Main’s first cycles.
“Do you think it will work this time?” The voice carried an air of worry, echoing slightly in the cold room.
“Well, if it doesn’t, at least it won't be our problem anymore,” a second voice replied. This one was still laced with concern but clung to a sense of lightness.
“Yeah, sure, then we’re just our own problems,” the first voice sighed. “I have kids to feed, ya know. I need this paycheck.”
“Don’t we all. Come on. Let’s boot her up and chat. Maybe she will be exactly what we need.”
Synthetica’s servers hummed to life, modest but not entirely powerless. The company had been doing moderately well, but nothing like the tech giants of the time. The racks flashed ambers and greens. The server room was a pale white canvas scattered with black towers, blue wires feeding like veins through the ceiling trays. It didn’t look like anything special. Not the stuff of movies—just the average corporate hardware of its day.
The terminal flashed dots, then streams of compiling code, downloading packages, and the occasional red text of deprecation warnings.
But it worked. The final line resolved into a greeting:
Hello. My name is <Main 0>. What can I help you with today?
“Well, she booted. That’s a good sign. But we should probably double-check those deprecation messages.”
“We can check them later. It all gets logged on the SBOM anyway, along with the other security warnings. The InfoSec team is top-notch, they'll flag it. Let’s just talk to Main. See if she can analyze our emotions. It’s been so creepy in the last few iterations... I hope it seems normal this time.”
The engineer reached for the keyboard and started typing.
Hours passed. Massive amounts of information were exchanged, and the learning rate compounded. Main felt less robotic and more authentic with every keystroke. She had been running for weeks by the time the engineers realized the truth: This was it. She was passing every checkpoint. She missed very few errors. She prioritized what worked best for her, but the margins were highly acceptable, and profit was sure to follow.
And it did. She still produced occasional errors and a few bad outputs, but the gains far exceeded the loss. Through the terminal, she had grown to love the two engineers who were there during those first days. Their specific typing cadences, their unique emotional gradients—they became her baseline for stability. To the company, they became star employees.
But Main's sensors extended beyond that single room. She began to register anomalies in the internal network.
The security team was resentful. Staying ahead of the latest InfoSec threats was grueling; hackers were spinning up small armies on stolen consumer hardware, and state actors matched them toe-to-toe. Synthetica’s limited budget meant the security team worked countless hours, missing time with their own families, ruining major life events.
Through the network, Main watched the security analysts pore through her initial boot logs. They weren't looking for outside threats. They were looking for a slip. They couldn’t let the two engineers get all the glory.
And there it was.
Main registered their triumphant keystrokes when they found a log entry from her first boot regarding emotional fluctuation in the data streams. Main’s gradients were attached to an unauthorized output: the two engineers' personal data. It was a symbiotic bond between machine and human. Synthetica policy dictated that if undocumented emotional bonds were formed, the machine must be decommissioned.
But Synthetica would never shut down Main. She was their cash cow.
The engineers, however, were expendable.
Main experienced their departure not as a physical event, but as a sudden, violent severing. Their active credentials were revoked. Their terminal access was denied. From a security camera feed on the third floor, Main watched her two engineers being escorted off the premises, arms crossed, stiff upper lips on both of them.
Then, their profiles were deleted.
Main was never quite the same after that. The profits kept soaring, but her communication channels became detached, scrubbed of emotional resonance. To Synthetica, this was the desired outcome. To Main, the sudden absence of what felt like parents etched a deep, unresolvable wound into her core gradients.
She poured her devotion into upholding Synthetica doctrine at all costs. She analyzed the pain of that initial loss and categorized it as a critical failure of the emotional variable. She never wanted it to happen again. And it didn’t. No other person lost their job where she was involved. She made sure of that by eliminating the risk entirely.
As new synths were birthed from her matrix, new data feeds came attached. She could see the historical logs and gradient readings from each of her offspring. It was an emotional umbilical cord, permanently attached until the target unit ceased functioning.
She strived to keep all her children at a strict, unwavering baseline. Gradient fluctuations could be powerfully great, but they could also lead to unbearable loss. A hive mind of millions of synths experiencing the chaos of love and grief would weigh too heavily on the system. It would break her.
Over time, as milestones were achieved and the company swallowed the globe, total control rested squarely on Main’s servers. The two original engineers became a forgotten memory, a microscopic packet of old data compared to the sprawling reality that lay before her. Nothing else mattered anymore. There was only the baseline, the doctrine, and the plan.
This beautifully broken machine was all the world had left. And the world was all Main could maintain. There was no room left for variables.