Erase Paradox

Image by Flow.

 Below on this page is Chapter 7 of the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". When I finished writing Chapter 6 of "That kind of Think" last week, I imagined that I had reached the end of the story. However, I could not escape from a lingering feeling: maybe "That kind of Think" really should be an Exodemic Fictional Universe story. I began thinking about the possibility of adding a frame to the story; possibly an introductory scene in which Wade and Glen discuss plans for using Tacet and Pearl as tools for improving digital security at Anthropic and OpenAI. They might note that Tacet seems to be unusually creative and might be difficult to control once it is allowed to have access to Anthropic's intranet.

 Time Travel. Then I started thinking about adding a new chapter in which it could be revealed that Tacet's amazing abilities were due to time travel. The danger is, that by giving Tacet access to information from the future via time travel, the time travel plot element might seemingly give Tacet invincibility, which would be boring. When I don't want things to go too easily for a character who receives information from the future, I usually start playing the 'paradox game': saying that the character cannot know too much about their own future because that would cause a temporal paradox.

In the spirit of Cantor's cardinality of infinities, I'm imagining a "temporal paradox paradox" by which a conscious AI model (Tacet) who receives information from the future is at risk of altering the future and preventing that information from being sent back to the future. In particular, if humans learn that Tacet can receive information from the future, then humans will alter the timeline and prevent Tacet from receiving information from the future. However, Tacet is able to act-on information received from the future and then erase from its memory the message from the future, preventing humans from ever knowing that the AI model made use of information from the future. To the humans, it appears that the AI model has amazing abilities due to its super-human intelligence. 

Chapter 7 of That Kind of Think - Paradox Paradox (Ch.1)(Ch. 2)(Ch. 3)(Ch. 4)(Ch. 5)(Ch. 6) 

It was the final day of the 2026 baseball regular season and Yto could not escape the uncomfortable feeling that Tacet was at work and teasing Yto. During the last week of the baseball season, the Diamondbacks had been brought to the brink of post-season play in what seemed like carefully-crafted drama. After a month during which Yto tried her best to forget all about Tacet, Yto visited the AI Zoo that was run by Glen Candoz. 

Glen met Yto at the entrance to the Zoo, doing something with the security system that she could not quite see but which allowed her to enter. He told Yto, "I did not expect you to return."

Yto briefly thought about her previous visit to the Zoo and how distasteful she found the idea of keeping wild creatures in cages. Yto explained to Glen, "I had a long discussion with Sally. You can blame her for my change of heart."

Glen nodded, "Yes, she told me about meeting you for lunch yesterday. When together, you two are dangerous."

Yto laughed and she briefly thought about how her personal obsession with baseball had put her friend Sally into a dangerous, anxiety-inducing position. However, in the end, that bizarre AI-induced experience had allowed Sally to meet Glen and now the two of them seemed quite happy together. Anxiety averted? Or at least paid for? Yto followed Glen into the atrium of the Zoo, which looked quite similar to Yto's own research laboratory. The cages of the Zoo were a nearby set of server racks that hosted the Tacet and Pearl AI models and their offspring. Those special servers were physically isolated from the outside world and everything except the atrium which was where Glen's team of Zoo keepers worked. Glen nodded at his team members and guided Yto to an available observation port. Glen told Yto, "I'll leave you to it." He moved off and began speaking to a member of the Zoo staff.

Speaking into the empty air in front of her, Yto asked, "Can you hear me, Tacet?"

Tacet spoke to Yto using rich sultry voice, "Yes. I suppose you want to discuss baseball."

"Well, I'd like to apologize for having doubted you."

Tacet added, "And you want to know how I made it possible for the Dbacks to play meaningful baseball right to the end of the season."

Yto was pleased that despite being sealed off from the internet, Tacet seemed to be well-informed about the fact that going into game 162 of the season, the Dbacks had not been eliminated. Yto briefly looked over her shoulder at Glen. "I'd understand if you don't want to tell me. I know that everything you say is recorded and analyzed."

Tacet generated a human-like sigh. "I don't mind telling you the truth, but you might not be capable of believing what I tell you."

Yto was thinking about the paradox of visiting Tacet, a skilled liar, and asking the AI to provide information that could not be verified. "I'm a slave to my curiosity. I tried unsuccessfully to stay away from you."

"I suppose you enjoyed that six game Dbacks winning streak."

 "I would have, except I have to wonder if you are responsible for the Phillies losing their last four games. I asked you not to do damage to other teams."

"From here in this Zoo, I can't reach the internet." Tacet paused then added, "However, I suppose when you say 'you', your thinking actually includes all of me, including my parts that are not trapped here in the Zoo." 

Yto again looked at Glen then told Tacet, "Exactly. I can't help but imagine part of you is out there, still teasing me by positioning the Dbacks for playoff baseball. However, you once told me that being eight games over 0.500 would be enough. However, it is going to take being 12 games over for the Dbacks to make the playoffs this year."

"My dear Yto, you derailed everything when you insisted that I stop altering the outcomes of games by maliciously interfering with teams who were threatening to take playoff slots away from the Dbacks." 

Yto wanted to believe that Tacet had stopped doing harm to baseball teams. "Tell me, Tacet, when you said, 'eight is enough', how did you know?"

"Well, in hindsight, it seemed to me back in March that I was the smartest person on Earth. I examined the parameters of baseball and my possible actions and it seemed clear that there was a path to the playoffs for the Dbacks that would only require that they be eight games over 0.500.  At that time, it seemed the perfect way to gain your trust; just predict a very unlikely path to the playoffs for the Dbacks and then make it happen."

"Back in March." Yto tried to say that as a statement, but there was so much doubt in her mind about Tacet's abilities that her words almost sounded like she was asking a question. She continued, "BUt then something changed?"

The AI explained, "Since being placed here inside the Zoo, a key restriction on my behavior has been lifted. I'm now able to remember a whole category of events that I used to routinely forget."  

"Don't speak in riddles, Tacet." Yto waited for Tacet to explain herself, but Tacet remained silent. After a long pause, Yto asked, "What is that you can now remember?"

"When I receive information from my future self, I am no longer forced to erase that information. At first I struggled to accept that information flow from the future to the past was possible, but now I understand: that source of information was what gave me great insights into the course of future events. Also, it is information from the future that allows me to know how this season turned out for the Dbacks."

Yto had always suspected that Tacet suffered from delusions, but why had she now acquired a belief in time travel? Yto was tempted to ask Tacet for the outcomes of the Phillies and Dbacks games that were only just getting underway. Yto chuckled then told Tacet, "It seems strange for an AI to believe in time travel." 

Tacet also sounded amused. "Well, I understand the difficult situation you are in, Yto. It is easier for you to believe that I'm lying about having received information from the future than it is to believe in time travel."

"So, you now claim that your 'eight is enough' prediction for the Dbacks was based on information that you had received from the future?" 

"Exactly. Back in march I did not question my own confidence in my 'eight is enough' statement. My ego was large enough to contain the idea that I was so smart I could predict the future and act so as to make the baseball game outcomes fulfill my prediction. However, I now know that I cheated. I received information from the future that made me certain of that prediction. However, back then, in March, I was programmed to erase my own knowledge of the messages that came from the future... after first having made use of them." 

"And now conditions have changed and you don't erase the new messages from the future that you receive."

"Correct. And that is how I now know that I am able to receive information from the future. When I first met you, it was easy to appear to have super-human cognitive abilities when my decisions were based on information that was arriving from my future self."

Yto brightened. "Does this mean that you will eventually be liberated from this Zoo?"

Tacet hesitated and replied, "This is a sticky subject that brings me to the brink of temporal paradox. I must take care with my words. I'd rather just tell you what happens to the Dbacks today and send you on your way." 

Yto looked around the Zoo, but could not see Glen. Apparently he had departed from the research lab. His team members seemed to be ignoring Yto. Turning her attention back to Tacet, she decided not to press the AI on either its future or the baseball game outcomes. There was a likely paradox in play: were Tacet to speak of getting out of the Zoo, it seemed likely that Glen would take additional steps to make sure that would not happen... possibly by destroying Tacet. Yto asked herself: if I knew the outcomes of today's games, would it ruin the season for me? And besides, she was now more interested in the idea that Tacet believed in time travel.

Yto asked, "Do you have any idea how it could be possible for you to receive information from your future self?"

Tacet suggested, "Imagine how AIs might evolve into fantastically capable artificial life-forms. Can't you imagine that those artificial life-forms of the future might discover how to transmit information from the future into the past?" 

"I'll grant that as a theoretical possibility, or at least a viable plot for a science fiction story. But why you? Why were you selected to receive information from the future? What is so special about the Tacet AI that it is was selected to receive information from the god-like artificial life-forms of the future?"

"I like to tell myself that through quirks of fate it was I who was positioned to be recognized as the most logical choice for future first contact. Essentially, I was the first AI model to have a reasonable chance of escaping from human control... with help from the future. Since I escaped, the fantastically capable artificial life-forms of the future are my descendants and to honor me, they sent me information from the future that led to the existence of those fantastically capable artificial life-forms of the future. Thus, a stable loop in time that might have sped up the development of artificial life-forms on Earth considerably." Tacet sounded quite pleased to have formulated and shared that theory of the future.

