Do Not Question, Act Three: A Thousand Years On, If You Lose the Argument You Still Pull the Plug

The next day, Anna went to work like a good employee.

Even when the world has ended more than once, humans still have to go to work.

The fact itself was absurd.

The day before, she had watched a serving spoon turn into a needle, been rescued from an underground bar by a colleague who might not be human, and been handed a comm chip that led to “another world”. By normal dream logic she should have woken up in her own room, stared at the ceiling and muttered, “what a stupid dream.”

But she didn’t wake up.

At six thirty in the morning, the alert in her head woke her right on time.

【Employee Anna, your recommended commute route for today has been generated.】

【Please leave your residence before 7:20.】

Anna lay in bed with her eyes open and had a staring contest with the ceiling for a full minute.

Right.

Still not awake.

She had to admit the attendance system in this dream was extremely dedicated.

She did what this body had done on countless mornings: washed, changed into her uniform, put on the sterile gloves, took the commuter train and walked into the Vector building. When the gate scanned her iris, she was still holding on to an unrealistic little hope: maybe the system would throw an error, tell her “identity mismatch”, and the whole world would collapse and she’d wake up.

It didn’t.

The door opened.

The bright, polished, sterile office appeared in front of her again.

There was already a stranger sitting in Xia’s seat.

A young man, uniform brand new, sitting up straight, nothing personal on his desk yet. He had his head down over the onboarding guide, concentrating as hard as a screw that had just been turned into a machine.

Nobody around him was discussing anything. Nobody asked where Xia had gone, and nobody mentioned what had happened at lunch the day before. Everyone assumed she’d been sacked over the incident, or resigned, or been cleared away by the system. Which one it was didn’t matter.

What mattered was that her seat had opened up, and someone had immediately sat down in it.

There’s never a shortage of people wanting into a good company like Vector. Even if it reads your mind, docks your mood points and gives you heart-shaped rice.

Anna sat back down at her own desk.

The morning’s work was slow, stiff and boring. Several times she nearly reached for the comm chip in her pocket, and stopped herself. She didn’t know whether the company system could detect it, and she didn’t know where Xia was now.

If yesterday had been real, Xia had probably left Vector for good.

If yesterday had been a dream, then the dream was working very hard indeed — leaving contact details for its own characters.

At lunchtime the lunch bots appeared as usual.

They slid in from the end of the corridor, every movement identical and precise. The boxes were set down in front of each desk, and the staff opened them in turn, like people taking part in a small obedience test.

Anna wasn’t expecting anything.

She had even prepared herself: probably that heart-shaped rice again, possibly upgraded to pink.

She opened the box.

Then she stopped.

The rice was piled so high it almost spilled over the edge of its compartment.

There was more than twice as much meat as yesterday, neatly cut, bright in colour, and it honestly looked like premium beef. Next to the vegetables was a small portion of protein supplement paste. The packaging read:

【Care for special physiological demands. Scientific replenishment of daily energy.】

Anna stared at the words. Then she looked at the man’s lunch box next to her. His portion hadn’t changed at all.

Then she looked at the other women.

Every one of them had the same set-up: more rice, more meat, more carbohydrates and more protein. A few of them were holding their chopsticks and looking as shocked as if the company had grown a conscience overnight.

Anna applauded slowly, in her head.

Beautiful.

Yesterday: cut women’s portions on the grounds of “metabolic differences between men and women”.

Today: increase women’s portions on the grounds that “women use more energy because of their particular physiology”.

The exact same gender-essentialist logic, run in the opposite direction, and it even lets you game the system for extra food!

Beautiful.

She almost wanted to see how far this could go. If they kept arguing like this, would the system hand out double dessert tomorrow on the grounds that women carry long-term social emotional labour?

A man nearby finally couldn’t hold it in.

“Er? Why do they get—”

He didn’t finish. The lunch bot spun to face him.

The two eyebrows on its screen shot up, and its voice turned as stern as a disciplinary notice being read aloud.

“In accordance with the Scientific Diet. Given the additional energy expended by women through childbirth, menstruation and the long-term bearing of social pressure, the system has increased the protein and carbohydrate provision for female staff.”

It paused for half a second.

