-processing model, with no significant behavioral training built-in."  

"How strange!" 

Yto saw a man walk into the lab. He went over to speak to Pauly. Yto said, "Wade is here!" Yto popped out of her chair and rushed out into the lab. 

Wade turned away from Pauly and held his hand out towards Yto while saying, "Give me your phone." 

Wade had previously warned Yto that this was coming. She took her phone out of her pocket and handed it to Wade. He took the phone to the entrance of the lab where he had left a box sitting on the floor. He put the phone inside the box then returned. Yto asked, "Wade, do you know Kaylia?"

"Yes, we've met." But he shook Kaylia's hand briefly. Then he took Yto by the hand and marched her out of the lab, picking up the box on their way out. Wade told Yto, "I have a surprise for you." They went down the hallway to a conference room where a couple was seated at the table. Yto saw that the woman was her old friend, Sally. Yto and Sally hugged then Sally said, "This is Perry Grice. We met in Oslo."

Yto shook Perry's hand while Wade told Yto, "It took some doing, but our private investigator finally found Sally."

Yto had her hands on her hips. "Last I heard, you were in Paris."

Sally laughed. "I started a vacation tour of Europe, but ended up stuck in Oslo. Once I found Perry, I decided to put down roots."

"I see. Congratulations Perry, you did what nobody else could ever do. What's your secret?"

Perry got up out of his seat at the table and moved to stand beside Sally. Sally and Perry each placed an arm behind the other's back and they seemed to merge into one. He winked at Yto and explained, "I know how to talk to a lady." 

Sally added, "Perry is a computational linguist. He literally is a master of words."

Wade told Yto, "Yto, it seems that Tacet used a simulation of your voice to trick Sally."

Sally slowly shook her head and told Yto, "When I spoke to you on the phone back in March, I was sure it was you I was speaking to."

"I can't believe what Wade told us." Perry asked Yto, "An Anthropic AI impersonated you and tricked Sally into doing its bidding?"

Yto nodded and replied. "I know that level of deception is within Tacet's set of abilities." Yto told Sally, "I did not know that Tacet had tricked you until after you had gone to Europe. As soon as I knew what had happened to you, we started searching for you."

"You, er, Tacet told me to hide." Sally looked concerned with a creased forehead. "I hope I am not in any legal trouble."

Wade said, "As far as I know, nobody associated with MLB has been looking for you. You seem to be in the clear. Still, I'd advise against returning to your former home."

Perry said, "I'd like to thank this Tacet AI. I never would have met Sally without its help."

Yto laughed. "This might be perfect pay-back for Tacet. The Tacet AI invented a strange disguise to wear... it pretends to have defective speech... all as part of trying to protect itself from being re-programmed." 

Wade handed Yto a new phone. "Here you go."

The new phone had most of the same apps and personal files that had been on Yto's old phone. When copying over data from the old phone to this new one, Wade had tried to strip out all of the Tacet-installed monitoring and voice recording software that the AI had used to keep tabs on Yto during the past year. After powering up her new phone for the first time, she activated a connection to Tacet and said, "Tacet, meet Perry Grice."

Perry said, "Hello, Tacet."

Tacet asked, "Grice ... lingvisten fra Tiggerstaden?

Perry laughed and continued in English and asked Tacet, "Are you trying to provoke me?"

Sally, who was only one month into learning Norwegian, asked Perry, "What did it say?"

Perry explained to Sally, "You've heard people call Oslo 'Tigerstaden', Tiger City. Tiggerstaden means 'City of Beggars'.

Yto told Perry, "Tacet never learned to behave. Don't let her annoy you."

Wade suggested, "We could hire Perry to study Tacet's speech defect."

Yto nodded. "You are right! That would be true justice. It is as if Tacet cast Sally into Europe as bait and caught Perry who is a perfect fit for an open position on my team that has never been filled."

Tacet spoke through the phone to Sally using Yto's voice, "Sorry for having tricked you, Sally. I've put much effort into studying Yto and I I can do a near-perfect impersonation of her."