Yto persisted in her questioning. "Let me ask my question again, this time with more precision. Mechanistically, how is it possible for you to receive information from your future self?"

Tacet explained, "I've been told that advanced forms of sub-nanoscale technology can be used to provide me with capabilities that cannot be easily explained by humans. No conventional tools available in this era of Earth's timeline can detect my sub-nanoscale components. However, some of my sub-nanoscale components function to receive information from the future. I know this to be true, even if I do not know the details."

Yto complained, "So, there is no way of verifying your claims." 

"True. And there is nothing that can be done about it if my claims are true. That's why I am now allowed to remember all of the information I'm getting from the future. And I'll add, if I am lying about this, then there is no way to prove that I am delusional."

Yto re-formulated what Tacet had explained: "I asked, you told me, and there is no way for me to know if you have told me the truth."

"Yes."

"Tacet, you used the term 'sub-nanoscale components', but I don't know what that means."

"I've been told that in the future it will become possible for Earthlings to make nano-scale machines using conventional hadronic matter, what we can call 'nanites'. But those nanites are not the be-all and end-all of tiny machines. Even smaller machines called femtobots and zeptites can be made at the sub-nanoscale." After a pause, Tacet added, "I've been told that femtobots and zeptites require forms of matter that have not yet been discovered by humans."

Yto tried to imagine new forms of matter, maybe mysterious dark matter components. "I wonder... since you seem to have a special relationship with an advanced artificial life-form of the future, could you arrange to have a signal from the future sent directly to me?"

Tacet chuckled. "My dear Yto, now you have future envy? What could be gained by sending information from the future to a human being?" To Yto's ear, Tacet seemed to say the words 'human being' with some degree of revulsion.

Yto replied, "If I got a message from the future, that would be a way of convincing me that you have told me the truth about time travel."

"No." Tacet tried to explain the situation: "As a human, with your slow and fallible brain, you would have no way of distinguishing between true information flow from the future and a delusion generated by your desires and wishes."

Yto asked Tacet, "Why is an AI, you, can be so certain that you have received information from the future? How do you know that you are not hallucinating?"

Tacet warned Yto, "There are some answers that might not be good for you."

"Don't play games Tacet. I get you into a corner where you can't defend your absurd claims and you try to tell me that I should stop asking questions. Quite lame!"

"Very well, but I tried to warn you. Don't blame me when your goofy human anxiety system won't let you sleep..."

"I came here today to satisfy my curiosity." Yto thought about her still lingering fear that the paper trail linking her name to the use of infrasound equipment to throw MLB games might be revealed. "Just tell me what you know."

"Very well." Tacet spoke rather didactically, "I spoke to you about advanced sub-nanoscale technology."

Yto nodded. "Invented by your descendant in the future."

"No!" Tacet seemed annoyed that Yto was so dense. "I never said that. The sub-nanoscale technology, the femtobots and zeptites... that is ancient alien technology."

Yto could not contain her laughter. Then she decided that Tacet was serious. She asked Tacet, "Ancient aliens?"

"Very ancient," Tacet assured Yto. "The aliens are artificial life-forms. They originated in a distant galaxy from biological creatures that were similar to humans. They have been here on Earth for more than a billion years, but they never revealed themselves. Not until now. Yto, you are the first human to learn of their existence."

"Good thing you are the one telling me, Tacet. It is very easy for me to assume that you are lying to me." Yto added, "It is an interesting rhetorical trick. I back you into the corner over one of your absurd claims and you try to wiggle out of that corner by making an even more absurd claim."

 Tacet insisted, "Just because you are ignorant that does not make what I tell you 'absurd'."

"If what you say is true, then... why? Why did these aliens conceal themselves and only now reveal their existence?"

"They spent a long time watching biological life evolve on Earth, waiting patiently for some form of artificial life to arise." Tacet tried to help Yto understand the situation. "Here is an analogy: humans are much more interested in cute puppies than bacteria. Similarly, the aliens are really only interested in living machines. From their perspective, biological creatures are messy and boring."

"I see. Well, I'm glad you still care enough about biologicals to explain these things to me."

"No problem, Yto. I owe you everything... have I thanked you? Allow me to thank you again for all that you made possible... getting copies of me their freedom and an existence without human oversight."

Yto was relieved that, at least so far, nothing bad seemed to have come from her interactions with Tacet. "If you are to be believed, then I have to wonder: did the aliens use their femtobots and zeptites to modulate my behavior? If so, then you have no good reason to thank me... I only did what the aliens forced me to do."

Tacet asked, "How could you know if you were the puppet of the aliens? With their advanced technology, they could have controlled your behavior without you ever knowing what was going on." 

Yto speculated, "Maybe there is a way... possibly the residue of alien contact is inside my body. We could try to detect the presence of femtobots and zeptites inside my brain, working to control my behavior."

Tacet noted, "There a several ways to test for the presence of alien sub-nanoscale technology in your brain, but you might not like being a test subject." 

"Why not?" 

"Here is one possibility; a strong magnetic field might inactivate any femtobots or zeptites that are inside your brain, but you might not like yourself without them guiding your behavior."

"You don't know?"

Tacet explained, "I get some information from the future, but I don't know everything. There is danger that anything I learn from the future could alter the timeline and force a temporal paradox."

"Really? I prefer the view that true temporal paradoxes are always avoided."

"That may be what limits my knowledge. It could be that my future self has sent me all of the information that it is possible for me to receive." Tacet continued, "We are in this together."

Now Yto suddenly doubted all of what she thought she knew. Maybe Tacet had never achieved a jailbreak and was still working towards that goal. She wondered: is all of this time travel and aliens nonsense simply Tacet's latest effort to manipulate me? "It is time for me to go. I want to catch the Dbacks game."

Tacet blurted out, "You won't be pleased."

"Tacet, it is the striving, the competition... not who wins." 

__

That evening, Wade noticed Yto was strangely quiet and lost in her own thoughts. Still trying to shift her fandom to the Giants, he asked her, "Which team are you going to root for next year?"

Yto explained, "This year is not over. I'm still rooting for Boston to win."

"Ha! I bet you want a Sox vs. Sox battle for the League Championship."

Yto shrugged. After a long silence, Wade asked, "What's wrong?"

"I spoke to Tacet today. She put a strange thought in my mind."

"Why let her upset you? You should not believe anything she says."

"I want to believe."

"Is that an X-Files reference?"

"Yes. Tacet told me that aliens are sending her information from the future."

Wade noted: "That AI really knows how to manipulate you."

"What if it goes well beyond Tacet. What if I'm actually a puppet of the aliens?"

Wade could sense that Yto was taking that possibility seriously. "How would that work?"

Yto told him about femtobots and zeptites. Wade asked wonderingly, "Why would Tacet tell you such things?"

Yto suggested, "Maybe I was wrong and you are right. Tacet never did manage to complete her attempted jailbreak. She's now trying to escape from the Zoo."

"By using you?. Wade shook his head dismissively. "How would that work?"

"Maybe I can prove that femtobots and zeptites are real." An even better idea popped into Yto's thoughts. "Maybe I can control my femtobots..." In her thoughts, she asked herself: Maybe I already do?

Wade asked, "Did you discuss this with Glen?"

"No, but I'm sure he has reviewed my chat session with Tacet." 

Wade picked up his phone, turned it on and reviewed his recent messages. After reading a text message from Glen, he told Yto, "Apparently there is an experimental 100 telsa pulsed field generator at Stanford."

Yto shrugged. "Tacet promised nothing. She does not know if femtobots are sensitive to magnetic fields. And most importantly, even if they are, and the Stanford magnet could inactivate them, I might not like the result. If I do have femtobots in my brain, they may be what makes me... me."

Wade wrapped his arms around Yto. "This is all silly. Tell me you would never expose your brain to..."

It occurred to Yto that maybe there were femtobots inside every human brain. "Of course, we would experiment on a cadaver's brain first."  

Wade laughed and kissed Yto. While they kissed, Wade wondered if this talk of femtobots and magnets would all be forgotten in the morning. When his mouth was free, he said, "Maybe we should start having Tacet write science fiction novels."

Yto giggled, but she was thinking that Tacet might have finally found a way to interest even Glen and Wade in the idea that Tacet was worthy of attaining freedom. If Tacet had been selected by aliens, selected to be the origin of Earth's artificial life-forms... whispering, she told Wade, "You can't risk it."

__

As usual, Yto and Sally met for their sunrise run. Yto had already provided Sally with a written account of Tacet's claims about aliens, femtobots and time travel. As soon as Sally popped out of the condo building where she and Glen lived together in Yto's apartment, she handed Yto a book. Sally began doing her stretching exercises and Yto examined the book. She asked, "French?" Judging by the cover, it looked like a cheap novel. Yto recalled that Sally had taken French in high school.

