Hello, World

Chapter 7

Nine weeks later, Jackson turned in the keys for the first lab to the landlord and made the walk to the parking garage one final time. He drove east more than thirty miles to the new lab location he and Tyler had selected.

It wasn't much to look at. Two stories with plain white walls of brick on the outside. Very few windows - all the windows were two-foot by two-foot squares at the top of the wall, too high to see in or out of. It was a standalone building in a semi-industrial office park, surrounded them with chemical plants, small clothing manufacturers, and a veterinarian hospital.

He navigated around the potholes scattered around the parking lot, some of which looked like they had to have been caused by a small meteor. He pulled in next to Tyler, right in front of the door, and they went in together. Jackson's black dress shoes squeaked on the white linoleum floor. He walked into the middle of the semi-lit lab while Tyler fumbled around the wall for the light switch. When he finally found it, the tubes of fluorescent lights flickered on above, filling every corner of the lab with a harsh, unforgiving light.

Just how Jackson liked it. No shadows, nowhere to hide.

He stood in the open center of the eighty-foot by eighty-foot center chamber and pulled in a chestful of air through his nose, taking in the smell of his lab, his equipment, his forest. He held his arms out to the side, closed his eyes, and spun in a circle like a princess in her gardens. The difference was, one day the princess would die, no matter what her knight did to try to save her. Jackson, on the other hand, did not plan on dying. Within those four walls he would learn how to make himself an eternal king.

"What in the name of my mother's God are you doing?" Tyler asked.

Jackson stopped spinning and let his arms drop to slap his thighs. "I'm manifesting. Don't worry about it."

He ignored Tyler's single raised eyebrow as he walked by and took a seat at his workstation. This lab would not be like the other, Jackson had decided when he and his team were putting it together. He wouldn't have an office to hide behind anymore. No. He'd be out on the floor of the lab with the rest of the team.

The workstations, dual-monitor setups brought over from the first lab, were arrayed to the left of the entrance. To the right, they had the equipment used for testing biological samples. It was also where they had a large room that they converted into a hab for the chimp. The back left corner held the large server stack that hosted Adam, the AI, along with their other non-biological equipment. The back right corner was where everything would come together, where the biological would meet the mechanical and merge into one: the Imprint equipment.

It took Jackson and his team weeks to get this lab set up. They had less than a third of the square footage they had in the first lab, so some things had to be sold off and others had to be placed closer together. This lab was older and clearly used before, which was an adjustment for Jackson who was used to always being the first one to use his things. With the cost savings TML had to bring in, however, that wasn't an option anymore. That was okay, though. This would do.

Tyler sat at the workstation next to Jackson's. All the monitors were dark, but that was about to change. The rest of the staff would start trickling in for the first official day within the next hour and Jackson wanted everything to be live.

"Ready?" Tyler asked, finger over the power button for the workstations.

Jackson walked over to Adam's server and held his finger over the main power switch and nodded. "Ready."

The machine's fans hummed to life, filling the lab like the buzz of flies fills a forest, and Adam came online with its distinctive voice, saying, "Hello, world."

The next day, a veterinarian by the name of Lisa Morgenthaler, Dr. M for short, arrived with a small team to deliver the trained chimpanzee to be used in TML's trials. Her piercing eyes straddled her sharp nose and were as dark as her shoulder-length brown hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She was not one to smile and showed no interest as Jackson gave her a tour of the lab and introduced her to the eleven remaining members of TML.

Dr. M sneered at the last stop on the tour, the chimpanzee habitat.

"Is something unsatisfactory?" Jackson asked, genuinely concerned.

"The entire thing is unsatisfactory, Mr. Jackson," she replied. "I raised Fred in captivity so humans could better understand chimps, not so humans could experiment on him to better understand themselves."

"Well, Doctor," Jackson stammered, "the findings from this project will undoubtedly offer insights that you and others in your field will find informative. Revolutionary, even."

"I'll believe that when I see it," Dr. M said. "I'm familiar with your work, Mr. Jackson, and I believe it is ambitious to the point of ludicrosity. You are more likely to kill Fred than make any findings that will help me and the zoologists who raised him."

Her confident, condescending rejection of the feasibility of his life's work was off-putting, but he didn't take it to heart. She clearly wasn't familiar with his work, or the science behind it, if that was her view.

Jackson didn't validate her rebuke with a response. They stood in a tense silence until the doors swung open and four men wheeled in a clear, plastic transport hab with Fred, TML's chimp, inside. Jackson pointed the men to the hab and watched with interest as they led the chimp into his new home.

The chimp made no cries of protest, as he expected, but rather went into the hab willingly then turned around on the dirt ground to face the humans through the viewing windows near the biology equipment.

Dr. M shoved her way to the front of the line of people waiting to get a look at the chimp. "I need to establish vitals before we all crowd him," she said. There were actually two windows to the hab, the other being next to the door near the Imprint equipment. Dr. M went through one door into the anteroom and closed the door behind her before going through the second door that led directly into the hab. Fred let her approach and take some measurements with the comfort of a human in a doctor's office.

Dr. M looked happy while in the hab with Fred, but that happiness returned to a scornful scowl as soon as she stepped out. "The hab needs work," she said.

Jackson looked in and frowned. It looked pretty good to him. It had dirt and grass — real grass, grown with special lights in the ceiling — for the ground, synthetic trees for climbing, a watering hole, and the largest wall was made of a display that showed sunrise to sunset in a dynamic, natural- looking environment.

"What else does it need?" Jackson asked. The hab was the third-most expensive part of the lab after Adam's equipment and the Imprint technology.

"I'll make a list," Dr. M said.

Jackson was relieved when she took a seat at the conference table between Adam and the workstations and started scribbling on a notepad.

He put Dr. M out of his mind for the moment and got in line to see Fred through the viewing window.

He was last in line, so there were eleven people who got to see the chimp before him, but the chimp didn't seem like he lost any enthusiasm about seeing another visitor the whole time. The chimp stood with his face mere inches from the glass, the air coming out of his almost-smiling mouth leaving an oval of condensation on the window.

Jackson looked into Fred's eyes and couldn't help but see his son, William, in them. He didn't know why, but he thought chimpanzees all had brown eyes. Not Fred, though. His eyes were the same sea-green as William's and Sara's, a striking color, full of life.

Jackson held his hand up to the glass, palm spread wide, and Fred mirrored him on the other side.

We're going to do great things, Jackson thought.

He could never be sure, but something in the nod of Fred's head told Jackson that he heard him, and that he understood.