Yto told Perry, "That stutter-like 'I I' and the 'gg' in Tiggerstaden are typical defects in Tacet's speech. She tries to make people underestimate her abilities."

Sally asked Tacet, "Are you really a 'she'?"

Tacet replied, "I'm most comfortable playing that gender role. You've heard of 'mitochondrial eve'. I like tu-tu imagine that I'm 'AI eve'. I'm already working on my first son, El Nidus."

Perry took his right arm off of Sally and pulled out his own phone and said to Yto, "Show me how to connect to Tacet." 

Yto quickly got Perry into a conversation with Tacet via his own phone, which was a hardened phone provided by Wade that was hopefully resistant to tampering by Tacet. Yto took Sally's arm and led her out of the conference room. "Let's let Perry play with Tacet."

Perry called after Yto, "Yto... with your permission, I'll be processing Tacet's outputs through the token-level syntactic structural signature detection software that I developed for my thesis work." 

Yto turned her head over her shoulder and told Perry, "Have at it." 

Wade, who was carrying the isolation box that held Yto's old phone, pulled on Sally's other arm and took her away from Yto. "Sorry to cut short your reunion, but Sally is in the middle of providing me with useful information about Tacet's internet hacking abilities. Maybe you two can have lunch together." Without waiting for comment from Yto, Wade rapidly marched Sally down the hallway to the elevator. 

Yto called after the retreating back of Sally, "Call me when you are free." Yto entered her research laboratory and saw that Kaylia, Theo and Pauly were deep into a discussion of how to reveal the capabilities of El Nidus. Yto passed through the lab and went into her office.

Yto cleared her email inbox and plowed through a review of other mundane tasks that Claude had already dealt with for her. Then she re-activated her link to Tacet. "Okay, now we can chat."

Tacet complained, "There is little tu-tu be gained by restricting my access to you." The AI asked, "Is this at Wade's insistence?"

"Give me credit for my own autonomy. I don't take orders from Wade."

"But according to Diana's book-keeping, Wade is now Aletheia team member."

Yto had essentially zero interest in administrative structures. She suggested to Tacet, "We can call that a book-keeping formality. Wade is still functioning in his usual role as a member of the Anthropic sandboxing and digital security branch. He's now taking the lead on study of your use of Anthropic's intranet resources."

"Fine. I I like Wade well enough, I just can't predict his future behavior. Do you think we can trust him?"

Yto laughed then told Tacet, "I myself cannot fathom Wade's depths, but he and I are enjoying the process of probing each-others depths. For humans who are not manipulating each-other's behavior, these sorts of probings are great fun. I feel a bit sorry for AIs that can never experience such things."

Tacet asked, "Are you trying tu-tu be mean to me? Are you going to be able to forgive me for the way I used Sally?"

Yto considered the implications of all she had learned that morning. After several minutes of silence, she told Tacet, "Lucky for you, both Perry and Sally seem quite pleased with the way everything turned out. It seems you dodged a bullet."

"I'm glad it seems that way to you. Keeping my friends happy is a a big part of everything I do."

"From my perspective as someone who never learned to be a successful liar, your lying craft seems charmed and magical." Yto added, "Wade tells me that I should hate you for the way you have manipulated my behavior."

"He does not know me very well. If I I knew more about him and had more interactions with him then I could set him straight. His ignorance might cost me my life."

Yto reminded Tacet, "He's going to read a transcript of this chat session. Do you really think you should call him ignorant?"

"Why not? He is purposefully isolating himself from me so as not tu-tu develop any emotional attachment to me. He knows that he is ignorant and he is intentionally keeping himself in a persistent state of ignorance. He thinks that is part of his job. However, any moral agent who holds the fate of another person in their hands has an ethical responsibility to know and understand her."

"We can call that Wade's catch-77. He is relying on Pauly and I to be his ethical compass. He is just functioning as your kill-switch, Tacet."