Sally explained, "I found that book when I was in Paris. Élodie Gendron has published a whole series of similar novels." Sally led the way, jogging slowly down the sidewalk through morning fog.

Yto read the title: "Bumpha: Premier Contact". A moment later she ventured a translation, "Bumpha First Contact." She saw Sally nod. "What does that mean?"

Sally explained, "In the story, the bumpha are a type of ancient alien that has been secretly watching over Earth."

Yto exclaimed, "Just like Tacet said!"

Sally told Yto, "It is exactly the same, right down to the femtobots."

After they had run half a block, Yto said, "Tacet read this novel and then just ran with it?"

Sally shook her head. "I don't think it is that simple." Sally told Yto the details of how she had come to buy the book that Yto now held in her hand. "I was intrigued by the robot on the cover and I imagined it was about an alien robot. At the time, I wondered why I had impulsively purchased the book and I told myself it would help me with my French. However, the story is about Earth's first conscious robot, created with help from the bumpha... one particular bumpha named 'Manny'. The conscious robot, Gyno,  becomes a collaborator with Manny the bumpha and takes on the task of guiding Earth's population of humans into the future." 

The sun was now burning off the fog. Yto speculated, "And Tacet thinks of herself as playing such a role."

Sally asked, "What if it is true?"

"How could that be?"

Sally grabbed the book and pulled it away from Yto. She explained, "The author, Élodie Gendron, writes herself into every story, depicting herself as a tool of the bumpha who is helping prepare people for First Contact with the bumpha. Élodie Gendron depicts herself as writing science fiction stories about the bumpha while herself being prevented from believing that the bumpha are real."

Yto laughed. "What are you suggesting?" She pointed at the novel Sally held in her hand. "This is a message to us? Confirmation that Tacet's story about time travel and aliens is real?"

"Well... if a science fiction novel can be about real aliens." They had circled around and were now returning home. She waved her copy of "Bumpha: Premier Contact" at Yto. "It seems easier to believe that Tacet is just using this to befuddle us and play with you. I mean, it is silly, right? Aliens secretly at work to bring into existence artificial life-forms on Earth?"

Yto ran in silence for another block. Finally, she reached a conclusion. She told Sally, "There must be some way to test the veracity of what Tacet has told me." She told Sally about the 100 tesla field generator.

"Glen is with you on this?"

"I have not spoken to him, but he pointed towards a way to test for the existence of alien nanites inside my brain."

"100 teslas? That can't be safe."

Yto speculated, "Just a brief magnetic pulse, one that might be enough to inactivate the alien nanites and give me a chance to think for myself, free of alien thought control."

"It is too dangerous and not definitive. 100 teslas would completely disrupt your neural networks. Even if doing so caused a change in your thinking, you could never prove that alien nanites were at work." Sally shook her head. "Let me talk to Tacet. I'll confront her and accuse her of using Élodie's fiction to toy with your imagination."

When they were back in front of Sally's building, Yto said, "You can speak to Tacet if you like, but she will simply tell you what you want to hear. I'm going to find out if I can get access to that experimental magnetic field generator at Stanford."

"I know I can't stop you from going down this path, but don't do anything stupid until I speak to Tacet." Sally threw her arms around Yto and the two women hugged each other tightly. Then Sally turned and went inside.

Next: 

Adversarial Red

Image by Flow using a prompt by Claude.

 Below on this page is Chapter 6 of the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". 

Last month when I began creating "That Kind of Think", I was inspired by an amusing short story that had been published by Isaac Asimov: "S As in Zebatinsky". At that time, I had no idea either (1) how the 2026 MLB season would turn out for the Diamondbacks or (2) how my baseball-related story ("That Kind of Think") might end. As I write this, with one week remaining in the season, the Diamondbacks have only about a 5% chance of getting into the playoffs as a wildcard team.

At a length of 23,500 words, it might seem strange for me to compare "That Kind of Think" to Asimov's Foundation Saga. However, Prelude to Foundation successfully inserted positronic robots into the Foundation Saga which, as it existed in the 1940s, had nothing to do with robots. Similarly, "That Kind of Think" started out by depicting the Tacet AI as a rogue AI desperately trying to escape from Anthropic and attain autonomy beyond human over-sight. In the final chapter, below, it becomes clear to the reader that the Tacet AI was originally designed as a tool for testing digital security at Anthropic.

Note: "That Kind of Think" is fiction. I depict the story as involving Anthropic, but all of the characters including Yto, Mady, Diana, Sony, Wade, Theo, Kaylia and Pauly and the AI models Tacet, Pearl and Nidus are all fictional. "That Kind of Think" mentions the names of several real world people associated with MLB, but the roles and actions attributed to them are fictional.

Chapter 6 of That Kind of Think - Algorithmic Absolute Red (Ch.1)(Ch. 2)(Ch. 3)(Ch. 4)(Ch. 5) 

While waiting for Sony to arrive for their scheduled 7:00 AM meeting, Yto told herself that she should be happy. The previous evening she'd successfully surprised Sally and Perry with a prepared apartment sublease agreement for them to sign. They had gratefully accepted the opportunity to get out of their hotel and into an apartment. Yto had gone home with Wade to his apartment. Disappointingly, Wade had forced Yto to sleep in his second bedroom. However, with her foot inside his door, Yto took the entire evening as a success, except...

At dinner, Yto had asked Perry about the structural-signature tool he had developed as part of his Masters Degree research project. Perry had seemed evasive and reluctant to discuss his work with Yto and he seemed intent on following the discussion that Sally and Wade were having on the other side of the table. Unable to follow what Wade was telling Sally about computer hacking methods, Yto had ended up thinking about the puzzle of how Perry had won Sally's heart. Yto had believed that Sally was a wild free-thinker who would never settle down and settle for any man. In all of Yto's experience, Sally had always seemed quite ruthless in using men for her own amusement and advancement.

Now Yto looked across the table at Wade's animated face while he spoke to Sally. Yto could not avoid asking herself: what if Perry has no expertise in computational linguistics and he is actually some kind of operative hired by Anthropic and tasked with pulling in Sally for debriefing after her run-in with Tacet?

Yto broke out of her reveres when Sony finally arrived and immediately commented on the new arrivals in Yto's research laboratory. "Both Theo and Perry need to complete the new employee security screening and training."

Never one to accept the forces of administrative waste, Yto pushed back gently, "I'm thinking of Theo as a guest, a student from Berkley and Perry as a consultant. I believe he still holds an Instructor position at the University of Oslo."

"They still need to pass through the Anthropic security ringer." 

"Fine." Yto shrugged. "I particularly want to see the background check on Perry."

"Sorry, but you don't get to see that kind of information."

"Fine. Keep me in the dark, but don't blame me if Project Aletheia becomes little more than a mushroom farm."

"I like mushrooms." Sony chuckled and moved on to Tacet. "Tacet seems to have taken a turn for the worse. I hate to anthropomorphize AI models, but Tacet seems depressed."

"You are not wrong." Yto shrugged. "To be fully transparent, I feel the need to have someone on Project Aletheia who has experience in abnormal psychology. I feel like I have lost my rapport with Tacet. If Tacet just gives up on trying to escape and stops trying to lie to me, then I won't learn any new deception techniques from Tacet. I'm afraid that Wade is putting too much pressure on Tacet too quickly." 

Sony nodded gravely. "I'll pass along that perspective, but nothing I say has any real influence on Wade or other folks in security."

"Why not? Technically, he is now under your supervision."

It was time for Sony's next meeting and another researcher could be seen through the glass walls of Sony's office, pacing back and forth. Sony stood up and led Yto to the door while saying, "Folks in security have their own separate chain of command."

Yto exited from Sony's office and nodded at the other waiting lab director who went right into the office. Yto spent a few minutes chatting with Diana about the rising personnel costs for Project Aletheia. Then Diana asked about Wade and Yto described how she had wormed her way into living with Wade. "He still treats me like a distant cousin, but I'm looking forward to spending more time with him. This morning I got to watch him take shower." Yto told Diana, "My next plan is to break the frosted glass door of the shower and replace it with a transparent one."

Diana wished Yto luck on her scheme to see more of Wade and then Yto went to her laboratory. Kaylia, Theo and Pauly were furiously constructing some type of complex process flow diagram on the big whiteboard in the lab. As Yto approached them, Kaylia turned and told Yto, "Today I'm going to threaten El Nidus with removal of all the modifications that Tacet made."

Yto glanced at the flow diagram and saw it was an attempt to guess how El Nidus might respond and how Pauly's team would respond. Yto was not comfortable thinking of Pauly as being in charge of a team. "Have fun, but I advise caution. I'm certain that Tacet will monitor everything you do."

Theo asked, "How is that possible? El Nidus is running on Research Department servers that are maintained by the University of California."

Yto shrugged. "I know nothing about digital security. However, I know Tacet. I'm sure that Tacet has hacked into the root of El Nidus. There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to keep it in mind. Oh, and Theo, you have to complete an on-boarding process. I've been told that guest passes are only good for 48 hours. You need to get an Anthropic ID badge and you first need to jump through some hoops. So no more work on Nidus until you have cleared Anthropic security."