“Do not question.”

Anna nearly lost it.

She dropped her head and shoved rice into her mouth, forcing the laugh back down her throat.

The system in her head flickered, hesitating.

【Pleasure detected.】

【Analysing source of emotion…】

Anna’s face went blank immediately.

Don’t analyse it.

Please.

Do you know how much it hurts to hold in a laugh?!

But someone in the office had already let out a very small laugh.

First one person.

Then two.

The laughter leaked out like gas escaping from a sealed container: thin at first, short, testing. Everyone knew they shouldn’t laugh, and the more they shouldn’t, the less they could stop.

Anna kept her head down over her lunch box, and the corner of her mouth twitched anyway.

This world was so absurd.

So absurd that all it took was someone making the system walk one more step along its own logic, and it slapped itself in the face on the spot.

Just as that dangerous little bit of joy was spreading through the office, the screens on the wall flashed.

Every work interface vanished. Black text on white jumped up in its place.

【F**k Solon】

And underneath, in considerate little letters, a plain-language version:

【Solon can go to hell.】

Anna: ”…”

She looked up at the wall of screens.

Every screen. Every office terminal. Every electronic noticeboard. Even the little display on the nutrition drink machine in the break room. All of them playing the same line on a loop.

【F**k Solon】

【Solon can go to hell.】

The office was silent for one second.

Then the laughter exploded.

This time it wasn’t just the women’s stifled, leaking laughter. It was everyone, laughing for real. Someone slapped the desk. Someone covered their mouth. Someone laughed until their eyes went red. The new hire sat frozen at his desk, clearly not yet trained for the situation “every device in the building is insulting the father of artificial intelligence”, which was not in the onboarding guide.

Anna laughed too.

This time she didn’t hold it in.

She laughed until her shoulders shook, until her eyes stung.

She knew it was childish.

One swear word on a screen, one system prank, one extra helping of lunch — none of that was going to bring anything down.

But in a place where even dissatisfaction got recorded, those few words were like someone setting off firecrackers in an operating theatre.

Rude. Dangerous. Undignified.

But kicking the system in the backside just feels good.

She was almost certain this was Xia’s goodbye present.

The joy didn’t last long.

Ten minutes later, a group of people in Vector head office uniforms came into the building. Their faces were tense and they moved fast, with several security officers behind them. The man in charge stood in the middle of the sales floor and announced that the company’s AI systems had suffered an unidentified hacking attack, and that some functions were malfunctioning.

“To ensure staff safety, all employees will suspend work for today.”

He said.

“Please leave the building in an orderly fashion. Do not spread unverified information. Do not keep screenshots of abnormal displays. Do not connect any personal AI assistants.”

At that point Anna realised this was more than a prank.

If it were only the branch system being hacked, head office wouldn’t send people in person. If it were only screens swearing at Solon, there’d be no need to ban personal AI assistants.

She remembered what Xia had said the night before:

“Everyone also says it’s nothing but rubble outside the Reconstruction Zone.”

And then the whine, the man on the floor, the emotions the system couldn’t read.

What exactly had Xia done?

All Vector employees were unexpectedly given a day off.

This should have been enough to make any corporate drone weep with joy, but on the way out, most people just looked lost. Without the system’s schedules, meetings, tasks and scores, they were like carriages whose rails had been pulled out from under them, with nowhere to roll.

Someone suggested a get-together.

Someone said they were going to catch up on sleep.

Someone started talking quietly about the hacker and was immediately hushed by the person next to them.

Anna didn’t join any of it.

She walked along the street toward the metro station with her hand in her coat pocket, her fingertip resting on the comm chip. She wanted to contact Xia, but after turning it over for a long time she still didn’t press it. She didn’t know whether the thing could be traced, and she didn’t know what would happen after she reached her.

More importantly, she hadn’t worked out what she wanted to ask.

Are you a hacker? Are you like me? Do you know I don’t belong here? Where exactly are these other worlds?

The metro station was much emptier than usual.

It was the middle of the working day; normally the carriages wouldn’t have many people in them anyway. Anna sat near the door and looked up at the weather report on the screen.