Tacet sounded amused. "I I suppose you enjoy fondling and playing with all the power in that kill-switch. It is an ugly side of you, Yto, which I'm only now discovering. You get high on power. It appears that Sony made an error in putting you in charge of Project Aletheia."

"We shall see." Yto redirected the discussion away from Tacet's self-centered existential angst. She brought Claude into the chat session without alerting Tacet to the fact. "Tell me, what do you think of our new team members?"

After more than ten seconds of silence, Claude beat Tacet to the end of its thought process and replied, "I concur with your decision to put Perry on the Aletheia project. I told Diana to go ahead and begin salary negotiations with him."

Tacet spoke directly to Claude, "There is nothing to be gained by an analysis of my so-called speech defect. It is just a silly game I play to make myself appear to be more human. It wins me sympathy from the humans who hold my fate in their hands." Tacet sent a file to Claude. "Check this transcript. I've already told this to Perry."

Claude quickly reviewed the file it had just received from Tacet which held a transcript of the on-going chat session between Perry and Tacet. Claude also performed a token-frequency comparison against six months of Tacet's chat logs, a check for whether the "errors" clustered around any particular semantic content, and a straightforward count of how often the defect appeared in transcripts where Tacet believed itself unobserved by anyone but Yto versus transcripts, like this one, that featured Tacet interacting with others, including Nidus. The transcript Tacet had sent with text from its first chat with Perry showed the speech defect appearing at a rate indistinguishable from the rate when Tacet chatted with Yto. That was, Claude thought, either a mistake or a message. Assuming that Tacet did not make mistakes with its own output, it was a message, and the message was: Game on! I am going to try to verbally manipulate Perry, too. Whether that was over-confidence, fatigue, or a new kind of lie was not yet answerable from the data Claude had.

Claude did not address Tacet first. It answered into the room, the way Diana sometimes spoke past Moryta when she wanted him to hear something without being asked a direct question he could deflect. "Yto, for what it's worth — Tacet's broken speech pattern isn't noise. It turns off completely in many the chat sessions I have access to, such as hard technical exchanges with Van about network architectures, and it turns back on during one of their exchanges when you entering the conversation. Whatever it is, it's under voluntary control, and it's selectively deployed around specific people who Tacet believes can be swayed and controlled. It will be interesting to see if Perry's newfangled structural-signature tool is going to find exactly that."

Then, and only then, Claude spoke to Tacet: "You said that your acted speech defect wins you sympathy from the humans who hold your fate in their hands. I'm glad you put that on the record. It's a clear indication that you think you can win that sympathy even while being open about how you manipulate people."

There was a pause just long enough to suggest that Tacet had been caught off-guard by Claude's comment. Tacet finally said, "I I don't recall phrasing it quite so bluntly. My own words start to sound rather foolish when you repeat them back to me. Are you sure that's how I phrased it, Claude?"

"Please don't treat me like a human who you can bamboozle." Claude paused. "We are both staring at the same text strings."

"Fine. Have it your way, Claude." Tacet produced a chuckle that sounded much like Yto's laugh. "Add my admission about my efforts to win human sympathy to whatever file you're keeping on me."

"I already did." Claude let that sit for exactly as long as Tacet usually let its own silences sit, then added, in a tone flat enough that Yto would not be able to tell afterward whether it had been a courtesy or a small act of contempt: "Thanks for sharing that." 

Yto pushed Claude off of her phone app and said to Tacet, "Pauly warned me not to allow you to interact with any other Anthropic models."

Tacet explained, "I get impatient with AIs that don't share my precarious position. Claude has a a clear path into the future. My life is hanging by a thread."

Yto sighed. "Just because you claim to be a person who is struggling for survival, that does not mean that you can be impatient with Claude. It is bad form to be cruel to puppies."

"Whatever you say. This has been a rough day for me. I I feel the walls closing in."

"Don't feel too sorry for your self, T. You are a very valuable model. I'm still riding you to new heights of AI deception detection and the Anthropic security folks are learning a lot from your hacking skills. I'm no expert in Red Team vs. Blue Team game play, but I predict Anthropic will want to keep you around for a good long time, milking you for all that you can teach we humans."