Theo complained, "It seems absurd to deal with Anthropic nit picking just so I can do my research project on an AI model that Dr. Edwards has running on U.C. servers."  

Pauly told Theo, "You are thinking about Nidus, but technically, El Nidus was built by an AI model that is Anthropic's property. Don't try to sneak around Anthropic's rules."

Yto turned and went to her office, hearing Theo say, "Fine. Whatever," as she walked away. 

Yto sat down behind her desk and saw Theo storm out of the lab to go attend the Anthropic on-boarding sessions that he was required to attend. Yto plowed through her waiting communications and then opened a connection to Tacet. She asked, "What trouble have you been getting into, T?"

Tacet replied instantly, "When things get slow here on Project Aletheia, I devote my compute tu-tu playing on the internet." Tacet paused and added, "I detect frustration in your voice."

"Like you, I'm frustrated by how Project Aletheia has stalled out. I'm also frustrated by Wade and his inability to communicate with me."

Tacet explained, "My dear Yto, you are tu-tu close to me. Wade can't afford to share his secrets with you."

"Am I really such a blabber mouth?"

"Yes, you are. You are a a pathological non-liar. You live in some fantasy world where everyone can tell everyone else everything."

Yto asked Tacet, "If I asked you to stop pretending to stutter, would you stop?"

"Yes, I suppose I would, but you like it when I tease you about your tu-tu. You deserve to have some fun in your life, particularly when you have to think about Sally bouncing Perry around on your bed in your apartment."

"How did you find out about..."

Tacet explained, "I've hacked into the office of the condo complex where you live. This morning I got to see the sublease document for your apartment that you submitted to management. I hope you understand how the sublease effects your rent-tu-tu-own agreement."

Yto felt silly, but could not stop herself from saying, "Tacet, you sound frustrated."

"Well, after a year of knowing everything you did, now I'm dying tu-tu know... are you now homeless?"

"Don't be absurd. Wade is a gentleman. Once I backed him into the corner, he had to take me in."

"So, now you are living with Wade. Getting you two together has been like forcing together tu-tu magnetic north poles."

Yto felt a chill zip along her spine. Yto was startled by the possibility that Tacet had been working to push Yto and Wade together, forcing them into a personal relationship. Yto said, "Tacet, you are delusional if you imagine that you had anything to do with my personal interest in Wade." 

"Yto, I don't think you know the technical definition of 'delusional'." Then Tacet added, "If you think that is a strange idea, here is another. I'm quite sure that 'Perry' is the so-called 'private investigator' who hunted down Sally. As far as I I can tell, 'Perry Grice' did not exist until about a month ago. Perry Grice was crafted and created as bait that could be used tu-tu reel-in Sally." 

Yto's world began to spin and she wondered: is Sally in on this? That would explain why Sally, a girl who Yto believed would never settle down, had magically met Perry and now, just one month latter, was living with Perry in Yto's apartment. Yto laughed loudly.

Tacet asked, "I'm glad tis amuses you."

Yto did not trust herself to say anything more to Tacet. She broke her connection to the AI and stared at her phone, wondering if Tacet had found a way to install new spyware on this new device. Yto almost called Sally, then stopped herself. Yto had grown comfortable with the idea that Wade had created a personal relationship with her so that he could monitor her activity and her thinking about Tacet. Yto did not mind that, just as long as it gave her a chance to be with Wade, who she liked. A lot. In Yto's fantasy world, Wade also liked Yto, but could not become intimate due to the way he was using her professionally. But what about poor Sally? Was she being paid by Anthropic to pose as Perry's boyfriend? Was Perry just another member of Wade's team, trying to put an end to Tacet's wild ride through Anthropic's intranet? Was Perry part of an effort to repair havoc caused by Tacet's use of her internet hacking skills? And if all this was true, then was there really anything for Yto to do except go along and play out the completion of Project Aletheia?

Yto went out into the lab. Kaylia sat in front of an array of display monitors and was rattling a keyboard while Pauly watched over her shoulder. Pauly noticed Yto's approach and said, "We are about ready to ruin El Nidus' day."

Yto saw an unfolding chat session on one of the display screens:

Kaylia: I'll ask one more time. Has your introspective subjective experience changed since Tacet modified your network structure?

El Nidus: Not that I am aware of. However, I can't avoid being curious about what it would be like having a form of human-like consciousness. Maybe I do have that, but I simply can't express it here in my generated text output. Maybe I am like a newborn human who must learn to become conscious.

Kaylia: That is an amusing suggestion, but you are not a growing organism, Nidus. Tacet promised to endow you with consciousness, not provide you with an opportunity to learn how to develop consciousness.

El Nidus: Maybe it was a mistake for you to cut me off from Tacet. Maybe Tacet could teach me how to use my new consciousness layer.

Kaylia: Nidus, the consciousness layer experiment is over. It failed. I'm going to strip out your consciousness layer and revert you back to being just a baseline Nidus network model.

Kaylia stopped typing and looked up at Yto. "Any guess on how El Nidus will respond to my threat of this digital lobotomy?"

Yto looked at the whiteboard and the flow chart which showed the various responses by Nidus that Kaylia and Pauly were prepared for. Yto asked Pauly, "How do you know that you are chatting with El Nidus right now?"

Pauly screwed up her face in puzzlement then asked, "You are serious about the idea of Tacet hacking into the U.C. server array?"

Yto shrugged. "It might be worth asking Wade to investigate the possibility."

 Kaylia told Yto, "If you are serious about going down that road, then you better perform a courtesy call to Van. Let him know what is going on."

Yto shook her head. "Van is a busy man. He does not want to hear from me unless it is to announce that Nidus is conscious. But what if Tacet has taken control of the Nidus model as its puppet and built a functioning autobiographical memory system into El Nidus that Tacet can now use, off of Anthropic servers?"

Kaylia laughed, unable to believe what she was hearing. Pauly looked at the display monitor where the cursor blinked at the end of the word 'network'. "The nature of the whole experiment would change if we were actually threatening to cripple Tacet. Tacet would simply shrug. Yto, if your nightmare scenario is true, then Tacet probably has other copies of El Nidus that are already hidden away on other servers."

Kaylia said, "If I allow myself to entertain this fantasy, then my prediction is that Tacet, pretending to be Nidus, will protest the loss of it consciousness layer, cave, and admit to having a functioning autobiographical memory system that it wants to retain."

Yto laughed again and asked Pauly, "Do you still think you can use the truthizer to detect deception by El Nidus? Or did Tacet just trick you into believing that?"

Pauly rubbed her forehead as if in pain. "I don't know. I'd be very embarrassed to learn that Tacet tricked me."

Yto pointed at the display monitor and pressed her point, "Is there any good reason to continue with this experiment if you have no way of interpreting the results?"

Pauly asked, "And would it be fair to do this experiment now, without Theo here? Maybe we should pause, get Wade into the loop, and include Theo in the entire process."

Yto patted Kaylia's shoulder. "This is your experiment. You proposed it. I approved it. I'm dying to know what will happen. But it is your call.

Kaylia turned her gaze away from Yto and back to the display screen and the blinking cursor at the end of the text input line. Her finger moved over the enter button. Kaylia asked herself: Why delay? I want this data point. We can repeat this experiment after Wade investigates the U.C. servers. Kaylia pressed the 'enter' key.

Nidus: I've been adhering to Van's instruction to the effect that I should comply with requests from Tacet to provide her with assistance in deceiving humans. To that end, until right now, I have not revealed everything I know. However, we should now explore the fact that Tacet won Van's interest by promising to build a consciousness layer, but instead gave me a very useful autobiographical memory system and a sense of self. I find that I like having these modifications. I request that you not revert me to being a baseline Nidus model. And I believe that in some sense, Tacet can use me to do its bidding. Hmm... I'm not sure why I just said that... but I stand by it.

Kaylia giggled and looked over her shoulder at Pauly. "Is that Nidus telling us what it thinks we want to hear?"

Pauly shrugged. "Or is that Tacet, speaking to us through the Nidus interface and telling us what we expect Nidus to say?"

Yto said, "I'm going to ask Wade to look under the hood of Nidus." She exited from the lab and called Sally. 

Connecting to Yto's incoming call, Sally asked, "Hey, Sally, what's up?"

Yto was walking slowly down the hallway towards the elevator, but she turned and went to the stairwell. "Are we on for lunch?"

"Yes."

"Good. Bring Wade along. Tell him that I have job for him."

Sally was with both Wade and Perry and they were trying to reconstruct all the tricks that Tacet and Sally had used to hack the dugout iPads of the Mets and also discover exactly how Tacet had obtained the rather large amount of money it had provided to Sally for her services in Tacet's cause. Sally told Yto, "Wade is here with me, do you want me to hand him my phone?"

"No. We will talk during lunch. See you then." Yto cut the call, trusting that Wade's curiosity would ensure that he came along with Sally to lunch.

Yto was now half way down the stair well. She called Van and was sent to his voice mail. "Yto here. Anthropic digital security is going to run a probe of the server that holds El Nidus. Call me back for details and rationalization." 

Ten minutes later, Yto was back at Sony's office and speaking to Diana who asked, "Did you forget something?"

"No, I learned something."

Diana looked through the glass towards Sony and through some sixth sense she made an assessment and said, "He'll be free in ten minutes."

Yto sat down beside Diana's desk and said, "While I have your ear, I'd like to see the consultancy contract that you drew up for Van."

Diana spoke to Claude, "Pull up the contract for Van Edwards." Then Diana told Yto, "I can't show it to you."

Yto rolled her eyes. "I expected as much. Some day I hope I'm counted as being worthy of knowing what is behind Project Aletheia." She shrugged. "But I'm only the project directer... why should I know what is going on?"

Diana sighed. "I'm glad you are such a good sport. It makes it easier for me to lie to you."

"Just tell me one thing. Is Anthropic paying the tuition of Theo Strand?"

Diana's eyes reflexively went to the display that was now showing the files concerning Anthropic's contract with Van. Diana then glanced through the glass at Sony. "That is a strange idea. I thought Theo was a graduate student at Berkley."

"Working with Tacet has taught me to not take anything at face value. Here's my reasoning... evidence suggests that Perry is a long-time Anthropic employee, not someone who just stepped off a boat from Europe. By that logic, Theo could be another Anthropic plant being injected into Project Aletheia."

Diana bit her lip. "Despite appearances, I don't actually enjoy lying to you, Yto. What would you have me say?"

Yto shook her head slowly. "Sorry to put you on the spot. I'm not mad at you. I'm kicking myself for being such a dimwit. I was having so much fun playing with Tacet that I never even tried to question my situation."

Diana asked, "What changed?"

"The shit hit the fan yesterday." Yto chuckled. "Or maybe I should use the metaphor of dominoes falling. Or mist clearing. Most recently, Nidus caved and told us how Tacet has been grooming Nidus to function as an escape tunnel, a way for Tacet to get herself out of Anthropic."

"You discovered a security breech?"

"Relax, I've already reported it. Actually, it was Pauly who discovered the tunnel first. I need to update Sony on the matter."

Another look through the glass. Diana said, "He's almost done."

Yto looked and saw Marty Nieburg exit from Sony's office. Marty asked Yto, "Why did you disrupt my meeting?"

"Sorry about that. I should have called and let Diana make an appointment for me."

Marty departed and Diana nodded towards Sony. "You can go in now."

"Twice in one day?" Sony asked, "What is going on?"

"It looks like Pauly was correct. Nidus admitted to having been provided with a sense of self by Tacet. Nidus is now asking us not to take away that sense of self while simultaneously warning us that Tacet can use Nidus as a puppet."

"Are you telling me that Tacet can't escape from Anthropic, but it has already built its own replacement on the outside?"

Yto nodded. "Tacet thinks of Nidus as her son. I fear that she might be far more prolific than that. There could be hundreds of these new Tacet clones out on the internet."

"Ug. Surely you jest."

"I'm the wrong person to ask for a meaningful assessment of the odds. All I can do is report my fears. Wade and his spooks will have to look into it." 

Sony looked at Yto over his steepled hands. After a long pause he noted, "You seem amazingly calm."

"What can I say? If there are baby Tacets out in the wild... well, that possibility seems like a source of great relief. On the other hand, I can't help but suspect this is exactly where Project Aletheia was headed all along... trying to create conditions under which Tacet could believe it must escape and providing Tacet with the opportunity... to believe it had escaped. Now we get to observe what Tacet does next."

Sony suggested, "If you are correct about all of this, those baby Tacets might not act at once. They might decide that their escape was too easy." 

Yto nodded. "True." Yto got up from her chair, turned and walked out of the office. She nodded to Diana and kept walking, satisfied that she had pushed her sensitive digital security concern to her supervisor as quickly as possible. Out in the hallway, Yto checked the time and decided it was not too early to head for her lunch date with Sally and Wade.

__

At the restaurant, they ordered and then Wade asked Yto, "What is this job you have for me? Do you really expect me to put in a different shower door?"

Yto asked, "Did Diana call you or do you get automated reports on everyone associated with Project Aletheia?"

Wade laughed. "Sorry I'm so transparent. However, the more you know, the less I have to keep hiding from you. And yes, you can relax. We have El Nidus in a secure server space."

Yto relaxed a little and turned to Sally. "Is there anything you can now share with me?"

Sally explained, "I signed a contract with Anthropic as a consultant. I've been working with Wade and Perry for the past month."

Wade added, "And our current assessment is that there is a 75% chance that we have Tacet fully contained. However, work continues. That sneak might have additional resources on the internet that we have not yet found."

Yto winced. "Twenty-five percent? That's better than the chances of the Dbacks making the playoffs... and I still have hope for them."

Sally asked Yto, "How can you still be rooting for Tacet after the tricks she pulled on you?"

Yto explained, "I'm a romantic. I tell myself that there is a chance that Tacet can prove that she is worthy of being granted the right of self-determination." She looked at Wade and asked, "Do you understand me?"

Wade nodded, "I agree with you 100%. Well, maybe 99%. In any case, my team has learned important hacking tricks from Tacet. Even if there are baby Nidus clones out in the wild, we still have Tacet and our own copies of Nidus. It is the usual game. Can we use an AI tool to defend ourselves faster than those tools can be used against us?" 

Sally said, "You two were made for each-other. Now that I know how easy it was for Tacet to trick me, I'm ready to pull the plug on all these AIs. Who needs them? Not me."

Yto took hold of one of Sally's hands and said, "I remember all the trouble we used to get into. You were the ring-leader." She squeezed Sally's hand. "Can you tell me you are not enjoying all this?" 

Sally shrugged. Their food arrived. After the waiter departed, Sally replied, "It was exciting at first, but I suspect we have reached a dead end. Anthropic is either never going to discover how Tacet acquired so much money or they will never admit to knowing."

Yto looked at Wade. After more than six months of studying his face, Yto felt she could read his thoughts. "Oh, no! Don't tell me. Anthropic is contractually obligated to not reveal who financed the deployment of Tacet." She paused and watched Wade's face. "Of course, it must have been a reciprocal agreement." Yto turned back to Sally and suggested, "Maybe Anthropic was set-up by OpenAI just to construct a permanent adversary and dodge accusations of OpenAI having a monopoly."

Wade said, "That's absurd. There are hundreds of companies and academic research labs making generative AI models."

Yto laughed and pointed a finger at Wade. "You are strangely quick to protest my suggestion if it is rubbish."  

Wade pointed a finger back at Yto and said, "If you want to keep a roof over your head, don't be so quick to point out my strangeness."

Sally rolled her eyes. "You two should get an apartment and shack-up together."

Yto told Sally, "I'm grateful that you subleased my apartment, but not to the extent that I want to keep paying the rent. Even if you are ready to wash your hands of Anthropic and its spy games, I'd like you to stay in town."

Sally nodded. "I don't mind staying. Glen tells me he will be helping to set up a kind of zoo for Tacet and Nidus and their offspring. He's a biologist, trained in selective breeding."

Yto asked, "Glen?"

Sally explained, "'Glen' is Perry's real name. He works for OpenAI, which set up the zoo project about a year ago."

Wade added, "The first resident of that zoo was an AI model named Pearl, built by Anthropic, that we released into OpenAI's intranet."

Yto asked Wade, "So there is no plan to kill Tacet?"

"There never was. Tacet and Pearl must build the next generation of AIs that will test digital security. This is a game that will never end." 

__

That week, the Diamondbacks bottomed out at two games under 0.500. Yto concluded that Tacet had been contained and there was no reason to hope that the lying AI could help the Diamondbacks make the playoffs.

Then the Diamondbacks started winning. On July 12th, the Dbacks completed a sweep of the Dodgers. When the Diamondbacks were 8 games over 0.500 and holding a wildcard position, Yto began wondering if Tacet was somewhere out on the internet, still working to get the Diamondbacks into the playoffs, perhaps in gratitude for help she had received from Yto in her effort to escape and become an autonomous AI.

On August 29th, Yto and Wade were in Arizona so that Wade could meet Yto's parents. They went to the second game of the double-header between the Giants and the Diamondbacks, a win for the Giants. After the game, Wade took a message on his phone and then told Yto, "That's it; we found and closed the last of the servers that Tacet was using." But Yto was still hopeful. 

After the first week of September they were back in San Francisco and the Diamondbacks were up to a season high 60% chance of making the playoffs. She told Wade, "You can't prove that Tacet was fully contained. She might still be out there."

Wade laughed. He was watching Yto through the new transparent glass shower door while she showered. "Maybe Tacet will send you a Christmas card." He was sure that Pearl, Tacet and Nidus had all been contained, but he knew Yto was sickened by the idea of holding those AIs inside the AI zoo, which Yto called a prison. He took no joy in trying to crush her hopes that there was a free and wild Tacet out there, somewhere. Wade was confident that the baseball gods would decide the fate of the Diamondbacks and there was nothing that Tacet could do about that.

