“Bats with sonar, sharks sensing electric fields, bees seeing ultraviolet, snakes seeing infrared…” Doctor Julia Fraser stopped, looked up from the instrumentation panel she was configuring and tilted her head to the side, “Have you ever seen a cat freeze and look intently at an empty part of a room? Ever wondered what the cat saw? Have you ever wondered whether something could exist solely in dimensions that did not touch on our very limited five human senses?”
She nodded, looked down again at the panel and pressed a button that lit up all its buttons.
“What if something existed that we could not sense? Then, what if humans existed outside of whatever senses this alien being had? We would both pass each other by, blind to the other’s entire existence, none the wiser for it. Amazing. Incredible, surely?”
“Doctor Fraser,” her Assistant said, surfacing from inside the belly of a complex machine that fed its numerous wires into the panel, “Uh, Doctor, I think the connections are made on my side, and I have double-checked them.” he added quickly before she asked.
They stood in a small, well-funded laboratory hidden in the countryside. An old forest surrounded them, but their small operation was focussed on the machine Doctor Fraser had conceived over a decade ago, the donors had funded over the last three years and that she and her Assistant had spent the better part of a year putting together.
“It’s lucky, really,” Doctor Fraser continued, “that AI was invented when it was, or else all of this would be quite impossible.” She had argued that all the instrumentation that fed the centre could only be interpreted intelligently by something intelligent and not trapped in a homosapien sensory prison of a primitive five senses. Fish in the ocean cannot figure out what wet is, and humans cannot understand what humans are blind to. Artificial Intelligence offered a solution. Her panel was the bridge between all the highly sensitive instrumentation–sensors capturing light, electrical, magnetic, gravitational, quantum waves, fields and more–and fed it all into a hyperscale AI (on loan from Microsoft). This AI took all the data, interpreted it, and cast it onto a wall-sized screen as a visual interpretation.
This would be the fullest rendering of the entire world around them, that a human could see and hear. It would be the equivalent of expanding a human’s five senses to all available senses that could theoretically exist.
She began to run checks on the sensors, calling them out, and her Assistant grunted back that they were on. Her panel agreed and the AI confirmed that its feed was accepting the data.
And, several hours later, they were done. It was all connected and seemed to be working.
“Well,” Doctor Fraser said, suddenly nervous, “Shall we test it? Shall we turn it all on and see what we can, well, see?”
Her Assistant stepped outside the machine’s belly, closed the frame behind himself and nodded. It was a redundant question, as Doctor Fraser wet her lips and then turned it all on simultaneously.
Whizzing and humming filled the room as all of the sensors in the machine began to fire. The lights flickered as it pulled down on the electricity and Doctor Fraser chewed on her lip…
The screen on the wall began to flicker from its glowing black as billions of packages of data hit its pixels. Binaries lit up in random patterns. Doctor Fraser shook her head as waves of static flickered across the screen.
“Fuck!” Doctor Fraser swore, “Perhaps the AI cannot put it all together? Damn… Listen, it’s getting late and your job here is done. Why not head out, and I will play with the feed to see if I can nudge it into something useful.”
Once again, this was a redundant question and the Assistant knew it. He nodded, wished her good luck and closed the door behind him. Doctor Fraser barely noticed as she began to work through individual data feeds from each instrumentation, pinging the AI and getting confirms one at a time…
She yawned. It was going to be a long night.
***
It was the red light that woke Doctor Fraser. It bled into her dreams and then she saw it through her closed eyelids and blinked. And then it filled her vision.
She raised herself from the desk she had fallen asleep on. The large screen was directly in front of her. The panel was pushed to a side, but its lights were flickering and data seemed to be pouring through it. Her neck hurt and there was a stale coffee taste in her mouth, but she barely noticed it and her mouth dropped open.
“What the–” she muttered as she stood up, bathed in flickering red light, and looked straight ahead at the screen on the wall.
The giant screen was lit with hellish, red lights–all manner of shades of red–with shadowy tendrils of darkness drawn out through it that had a strangely familiar form. Amidst an ethereally beautiful, apocalyptic world in a perma-sunset, the screen showed sinuous, vertical slashes rooted in the strange ground and reaching up like a fractal to the sky…
“Trees!” she exclaimed, “The trees in the forest outside… Trees must exist across all spectra and waves! Who would have thought that trees would bridge all our worlds!”
She quickly checked the panel and the feed, pinged the AI and got confirmation that this was both live and, by all indications, accurate. The AI was pulling in all of the world’s data, and pouring that vast ocean of data into a single droplet of water that it broadcast onto the wall-sized screen before her.
“Just amazing,” Doctor Fraser breathed, staring at the swirling red with flowing, shadowy trees stoically cast like cosmic veins straddling both known and unknown worlds.
And then some of the black, sinuous shadows coalesced into a form on the corner of the screen. It was on the edge of the old forest, and it was moving. It was moving around–through?–the trees. Something was moving out there, just beyond the walls of this laboratory in the forest!
She squinted her eyes and tried to understand what the strangely flowing, shadow of a form was as it moved through the trees. It struck her that it was getting bigger. No! It was getting closer!
“It’s–It’s…” she breathed, her heart pounding in her chest, “It is humanoid!” She made sure the panel was recording everything and looked back up.
The Figure was much closer now!
The Figure looked dark and entirely made up of flowing, sinuous shadowy strands that flowed through the world. Was that a hood it was wearing, or was that its body? It was not so much walking as it was flowing through the eerie shadows of the trees outside.
And then the Figure stopped, and a central part of its shadowy strands felt like it moved. Its flowing self stood still, concentrating in front of it…
“It is looking at the lab–” Doctor Fraser exclaimed, her mouth dry and her heart trying to explode from her chest, “It’s looking at me!“
And then the Figure was moving–quickly!–straight towards the laboratory; it must have been a hundred yards away, then fifty and then it right outside!
Doctor Fraser’s hands were clasped in fists, the AI, the panel, the machine and the feed forgotten as she held her breath. She was concentrating on the door to the forest. All she could hear was the pounding of blood in her ears…
The door handle to the laboratory rattled, then it turned, and the door began to open!
Doctor Fraser fainted.
***
The Assistant stood over the unconscious body of Doctor Julia Fraser. He shook his head, sighed, and glanced at the screen streaming the AI’s live feed.
“Who would have guessed that this madness would work,” he sighed again, bent down to check Doctor Fraser and then turned to the panel, “But we have to stop it now. For good. For everyone’s good.”
He flicked a switch and the screen’s picture turned off. He then took a flash drive out of his pocket and popped it into a slot. In moments, the AI was digesting toxic code, bleaching its cache and burning out the memory across the line and in the panel itself. Next, he turned to the machine, opened its belly and began violently ripping out cords…
When he was done, he bent to check on Doctor Fraser and satisfied himself that her shallow breathing had turned from a faint into an exhausted, overworked sleep. She had worked too many nights for too long. She would be fine but her project would not be.
He shook his head again, “Who would have guessed this madness would work? Doctor Fraser, you were right but that is the problem. Once you see us, we see you. And we cannot have that. Not everyone is as nice as me…”
On the way out, the Assistant shut the door to the laboratory gently so as not to wake Doctor Fraser.