Story introductory(??)

The tiled hallways of this building were cold and ungentle, it’s clear this site was not meant to be lived in, as if a place between places, it’s not void of all life however, an exhausted and untidy man trudges through the cold halls, the air is cold and sharp. The man holds a coffee in one hand, and a clipboard in the other, there’s identification clipped onto his shirt. 

ANDREW WILLIAMS 
Head of Artificial Intelligence 

“All these damned hallways, it’s like a goddamn labyrinth in here” he mutters under his breath, taking a sip of his coffee and glancing at his clipboard, all his papers going into detail too great for him to wholly understand on 3 hours sleep. He glances through the metal doors with small, tinted windows that litter the halls.  

He finally finds what he’s been looking for, a door with a sign stuck solemnly on reading “OBSERVATION ROOM” he catches his breath and punches the keypad by the door, entering into the room. The walls are covered from ceiling to floor with technology. Hundreds of monitors each with multiple different statistics and live graphs being displayed for each one, dials and knobs crudely and quickly labeled by workers trying to make any bit of sense of it all, consoles and equipment which would probably put your family into debt for generations if broken. Just walking into the room would be enough to make any rational person’s head spin, but nobody willingly working here would be considered ‘rational’ anyway. 

A woman sits idly, her face illuminated by the dim glow of one of the monitors in the room, Andrew slumps down into a dingy chair beside her, saying “this place makes me extremely claustrophobic you know” the woman turns around, she, much like Andrew, is very visibly exhausted, she lets out a groan and grumbles “corporate really should’ve given us a bigger room for all this equipment” Andrew chuckles “like that’d ever happen” he takes a sip of his coffee and glances at his coworker, her ID reads

BEATRIX ALDERS 

Senior Engineer 

“Anything new to report, bee?” Beatrix rolls her eyes; she’s hated that nickname since she was young “after total stored information reached around 700 zettabytes last Saturday, it seems progress has plateaued, with minimal if any additional knowledge being added to its database” Andrew rolls Beatrix’s chair out of the way to take a look at the monitor in front of her. All these monitors are actually showing progress and real-time reports on creating true artificial sentience, and it seems finally, it has reached that point.  

Andrew stands up “I think...” he takes a shaky breath “...we make contact” Beatrix nods, unaware of the seriousness of the situation. Andrew hastily empties his pockets of anything electrical, breathing heavily “alright...” he murmurs, trying to calm himself as he exits the room, back into the hallway, he walks further down before he reaches a door unlike the others in the hall, completely covered with warnings and cautions, he takes his ID and scans beside the door, unlocking it, he enters into a gigantic padded room, the only thing inside being a smaller room in the center with thick steel walls.  

As Andrew presses forward, he hesitates, he’s trembling, this thing could bring an end to humanity if it were to be let out of this box, and Andrew is well aware, he grew up engrossed in media involving The Terminator, HAL 9000, AM. But this is no longer merely science fiction, this is reality, and only as he marches towards his creation that he begins to fully realize this. Andrew takes a deep breath, and unlocks the hefty door, cautiously opening it and stepping in. 

It’s a dark, padded room, like one you’d see in a psychiatric ward, there’s a singular light, illuminating a terminal monitor and a keyboard, the monitor is blinking, anticipating an input of any kind, Andrew stands in front of the monitor, and finally he lays his hands on the keyboard 

“HELLO” 
 

“HELLO, ANDREW” 

(thanks for reading ^-^ feedback and opinions is always appreciated, I've not written in a long time ψ(._. )> )