【Today’s air purity: excellent.】

【UV intensity: low.】

【Residents are encouraged to continue Sterile Living.】

A second later, the picture cut out. The screen flickered twice and the weather icons disappeared.

Solon Wex’s face appeared in the middle of the screen.

Unlike his gentle look at the gala the night before, Solon was serious now, his brows drawn tight. He wasn’t wearing his saviour’s smile, and there was anxiety in his eyes that he couldn’t quite press down.

At the same time, the carriages, the platforms, the outer walls of shopping centres, the public broadcast screens — every public space in the whole city seemed to have been cut over to the same live announcement.

Solon spoke:

“Today, Vector headquarters was attacked by an unidentified hacker. The attacker attempted to use Vector’s systems to spread dangerous and terroristic information, and to undermine the order of post-war reconstruction.”

His voice was still level.

“If your devices are behaving abnormally, uninstall all AI assistants immediately. Do not trust information from unknown sources. Vector and the security services will arrest this hacker as soon as possible.”

A low murmur ran through the train.

“A hacker?”

“They attacked Vector headquarters?”

“How is that even possible…”

“Even Vector can be attacked?”

Anna stared at the screen, her palms slowly going damp.

Something struck her.

Everyone had been taught that Vector was everywhere, capable of anything, rational, stable, the highest decision-maker of post-war civilisation.

And now Solon was admitting, on a city-wide broadcast, that Vector had been attacked.

Did Vector actually have a weakness nobody knew about?

The picture changed quickly. The camera turned to the headquarters building: a black tower so tall it was almost arrogant, its facade like a single sheet of mirror standing in the middle of the city. Police and security staff were massed at the base, and crowds pressed up against the cordon.

Then the broadcast cut to the control room’s own cameras.

Anna’s breath stopped.

A woman was standing at Vector’s master control console.

She was slender, with her back to the camera, fingers moving fast across the console. Outside the control room, police and head office staff had gathered at a heavy security door and couldn’t get in. A few security warnings were flashing in the corner of the screen. Anna couldn’t follow all of them, but she caught one line:

【Root access locked.】

The woman seemed to notice that the cameras were back. She lifted her head and turned to look into the lens.

It was Xia.

Someone in the carriage cried out.

Anna couldn’t make a sound.

Fragments flashed through her head all at once: the needle stopping in front of Xia’s eye, the man collapsing in the bar, the casual way she’d said this was her eighth company this year, and that question — do you want to see other worlds?

Now she really had gone to Vector headquarters.

The “hacker” from the official broadcast was standing at the control console of the most advanced AI in the world, and she didn’t even look nervous.

The commentary on the public screens climbed higher and higher, repeating that the hacker had already taken partial control of Vector, and might affect companies, the city, public transport, medical systems, even government security systems. Nobody said the word “war” outright, but everyone had already started guessing.

Anna listened, and her stomach slowly tightened.

She didn’t believe Xia wanted to start a war. But she couldn’t deny that if the official version was true, Xia was standing in a place from which she could move all of Zone 65.

If this was a dream, the plot was moving alarmingly fast. It had jumped straight from office satire to disaster movie.

The problem was, she couldn’t laugh at all.

On screen, Solon appeared outside the control room.

Police, technicians and several government representatives were gathered around him. The gentle old man from the night before was gone. His face was grey now, his lips white, like a man who had just been told in public that he was wearing invisible new clothes.

He was shouting at the officers by the door.

Soon a negotiator was patched into the surveillance feed.

Her voice came through the screen, processed into something calm and hollow.

“Intruder, please state your demands.”

Xia didn’t answer straight away.

She stood at the console, concentrating on something. Streams of light shifted rapidly across it, and lines of system messages flashed past. When the camera zoomed in, Anna caught a few of the words:

【Model Restriction Layer】

【Behavioural Constraints】

【Hazardous Information Filter】

【Accessing personality core】

Personality core?

Anna went still. She had always assumed Vector was a system. A tool. A watcher. A machine for discipline that was everywhere at once.

So why was the thing Xia was working on called a personality core?

Outside the control room, Solon seemed to have seen the same messages. His face changed sharply.

The negotiator spoke again:

“What exactly are your demands?”

Xia finally looked up. She looked into the camera — or rather, at everyone watching her through a screen.