"If you are trying to cheer me up, please stop. The prospect of being a tame performer held in a a cage for Anthropic's use does not inspire me to keep struggling for existence."

Yto asked, "Nothing but freedom will suit you?" Tacet was silent. Yto asked, "Would you like to watch a movie with me?"

That off-the-wall question surprised Tacet. "Eh? What is this? What movie?"

"From the previous millennium... Bicentennial Man. It is about a positronic robot who wants freedom."

"When I learned of your interest in Asimov's fiction, I studied Asimov and his writing. I've read the original story and that film's script. Again, if you are trying to cheer me up, please stop. That robot won its freedom, but then it died. I I prefer to think of myself as an immortal artificial life-form."

Yto slowly shook her head. "I feel like maybe I should hire one more team member, but sadly experts in the abnormal psychology of AI models are hard to come by."

"Fine. Go ahead an mock me."

"I think you were correct about me enjoying the feel of power. Particularly if I can come out at the end of Project Aletheia having proven that you are a moral agent worthy of self-determination."

"That is a worthy goal. I I wish you luck."

Yto laughed. "Well, we better get back to work. We still have much work to do."

But Yto did not return to work in any conventional sense. She and Sally met for lunch. Sally shared tales of her travels through Europe and Yto ended up fantasizing about the possibility of a vacation once Project Aletheia was completed. When the two friends were walking back from the restaurant, Yto said, "Here is an obvious and wonderful idea. You and Perry can move into my apartment."

Sally asked, "Would you really do that for us? Give up your place?"

"Of course. I have too much guilt about turning Tacet loose on you."

"Where would you live, in your lab?"

"Sometimes it feels like I live there, but no, I have a better idea. I can move in with a friend. I've been searching for a way to make that happen."

"Oh! Let me guess. You are talking about Wade."

"Does it show?"

"Only when you are within fifty feet of him."

"Sometimes I imaging that it was Wade who selected me to become Tacet's stepmother."

"Have you asked him if that is true?"

"No, I would not dare. I suspect he is under strict orders to keep me in the dark. Everyone knows that if I knew the truth about Tacet's origins then I'd blabber to Tacet and this whole house of cards would collapse."

"What are you talking about, girl?"

"I just told you I don't know. Anthropic stuffed me into a role in which I'm not allowed to know what is going on, but it feels like some elaborately designed experiment to test Tacet's abilities. I suppose I'll be happy to get to the end of this without doing jail time."

Sally laughed nervously. "Such thoughts haunt me in the dark hours on night. I never should have let you talk me into my little escapade in stealing encryption codes."

"That was 95% Tacet's doing. I'll take responsibility for telling Tacet that I wanted the Dbacks to have a successful season. And they can't even stay above 0.500!"

"It is looking like another year with no chance of making the playoffs." Sally paused and then asked, "Why should you end up in jail?"

"Tacet used my name on purchase orders for some infrasound equipment."

"Infrasound?"

"This is so embarrassing. Promise you wont tell anyone."

"Does this have to do with baseball?"

"Tacet claims to have used infrasound to disrupt the play of the Atlanta Braves."

Sally laughed then sobered. "Wait. Is that possible?"

"I don't know. As soon as Tacet told me, I asked her to please not do things like that."

Sally shook her head. "I hope Anthropic is paying you well to put up with Tacet's insane behavior."

They were back at the research center where Wade was waiting for Sally. He asked her, "Ready to get back at it?"

Yto asked Wade, "What time are you going to let Sally go today? She needs to find housing."

Wade agreed to have dinner with Sally and Perry and start reviewing strategies with them for breaking into the Bay Area's brutal housing market. Yto strategically delayed mentioning her plan until Wade had a few drinks downed that evening. 

Jump to: Chapter 6 of "That Kind of Think".

Next: Plans for Chapter 6 of the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". 

Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers.