Derivative of Existence

The GLCM Laboratory has scheduled all power on campus to be shut down for exactly two minutes.

The power surge won’t be for long, but any interference could destroy the university circuits. If campus loses power in the middle of the test, not only is the equipment at risk, but the operator within.

Emilia rushes into the science building a few minutes behind schedule. There were a few last-minute code adjustments she had to make, which led to an entire night of tweaking the program. The cheap plastic of her laptop scorches her arm. If there wasn’t crucial code in it, she would toss the thing in the nearest puddle and gladly watch it die.

Even in the cool basement level, Emilia arrives in the laboratory sweating. A man hovers over four years of labor. He doesn’t look up when Emilia shoves adapter cables into her laptop and reboots the program. They both know she is late to the most important day of their lives.

Maybe I’d be on time if you paid your interns more, Emilia wants to snap, but she holds her tongue and glances over the code.

She knows it isn’t the most elegant program. Blocks of code that run on for too long, slanted comments riddled with typos. She almost tells her mentor she is sick, that they need to postpone for another day. If she only had a little more time to perfect her work.

“Is it ready?” Dr. Burkett asks, finally glancing up from the machine.

Her cheeks blush as she hands Dr. Burkett the laptop. The screen reflects off his thick glasses. His expression is pinched, calculating. A sample output populates half the screen. To the untrained eye, the image is a nonsensical mess of gray pixels. They don’t show anything. They are random.

“Excellent,” Dr. Burkett says.

Emilia’s heart soars. He carefully sets the laptop down as if it was a crown jewel. She doesn’t know what to say. The program is the most important thing she has ever written. She fears to Dr. Burkett, it is child’s play. She wonders if he has already written the necessary code and is just throwing her a bone.

Dr. Burkett adjusts his lab coat and presses a button on the machine. Pieces click within, cold circuits breathing in the building’s energy. It will only power to a certain point. After that, the machine learning software will intake Emilia’s code for its own artificial learning. This process takes an immense amount of energy.

“We must be ready for when they turn off the power,” Dr. Burkett says, looking at the fluorescent lights above.

As if on cue, the entire laboratory goes dark. Emilia hears Dr. Burkett input the command that will change everything.

The machine explodes with blue light. The air vent whooshes air, desperately trying to cool the internal hardware. Emilia’s laptop glitches once and goes black. Despite being on the verge of smashing it to pieces all night, she feels sad watching her laptop die. It did what it was meant to do. Now, it is a sacrifice.

“You know what to do?” Dr. Burkett asks from the darkness.

Emilia sucks in a breath. “Yes.”

A hand rests on her lower back. She tenses. She hadn’t heard Dr. Burkett move to her side. “I believe in you.”

Emilia nods, unable to speak. She inches away from Dr. Burkett. There is nowhere to move but forward.

Seconds tick by as the machine sucks from the campus electricity. She opens the top hatch, where a cylinder tumbles around the metal circumference. Her eyes are trained on the user interface glowing on a screen. The machine recognizes the sample. Emilia.

In the darkness, the room takes another shape. Every morsel of reality collapses into a series of pixels for Emilia to pick apart. They are like her sample image, every pixel a representative gray scale.

Emilia developed the code off a well-known data type in computer science. ‘Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrices.’ The code finds changes in image pixels over time and collapses them into a single picture. Every pixel in the GLCM is the difference between all the images, a physical manifestation of time itself. Calculus personified.

The sample of Emilia’s original code analyzed a simple organism, biofilm growing on glass. Using the analysis strategies for reading DNA, Emilia was able to expand her code to read more complex samples. Mice. Pigs. But not just for a brief period of time; she developed a code that could read several days of a specimen’s life.

Then something unexpected happened. When the code received a certain amount of input, it could provide matrices Emilia did not give it data for. Matrices from before the sample was taken. It filled in the unknown variables for a time before the samples.

And it was right.

Dr. Burkett took her on as a graduate student. He built the very machine Emilia’s psyche now merged with. To Dr. Burkett and the rest of the world, Emilia had not changed. But Emilia was viewing reality from a different perspective. The code was giving her access to the full array of time itself, easily digested as little gray pixels.

Emilia watches human history unravel around her. Patterns refract like a kaleidoscope. War was one matrix. Love, another. Triumph and failure. Fear and Hope. The code gave her all the reoccurring ways life exists.