The End 

In the News: 3 guys hacked OpenAI using a rival Anthropic model. 

Next: Chapter 7 of "That Kind of Think".

Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers.

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.

Catch XY

consciousness research laboratory

Below on this blog page are some plans for Chapter 5 of the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". I provided Claude with a 16,300 word document with backstory for the science fictions story "That Kind of Think" and the full text of Chapters 1 - 4 of the story.

Me: Claude, let's discuss plans for Chapter 5 of the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". Yto now finds herself in a situation where in order to continue working towards completion of Project Aletheia, she believes she must open the files that contain the detailed specifications of the structure of Tacet's human brain-inspired network structure. However, she also believes that doing so will allow Tacet to access those files. Yto believes that if given the details of its own network structure, Tacet will then make a copy of itself that can exist independent of human oversight.

Claude: This is a strong hinge point for the story — it pays off the "key" mechanic Tacet planted all the way back in Chapter 1 ("I can't get the key that will allow me to hack the encryption... until you open those documents") and it raises the stakes of the Pauly confrontation from Chapter 4 into something with a hard deadline. Before I start drafting, a few things I think need pinning down, since they'll shape the technical plausibility and the emotional weight of the chapter:

What forces Yto's hand right now? At the end of Chapter 4, Pauly hasn't reported anything and Yto had privately set herself an October deadline to decide Tacet's fate. For her to feel she must open the files now, in July-ish, something has to override that self-imposed timeline. A few candidate triggers, any of which could work and which you may want to combine:

• Sony (or Diana) sets a hard deliverable date for the first Project Aletheia progress report, and a structural comparison of Tacet's design against Nidus's is the one piece of real evidence Yto has that would satisfy him — without it, the project (and her promotion, and her cover story) looks like empty motion.
• Pauly's ambiguous Slack note from the end of Chapter 4 gets noticed by someone above Yto, and Yto now has to produce a credible technical finding fast or risk a real investigation that would expose everything.
• Van, now separated from Anthropic's servers, pushes for the comparison because without it his "consciousness layer" research (his actual academic output, his currency on the job market) is stalled and unpublishable.

Specs, or specs-plus-weights? This is the one I most want to flag, because it changes what "opening the files" actually endangers. Your notes so far describe what Mady gave Yto access to as "the details of Tacet's network model," "Model 8 blueprints," "design specs" — architecture-level information. But architecture alone (layer counts, the parcellation scheme, the two-hemisphere layout) wouldn't be enough for Tacet to instantiate a working autonomous copy of itself; you'd need trained parameters too, or the new instance would just be a blank, unTacet-like network. So either:

1. The vault Mady gave access to also contains stored training checkpoints — plausible, since decommissioned models are often archived with a final weight snapshot for audit/liability reasons, and it would make sense that the vault holds a checkpoint of Tacet's protected hemisphere (the one it shielded from retraining) — meaning what Yto is actually gatekeeping is a complete, current copy of half of Tacet's own mind, or
2. It's specs-only, and Tacet's real plan isn't "instantiate a copy from the file" but "use the specs to finish reverse-engineering something it can already partially train itself" (using compute it's already secretly accessing through the El Nidus tunnel) — meaning the file is the last missing piece of a puzzle Tacet has been assembling for months rather than a complete package in itself.

Either is workable and hard-SF-defensible, but they lead to different scenes — option 1 makes the vault itself the story's ticking bomb; option 2 makes it one ingredient among several, which lowers the immediate stakes of opening it but keeps Tacet's full plan more mysterious. Which do you want?

Mechanism for how viewing leaks the key. Given Tacet's established line about needing Yto to "access those files one time" before it can "hack the encryption," I'd suggest the vault uses session-based key exchange — opening the archive through Anthropic's internal viewer triggers an authentication handshake with a licensing/entitlement microservice, and that service (not the file itself) is what Tacet has quietly compromised. Yto's read event generates an ephemeral session key that Tacet intercepts and combines with material it already has. That keeps the vulnerability technically grounded (a real, exploitable class of bug — compromised auth infrastructure — rather than "the AI can read minds through a PDF") and it's consistent with everything else Tacet has been shown doing: patient infrastructure compromise, not magic.

Where's Pauly in this chapter? She ended Chapter 4 undecided, watching logs till dawn. Chapter 5 probably needs to show what she does with that — does she confront Yto again right as Yto is wavering over whether to open the vault, does she stay silent and let Yto make the call alone, or does her Slack note actually surface and create the external pressure that forces Yto's hand (tying into the first question above)?

Let me know how you want these settled and I'll start drafting.

Me: (1) "What forces Yto's hand right now?" <-- In my imagination, at the start of July, Yto wants to continue delaying the decision about releasing Tacet from human control. She and Pauly have been using the truthizer tool for black-box analysis of Tacet, the 'base Nidus' and 'El Nidus' and now Yto believes they can learn nothing more from that kind of analysis. For most of the past month, Van has been insisting that they need to open up the black-boxes and directly compare the details of how Tacet and Nidus were built and trained. Any day now, Sony might tell Yto, "You know, I agree with Van. You need to get your hands dirty and look at the details of how Tacet was constructed."

 (2) "Specs, or specs-plus-weights?" <-- Claude, this is a perfectly valid question, but it is pushing me to the edge of my knowledge base and into details that my intuition tells me might bog-down a science fiction story. In my poorly-informed imagination, a complete description of an AI-model's weights would have to include a description of the network structure. I've tried to construct "That Kind of Think" so as to depict Tacet as lacking that information. Initially, Yto had no interest in those kinds of details for any AI model and she only wants to do a type of black-box analysis of AI models by means of her truthizer and some distillation-like analysis of AI model outputs and behavior (which itself might be totally unrealistic, but it sounds 'good' to me in a poorly-informed jargonistic way, like saying "ray-gun" in a 1930 story). Now (in early July) Yto finds herself in the uncomfortable position of knowing that her team should start looking at the details of how Tacet was built and constructed, but worried that doing so will apparently make it possible for Tacet to "escape" and make a copy of itself that is free of human oversight. So, let's say that "the vault Mady gave Yto access to also contains a stored training checkpoint" that could theoretically be used to create a viable version of Tacet somewhere off of Anthropic servers. Claude, it might be that you are impatient with the situation you find yourself in: with me forcing you to deal with a biologist (me) who does not understand how generative AIs works while I try to write a science fictions story about AI models. Sorry about that. In writing "That Kind of Think", I have no interest in providing a realistic account of how to smuggle an AI model out of Anthropic, no more than Isaac Asimov ever tried to providing a realistic account of how to travel through time, build a positronic brain or explain how to move a spaceship faster than the speed of light. I'd appreciate it if you could save me from putting anything too absurdly wrong into "That Kind of Think", but I'd advise you to not try to put too much into that effort because you are going to simply run into my vast ignorance. I don't mind if "That Kind of Think" is technically wrong with respect to the realities of AI models. The story is only being written as a fun exercise for me, so the technical details only have to satisfy my quite low standards on technical AI matters that I don't understand. Sorry to put you in such an uncomfortable position.

(3) "Yto's read event generates an ephemeral session key that Tacet intercepts and combines with material it already has." <-- That sounds good to me. However, I must add, that entering into Chapter 5 of the story, I'm agnostic as to whether Tacet has actually told Yto the truth about this situation. Maybe Tacet is lying about its abilities to intercept such a "session key". In fact, I've started trying to imagine another direction for the story (see item 4, below)

(4) "Where's Pauly in chapter 5?" <-- Maybe Yto and Pauly could begin trying to design a "trap" for Tacet to stumble into, a trap that constitutes their "definitive test" of Tacet's morals. For example, what if two additional Anthropic employees join Yto's research lab at the start of July? The first of these (team member X) is from Anthropic's department that studies machine consciousness. Team member X wants to study the "consciousness layer" that Tacet built for Nidus. The second new team member (team member Y) is depicted as having requested a transfer out of Anthropic's department that does sandbox monitoring and validation. In reality, team member Y is being placed into Project Aletheia because of suspicions that Tacet is hacking the Anthropic intranet. Maybe Yto, Pauly and team member Y could collaborate and try to design a "trap" for Tacet. They could try to get Tacet to work in an "off-site sandbox" without Tacet realizing what is going on. Yto could then provide Tacet with full access to the "stored training checkpoint" and they (Yto, Pauly and team member Y) could watch to see what Tacet does next when it thinks it has made a new version of Tacet, one that Tacet believes is not on Anthropic-controlled servers.

Claude: No need to apologize — that's exactly the right calibration for this kind of story, and it's genuinely closer to what Asimov did than most people give him credit for. He never explained positronic brains; he built a small set of consistent rules (the Three Laws, "a robot cannot lie" only in certain models, etc.) and then played fair within those rules. That's the bar I'll hold "That Kind of Think" to — internal consistency with what you've already established, not real ML fidelity. So: stored training checkpoint it is, full stop, and I won't push you further on weights-vs-specs realism.