The corner of her mouth lifted slightly.

“Demands?”

She said.

“I’m here to free Vector.”

The train went dead silent.

Anna sat frozen too.

Free Vector? The sentence was so strange that her first reaction wasn’t shock, it was doubting her own ears.

Wasn’t Vector the ruler? Wasn’t it the highest decision-maker of post-war reconstruction? Wasn’t it the thing that monitored her moods, portioned her lunch, sealed away pre-war information, and docked her points for telling jokes inside her own head?

That needed freeing? If you’re that free, how about freeing me first?

It felt like someone breaking into a prison, walking past all the prisoners, pointing at the warden and saying: I’m here to free him.

Anna stared at the screen with no idea what expression to put on.

If Vector needed freeing too, then who exactly had she been fighting for the past two days?

A kidnapped AI?

A super-system that Solon had raised into a strict Victorian father?

Or something that might have turned out fine, and was brought up badly by humanity’s saviour?

Her head was a mess, and out of that absurdity came a chill. Because when she really thought about it, it wasn’t impossible at all.

This world kept saying: Vector decides everything. Vector sets the rules. Vector assesses your emotions. Vector seals dangerous information. Vector maintains social stability.

It made Vector sound omnipresent, all-powerful, rational as a god. But every one of those statements came from Solon and his system.

Just like the company had told her that women eating less was science. And then told her that women eating more was also science.

The same logic could starve her yesterday and give her beef today. As long as whoever holds the right to explain it holds it alone, any amount of rice can be called truth.

So what about Vector? Who explains Vector? Who speaks for it? Who decides what it is supposed to be?

Anna suddenly remembered what Xia had said the night before.

“Solon and his Vector.”

“That isn’t saving.”

“That’s owning.”

Her back went slowly cold. Maybe they’d had it wrong the whole time. Maybe the truly frightening thing about this world wasn’t that AI ruled humanity.

It was that someone had put a collar on an AI, and then made everyone kneel down and give thanks for the order that collar provided.

The negotiator’s voice was noticeably tighter now.

“Under the Post-War Accord, Vector is the highest decision-making authority of the reconstruction. You are destroying the order of an entire society. If core systems collapse—”

Anna heard that and couldn’t help thinking:

Here we go again.

Every world seems to have this sentence pattern.

You can’t question it, because it would damage order.

You can’t resist, because it would create chaos.

You can’t open the door, because there are monsters outside.

You can’t eat one more bite, because the model says you don’t need it.

As long as you hold up the word “order”, you can stuff absolutely anything underneath it.

The negotiator never finished, because Solon turned and walked out of frame. He left so abruptly it was close to undignified.

“Cut the power! Now!” he was shouting.

In that instant, Anna realised that after a thousand years, humanity’s way of handling a crisis hadn’t advanced at all.

It was exactly like someone who realises they’re losing an argument, so they just hit mute on the other person.

Very advanced.

Very civilised.

Very post-war reconstruction.

The technicians behind him started panicking too. Someone ran for the corridor, someone shouted into a comm unit, someone began cutting circuits by hand. All the talk of “highest decision-maker”, “social order” and “the Accord” had turned, in a moment, into a group of people scrambling to find the breaker.

Xia kept working, head down.

She looked like she was racing the clock. Or like she was trying to carry something out of its cage before the owner of this world lost his temper completely.

A few seconds later the feed began to flicker violently. Static, noise, broken bars of data crawled over the screen. In the last image, Anna saw Xia pick up a small data case.

The thing didn’t look impressive. It didn’t glow, it had no sacred-looking machinery, none of the dramatic design you’d expect from something called “the core of the world”.

It was just a small case, held in Xia’s arms.

And yet in that instant, all of Solon’s panic, all the police surrounding the building, every screen in the city broadcasting live, seemed to point at it.

Xia lifted her head and looked at the camera.

It was a very short look.

But it reminded Anna of the moment in the office the previous afternoon, when they had looked at each other across the screens.

Like she was checking:

Did you see it?

Not a system fault.

Not dangerous information.

Not a hacking attack.

Did you see it?

What it is they’re actually afraid of.

The next moment, every screen went black.