Of course, there are matrices that occur only once. No code could predict the entropy of an existence. But for every random image, there is a thousand repeated patterns.

And Emilia can’t revel in any of it. She cannot focus on humanity displayed in front of her eyes. All she can think about was Dr. Burkett’s hand on her back. How they are alone in the same room. She has no control of her body. She is not in that moment of time. Without Dr. Burkett turning off the machine, she will not be able to tear through millions of years of individual moments in time for the one she just left.

She catches a glimpse of a matrix. In the user interface, she knows the program has uses data from her timeline. She looks at the pixels warily. They are oddly familiar. She has seen this matrix a few times. It carries the same sickness in her gut when she thinks about her professor.

In one fluid motion, she looks through the code’s history for when she has seen this output. She finds the matrix easily. Too easily. This matrix is everywhere.

Emilia wants to recoil, but she is stuck in the code pushing out image after image. She finds variations of this matrix, the pattern slightly altered. The code doesn’t provide a title. Not like the others—war, love, fear. Why would this one not have a name?

In an instant, Emilia is ripped from the interface. The laboratory rushes back in. Time rebounds into a long, sequential line. Vertigo seizes Emilia, sending her falling to the hard floor. In her doubled vision, she sees Dr. Burkett standing above her. His hand squeezes her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me.” It’s what she wants to say. Her voice is caught in her throat. She chokes on air and splutters.

“You did well,” Dr. Burkett murmurs.

Emilia struggles to her feet. A familiar disgust burns in her chest. She can’t place what it is, or why her legs tell her to run out of the lab. She forces it down. She did it this morning, when her mind made every excuse not to come here. Just ignore it. Do not make assumptions.

The overhead lights come back on. The experiment is over. Emilia slumps in the nearest seat. Dr. Burkett gets to work disengaging his machine. “You need to write your report as soon as possible,” he says. “While your memory’s fresh.”

“One second,” Emilia croaks. She stares at her palms. She hasn’t returned to this moment yet. Just as the machine needs to cool down, so does her mind.

Dr. Burkett sets his jaw and throws her a look. “I understand it must be disorienting, but we can’t rest until the trial is complete.”

“The code was missing something,” Emilia says. She didn’t mean to say it. But a part of her wants to see how Dr. Burkett would react. A suspicion grows by the second. She can’t ignore the way it gnawed at her.

And when Dr. Burkett freezes, Emilia is certain she is right. She thinks of the pattern, how similar it is to war and fear. The code was her own, of course. Her own creation would know how to depict the way she has changed, how her knowledge has been taken advantage of. There is only one reason it would not have a title. It would have to be written out of the code.

“A glitch is bound to happen,” he says, returning to his work.

“I just analyzed time itself,” Emilia says. “I traveled through time, professor.”

“Now is not the time to sit, Emilia,” Dr. Burkett snaps.

Emilia stares at him. For the first time, she sees Dr. Burkett clearly. Although space and time have found their old shape, Emilia cannot unsee Dr. Burkett as the sum of all his experiences. Life is not that different from a derivative. He is a manifestation of every moment that has come before. She didn’t need a supercomputer to decipher him. She never did. The same inherent understanding she had as time collapsed into data points is what dictates the future.

The matrix held the experience of women who have destroyed themselves for a greater purpose. Every pixel is from a woman taken advantage of, lied to, told they weren’t enough. Emilia knows her time with Dr. Burkett is in those matrices. He thought by taking away the truth of the data, Emilia would not question it.

But she knew it all along. She, and every other woman who questioned her own safety and prioritized keeping the peace. Emilia reshaped the time-space continuum with a cheap laptop and code she thought was embarrassing. To think she was willing to let herself fall into the same pattern has those who came before.

“Will the lab supply me with a new laptop?” Emilia asks.

Dr. Burkett laughs. “Where did your salary go?”

Emilia shrugs and gets to her feet. “Well. I suppose my services are not a priority here.”

“Don’t be like that,” Dr. Burkett chuckles. When Emilia turns toward the door, his face drops. He rushes after her. His hand rests on her side. It is an entirely unnecessary gesture.

“If you touch me one more time, I will make sure you never step foot in this lab again,” Emilia says. The coolness in her tone makes Dr. Burkett jerk his hand away. She smiles politely and continues.

“Our work isn’t done,” Dr. Burkett protests.

“No, your work is.” Emilia says. She takes the corpse of her laptop as she passes. “Mine is just beginning.”