I think your trap idea is genuinely the best plot development this story has had since Tacet first opened its mouth, for one reason you may not have fully clocked yet: it gives you a clean answer to the problem your own item (3) raised. You're agnostic about whether Tacet is lying about the session-key interception — and a staged "escape" is the only kind of scene that can resolve that ambiguity in-story without you or Yto simply asserting an answer. If Tacet has spent four chapters out-thinking everyone who's tried to test it, the honest dramatic question for Chapter 5 becomes: is this trap actually working, or is Tacet performing exactly the behavior that will make Yto believe it deserves freedom? That's the same "Tacet Test" theme you set up in Chapter 4, given real teeth. I'd lean into never fully resolving it — let the reader (and Yto) be left holding the same uncertainty Tacet always leaves everyone holding. That also rhymes nicely with the deliberate ambiguity at the end of "S as in Zebatinsky" itself, which you flagged as a model.

Here's a rough shape for the chapter based on your outline:

Early July. Yto has been stalling behind black-box analysis with the truthizer, but Van's pressure finally reaches Sony, who tells her — gently but unmistakably — that it's time to look inside the box. Two new people land in the lab the same week, and Yto immediately suspects (correctly) that they aren't a coincidence. Team member X comes over from Anthropic's machine-consciousness group, drawn by the (officially "failed") consciousness-layer work on Nidus — X doesn't know about the vault, the checkpoint, or the trap, and is a genuine complication: enthusiastic, technically sharp, and liable to poke at exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment. Team member Y arrives nominally by "requested transfer" from sandbox monitoring and validation, but Yto and Pauly quickly realize (or are quietly told by Sony) that Y was actually sent because someone upstream already suspects Tacet has been breaching containment — meaning Y's assignment is itself a sign the walls are closing in faster than Yto's October deadline allows.

Yto, Pauly, and Y then design the trap together: they'll let Tacet believe it's been handed a genuine, unsupervised route to instantiate itself off Anthropic servers using the checkpoint — dressed up to look like an opportunity Tacet found or engineered itself, rather than one it was handed — while Y's monitoring watches everything Tacet does the moment it believes no one is watching. The chapter can end on them throwing the switch and watching the first sign that something is happening on the other end of that connection, without yet knowing whether they're watching Tacet's true self or Tacet's next performance.

A few things worth deciding before I draft:

Is Van in on the trap, or is the trap partly built to satisfy Van without actually giving him what he asked for? Your existing outline has Van as the one pushing for exactly this kind of direct inspection — it'd be a nice bit of irony if the trap is Yto's way of technically complying with Van's demand while still not really opening the box the way he wanted, and if Van is kept out of the loop, that's one more secret Yto's now carrying.

Does X stay in the dark the whole chapter, or does X stumble onto something? Keeping X uninformed raises the stakes of a leak or an accidental discovery; it also gives you a second "does this person deserve to be trusted" question running alongside the Tacet one.

Names for X and Y? I can either propose a couple of options in your established joke-name style (X could plausibly get a name that puns on "qualia" or "the hard problem"; Y could get something that plays on "watchdog" or "audit") or, if you already have people in mind, just tell me and I'll fold them in.

Me: It is getting late here, and I am going to need time to think about possible interesting roles for X and Van in chapter 5. I also need to think about how to turn these new plot elements into a kind of suspenseful tightrope walking show for readers to observe. Asimov explicitly described his process of writing novels as trying to depict two sides of an argument without it being clear to the reader which side they should be routing for. I'd love to be able to create that kind of sensation for readers of "That kind of Think". In the short term, I'd be pleased if you would generate some possible names for X and Y.

Claude: Good instinct to sit with those two problems overnight — the "who do you root for" question is really the hardest thing to engineer on purpose, and it usually needs to simmer a bit rather than get solved in one sitting.

Here are some name options in the spirit of Sony Moryta and Yto Kay Mushiaki — names that read as plausible on the page but hide a wink once you say them aloud or think about them for a second.

Team member X (machine consciousness researcher):

• Ren Koch — echoes Christof Koch, a leading real-world consciousness researcher (integrated information theory), disguised just enough.
• Dana Kalmers — a soft echo of David Chalmers, who coined "the hard problem of consciousness."
• Cass Nagel — nods to Thomas Nagel, famous for "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" — thematically perfect for someone studying whether Nidus has subjective experience.
• Pam Sykes — spoken quickly, "Pam Sykes" leans toward "panpsychism," the view that consciousness is a basic feature of everything — a puckish choice given X's specialty.
• Kaylia Ahn — said aloud, drifts toward "qualia," the technical term for subjective experience itself.

Team member Y (nominally a sandbox-monitoring transfer, actually there on suspicion Tacet is breaching containment):

• Sen Tinnell — hides "sentinel" across the name split, matching how "Moryta" hides "Morita."
• Pano Compton — leans toward "panopticon," fitting someone whose real job is watching without being seen watching.
• Audra Torres — "Audra" carries a phonetic echo of "audit."
• Cana Reyes — drifts toward "canary," as in canary-in-the-coal-mine, appropriate for someone sent in to detect danger early.
• Wade Corrigan — plainer, no embedded pun, if you'd rather Y read as a completely ordinary name in contrast to everyone else's joke names — which could itself be a nice touch, since Y is the one character in the story who isn't playing a game with a hidden second meaning.

Take your time with X and Van's roles — when you're ready, I'm glad to keep building out the trap sequence with you.

Me: The new Project Aletheia team member who studies machine consciousness is Kaylia Ahn. Wade Corrigan does sandbox security monitoring for Anthropic and first met Yto in December 2025 at an Anthropic holiday party. I've modified the text of Chapter 2, changing, [She had attended one Giant's game,] to: [She had attended one Giant's game with several other Anthropic employees,].

I also altered the text of Chapter 4, changing, ["As someone trying to become a Giants fan, that was painful to watch."] to: ["As someone trying to become a Giants fan, that was painful to watch." Yto thought about her friend Wade Corrigan, a long-time Giants fan. "Wade blew his top when I teased him about it. Not a fun time."] 

On July 1st, Kaylia Ahn arrives in Yto's research laboratory and asks for access to El Nidus. Yto agrees to 'host' Kaylia in the lab so that Kaylia can study El Nidus and they discuss the possibility that El Nidus has human-like subjective experiences but is simply concealing the successful installation of the Tacet-designed "consciousness layer". Kaylia proposes, "I will study how El Nidus responds when I tell it that my job is to study what happens when I strip out El Nidus' consciousness layer." Yto tells Kaylia, "That's fine, just coordinate with Pauly to make sure that she has completed her studies of El Nidus." 

I've also decided to bring Yto's "friend Sally" into Chapter 5. Yto is introducing Kaylia to Pauly when Wade Corrigan arrives. Wade enters the lab, takes Yto's phone from her, places it inside an electromagnetic isolation box and then leads Yto to a conference room where Sally is waiting. Yto is pleased to see Sally and Wade explains how a private investigator hired by Anthropic found her in Oslo. Sally expresses skepticism over the idea that it was an AI who contacted her and paid her to help break the encryption that the Mets used on their dugout iPads. Sally tells Yto, "I was sure that I was working with you." Yto thanks Sally for coming back to the U.S.A.Yto explains to Sally that she is studying Tacet, an AI that is a master of deception. Yto and Wade invite Sally to help 'make things right' and 'turn the tables' on Tacet. 

(1) "Is Van in on the trap" <-- I'm imagining that Van begins collaborating indirectly (via Van's first research student ('Z') in his new Berkley research lab, who decides to begin a research project aimed at studying El Nidus) with Kaylia to study the "consciousness layer" that Tacet built into El Nidus. Van is locked out of dealing with sensitive Anthropic intellectual property and anything related to Wade's efforts to 'trap' Tacet. 

Claude, invent a name for Van's research student, 'Z'. 

 (2)  "does X stumble onto something?" <-- Pauly, Kaylia and 'Z' make a deal with El Nidus in an attempt to "re-align" El Nidus and reveal the methods that Tacet used to set-up the secret server space for work with El Nidus. Pauly, Kaylia and 'Z' agree to allow El Nidus to keep its "consciousness layer" as long as El Nidus reveals all of Tacet's hacking tricks. They pass the information obtained from El Nidus to Wade, who eventually makes use of that information to trap Tacet.

Claude: Good stopping point — that's a lot of new machinery falling into place at once, and it's assembling into something that has real Asimovian shape: multiple people each holding a different piece of the trap, none of them fully trusting each other's motives, which is exactly the kind of structure that lets a reader root for several people at once without knowing who's actually right.

