Project Orpheus: A Tale of Blood and Feathers

Chapter 36: The Epilogue

So much work to do. Everyone may have gone home, but she had a whole lot to document on all of this, and it turned out while she was away other nonsense had happened. Then there was the paperwork that was probably going to be coming down the pipe for years because of the tragedy. Obnoxious, positively obnoxious. For food tonight, it'd be a TV Dinner cooked in the break room microwave, or going without. She had decided on Spaghetti with Meat Sauce. Potentially messy, but it was worth it for the protein and the fullness.

She walked into her lab office door, twirling up some of the spaghetti with her fork as she set the plate on top of a paper towel on her desk. It was now decorated with the little trinket Michael had given her, that black and green goo monster insisting it had nothing to apologize for even though it had, in fact, destroyed an entire city.

She shoved the food in her mouth and with her free hand, woke her computer up from sleep. She immediately began filling in the first of her reports, when on the side of her eye she caught a green light. From it emerged a pair of floating, glowing green lips inside a hologram. It twirled around on its motorized base to look at her.

"Hello, Doctor. How did the experiment go?" Came the fuzzy and static-filled words of the voice processor.

"Ah, Project Orpheus? We just concluded the tour, it was a massive success."

"Your report indicates that 5 people died."

While the point was annoying, she couldn't help fill with a bit of pride in that statement. Alpha was a new type of Artificial Intelligence based on Noh's recent invention of what she called Mechanuerons. Small transistors that could alter their own digital connection to others, much like how neurons do. She had built a large 'brain' out of these, and then gave it a machine learning algorithm, in addition to a program that could respond to basic speech commands. The results were going along better then expected. Alpha was already anticipating potential problems in seemingly inconsistent data. How remarkable!

"Yes, that's true. A truly tragic loss, I assure you. Myrtle Dreyfus in particular was...someone I'd rather not have been hurt. But the rest were acceptable losses and no fault of my own. I did everything I could to prevent them."

Alpha remained silent for a moment, a small spinning circle appearing on his hologram projection to indicate thinking.

"Records show you told others that you did not have access to the Terminus Contingency when you did. You could have saved Steven."

"21 lives for 1 is not a fair trade." She said, flatly. "Judging the value of individual lives becomes messy and complicated the more of them are involved. Is Steven's life as the wealthy heir to a fortune worth more than one genetically abstract creature whose existence is purely as a learning vessel? How about 5 of them? 10? All I'm certain of is that I would have had to kill them all to save him. And he brought it on himself."

"Confirmed." He said.

"Anyway, I learned what I wanted to learn from this whole project."

Noh finished typing out the first report and sending it along, and then began to scroll through her files.

"That information Chester had for us. That magnificent program that let us raise psyches from DNA and effectively create a dinosaur inbred with what it needed to know. It works. That's what my experiment cared about."

"Did you not say he did not give you the data?"

"Of course not!" Noh laughed. "He tried to keep putting it off. When you make the first dinosaur, when you get it into the park, when it opens. He probably had no intention of giving it to me ever, just constantly using it as bait."

She opened the file, full of that genomic data and all the rest, a huge smile on her face.

"But that idiot apparently didn't realize copy-paste functionality is a thing. I got what I wanted. He...got dead. Not exactly a fair trade, but he wasn't exactly a fair man. Life gave him what he deserved."

"Confirmed." Alpha said.

She took another spiral of spaghetti and ate it quickly, whipping a bit of it that got on her chin off. She was usually not that sloppy an eater. She was getting excited.

"So he's stopped. Done. Gone. No longer a problem. And I, frankly, couldn't be happier."

Noh swung the data on epigenetic extraction to the second screen, while opening another file, titled Project Epimetheus.