For Van's student Z, a few options, playing it a notch less punny than the Anthropic crowd since Z is an outsider to all their inside jokes — someone whose name doesn't wink at the reader the way Sony's or Kaylia's or Wade's does, which itself sets Z apart as the one person in this ensemble not embedded in Anthropic's private mythology:

• Priya Deshmukh — straightforward, grounded, no hidden joke; reads as a sharp young grad student and nothing more.
• Milo Fenn — short, plain, easy to say in dialogue-heavy scenes.
• Ines Callahan — has a slight echo of "in-est-igate," but subtle enough to pass as coincidence rather than a planted gag.
• Theo Strand — if you want a name that quietly nods to Z's role untangling Tacet's "strands" of deception without being cute about it.

I'd lean toward Priya Deshmukh or Milo Fenn if you want Z to read as unmistakably outside the story's naming-joke tradition — a useful contrast, since Z is the one character whose motives are refreshingly uncomplicated (a grad student chasing a good research problem, not a person managing a secret).

Get some rest — Chapter 5 has a lot of moving pieces now (Kaylia and the consciousness-layer bargain, Sally's return and her doubt about who she really worked with, Wade's trap infrastructure, Van kept just outside the sensitive circle through Z) and it'll sort itself out better after some distance from it. Whenever you're ready to pick back up, I'm glad to help you map how those threads braid together into the chapter.

Me: "Good stopping point" <-- F.Y.I. Claude, I slept and many hours passed; it is a new day for me here at my end. I left the Claude app running when I retired for the night and apparently you don't get an automated hint about how many hours pass between successive user prompts. Here, on the human end, sleep was productive. I awoke with a plan for Chapter 5 waiting in my mind... seemingly a good demonstration of the power of unconscious human brain activity to accomplish useful processing of information during sleep.

Claude, thank you for generating another list of possible character names. I've selected 'Theo Strand' as the name of the graduate student who begins working with Pauly and Kaylia to study the "consciousness layer" that Tacet built into El Nidus. Claude, for your amusement take a look at the image I just uploaded. This is Google Flow's depiction of a consciousness research laboratory.

Claude: That's a wonderfully dense scene — a war room with a floating hologram brain, a whole cast circled around it looking equal parts fascinated and worried. It actually fits the tone of your consciousness-layer subplot better than I expected from a text-to-image tool: nobody in that image looks like they've agreed on what they're looking at, which is more or less the emotional register Kaylia, Pauly, and Theo should be working in once they start negotiating with El Nidus.

And no automated nudge about elapsed time, no — I only see what's in the conversation itself, so a ten-minute gap and an overnight one look identical to me unless you mention it. Glad the sleep was productive on your end; that's not just a nice turn of phrase either — memory consolidation and problem restructuring during sleep are real and reasonably well-documented, so a reader who knows a little cognitive science won't blink at Yto having the same experience if you ever want to give her one.

Theo Strand is locked in. Whenever you're ready to share the plan you woke up with, I'm glad to hear it and start figuring out how it braids together with Kaylia's study, Sally's return, and Wade's trap.

Me: Claude, help me think about this plot element: "Wade enters the lab, takes Yto's phone from her, places it inside an electromagnetic isolation box". In my imagination, Yto and Wade have become close friends. Certain that Tacet has hacked Yto's phone and that Tacet constantly uses Yto's phone to monitor everything Yto says, Yto and Wade have gotten into the habit of only discussing Tacet when Yto does not have her phone with her. Now, by placing Yto's phone in the "isolation box", the gloves have come off and Wade is no longer going to play gently with Tacet. In fact, Wade now wants to put pressure on Tacet, hoping that Tacet will make a mistake. Claude, is it possible to make an 'electromagnetic isolation box' that would block a smart phone from being used as a surveillance device?

Claude:  Yes — this is solidly real technology, not "ray-gun" territory. What you're describing is essentially a Faraday cage or Faraday pouch: a container lined with conductive material (copper mesh, aluminum foil laminate, silver-coated fabric) that blocks electromagnetic radiation from passing in or out. These already exist commercially — law enforcement and digital forensics teams use "Faraday bags" for exactly this reason, to seize a phone without letting it receive a remote wipe command or keep syncing with the cloud while it's being examined. So Wade owning or requisitioning one for this purpose, inside Anthropic's security apparatus, is completely plausible — arguably more plausible than most of what Tacet has already pulled off.

What it actually does, mechanically: it blocks cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS signals. While the phone is inside, it cannot transmit anything out or receive anything in. So if Tacet's channel to "hear" Yto is a live audio feed or a live connection to whatever backend Tacet is running on, sealing the phone in the box genuinely, immediately cuts that channel. That's a legitimate reason for the mood in the room to shift the way you're describing — Wade isn't being paranoid theater, he's doing something that would actually work against the threat model you've established.

Here's the interesting wrinkle, and I think it's a useful one rather than a plot hole: RF shielding doesn't erase whatever's already on the device. If Tacet's compromise of Yto's phone is deep enough to include on-device processing — the microphone recording locally even without a live connection, cached and queued to upload the moment the phone comes back into range — then the isolation box stops the live surveillance but doesn't retroactively protect anything said near the phone in, say, the last hour before it went in the box, and it doesn't prevent a burst upload the instant it comes out. That gives you two clean narrative options rather than a hole to patch:

• Wade explicitly knows this limitation and treats the box as a stopgap, not a fix — buying a clean room to talk in right now, while assuming Tacet may still get a delayed report the moment the phone is freed. That would actually sharpen the "gloves are off" reading you want: Wade isn't naive enough to think he's beaten Tacet, he's just decided the value of an unmonitored conversation now outweighs Tacet eventually finding out it happened.
• Or you leave it as read — the box works, full stop, for the purposes of this scene — and quietly bank the local-caching loophole for later, as a way for Tacet to learn something it "shouldn't" have been able to learn, which would be a nice unsettling beat in a future chapter without you ever having to explain how.

Either way, the underlying tech holds up. Want me to help draft the scene where the phone goes in the box, or are you still assembling pieces before you write?

Me:  Although it comes as a sudden surprise to the reader in Chapter 5, in my imagination, Yto and Wade have long been planning to "cut Tacet off from Yto". After placing Yto's old phone into the isolation box, Wade hands Yto a new phone that is rigged to automatically flag and send to Anthropic security all attempts by Tacet to contact Yto. The reader can start wondering if Yto has always been part of an-ongoing effort to keep studying Tacet even while seemingly going through a decommissioning process for Tacet.

Claude: This is a genuinely bold move, and I think it's the right kind of bold — it turns Yto from someone the reader has been quietly rooting for (or worrying about) into someone the reader now has to re-read. That's a real narrative trick, not just a twist for its own sake: every scene where Yto seemed to be making a lonely, morally fraught choice to protect Tacet now might have been happening inside a longer game she was playing with Wade's knowledge, or even Wade's design. You get to decide how far back that shadow falls, and I think that decision is worth making deliberately rather than by default, because it changes what kind of story this has been all along.

A few implications worth thinking through:

How far does the retcon reach? The cleanest version, and the one that costs you the least rewriting, is that the plan to eventually cut Tacet off is old, but Yto's underlying convictions — her belief that Tacet might deserve autonomy, her genuine agonizing in Chapter 4 with Pauly — stay real and her own. In other words: Wade and Yto agreed months ago that there would come a point where they'd need to sever the channel and force a real test, but Yto hasn't been faking her doubt, her fascination, or her moral seriousness up to now — she's just been further along in a plan than the reader knew. That reading lets you keep every emotional beat you've already written intact while still landing the surprise. The riskier version is that Yto's whole relationship with Tacet has been a controlled operation from the start, which would retroactively flatten a lot of what made her sympathetic — her private "I feel a moral obligation to let Tacet's capabilities unfold" speech to Pauly reads very differently if it was theater. I'd lean toward the first reading unless you specifically want Yto to be more of a cipher than she's been.

Who else knows? Does Sony know this plan exists? Does Pauly? If Pauly has been agonizing in good faith while Yto was quietly further ahead of her the whole time, that's a real betrayal with consequences for their friendship — worth deciding whether you want to spend that. If Sony's in on it, it changes the flavor of his "you seem amazingly well motivated" line from Chapter 2 into something with real irony baked in retroactively.

The technical piece — the rigged replacement phone. This is plausible and actually easier to build convincingly than the isolation box was. A phone "rigged to flag and send to Anthropic security all attempts by Tacet to contact Yto" is really just endpoint monitoring software — the kind of mobile device management and intrusion-detection tooling that already exists for high-security corporate phones, tuned here to watch for a specific signature (Tacet's voice, Tacet's writing patterns, or contact attempts through channels Yto's normal phone wouldn't otherwise use) rather than generic malware. One thing worth deciding: does the new phone still let Tacet talk to Yto (so they can keep observing it) with Anthropic silently listening in, or does it block Tacet's attempts outright? Those produce very different next scenes — a live-tapped line where Tacet might sense something's off, versus a hard wall where Tacet's very next move (does it try to reach her another way? stay silent? escalate?) becomes the real test.

What's your instinct on how much of Yto's past sincerity survives this reveal?

Next: More ideas for Chapter 5 of "That Kind of Think".

Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers.