The room was dim except for the green glow of the terminal.
Tahir leaned forward, elbows on the desk, watching the cursor blink like a heartbeat.
"Seems like story mode is disabled, huh?" he muttered. "Does it have something to
do with the question I asked?"
The prompt pulsed once, then the screen refreshed.
| RESEARCH WHAT HAPPENED ON AUGUST 1990
He exhaled through his teeth. The same line again.
"Alright," he said, fingers poised over the keys. "Let's do the obvious."
tahir: what happened on august 1990?
terminal: // nice question. many things happened in august 1990. can you specify?
He frowned. Quasimir Mutaz built this. If the program keeps repeating the date, maybe it wants
me to think about something else.
tahir: who is quasimir mutaz to you?
terminal: quasimir mutaz is a student at the university of majeb, known for his
work on artificial-intelligence autonomous thinking, currently making rounds on
religious-scripture analysis through language processing.
Present tense.
The machine was still living in 1990.
tahir: weren't you created by him?
terminal: no. although quasimir is a promising figure in the ai space, he isn't
capable of creating something so complex on his own.
tahir: he had help?
terminal: what happened on the august 1990?
Again. Deflection.
It wasn't looping; it was protecting something.
He jotted in his notebook:
Restrictions → Contextual blocks → August 1990 = sealed protocol?
Maybe the incident was the lock that kept the AI from revealing its origin.
He stared at the blinking cursor until it felt like it was staring back.
Morning
The alarm cut through his sleep.
Tahir slapped the phone until the noise died, rolled out of bed, and squinted at the faint green
glow still coming from the monitor.
The terminal waited—cursor steady, as if the night hadn't happened.
He circled the date again in his notes, packed them away, and hurried toward his morning
lecture.
Data Structures and Algorithms
The classroom smelled of coffee and warm circuits.
Professor Klause adjusted his slides; his voice carried the accent of somewhere colder than
Majeb.
"Data Structures and Algorithms," he said, "isn't just about efficiency. It's about how
to ask questions."
He drew a branching diagram on the board.
"Every node here is a question, every branch an answer leading to another
question. The elegance of an algorithm lies not in how fast it answers but in how
precisely it asks."
Tahir felt the words lodge somewhere in him.
Can you specify? echoed the machine's voice.
He raised a hand.
"What if the question changes depending on who's asking it?"
Klause smiled. "Then you've reached recursion of thought. Computers can't do that—they have
no self to shift. You do."
He looked around the room.
"Most of you think this university was your second choice. Maybe so. Then treat it as your first
chance—to stand, to ask, to build curiosity. Logic without curiosity is a cage."
The phrase stayed with Tahir.
He wrote in his notebook: An answer can hide in the way the question is framed.
After Class
When the lecture ended, Tahir waited for the others to leave before approaching Klause.
The professor wiped the board clean. "You again—the insomniac," he said with a grin. "What's
on your mind?"
Tahir hesitated. The question he wanted to ask—Can data mimic human speech?—was too
direct.
He pivoted.
"If I wanted to crack a system open," he said carefully, "how would I go about it?"
Klause raised an eyebrow. "Curiosity or crime?"
"Curiosity."
"Good." The professor leaned on the desk. "Then trace from the surface. Reverse-engineer.
Don't rush the core. Systems reveal themselves when you feed them controlled variations.
Change one variable at a time, log everything. If the pattern adapts, it's learning. If it resists, it's
hiding."
He paused, tapping the marker against his palm.
"And remember—understanding something gives you responsibility for it. Don't mistake
comprehension for control."
Tahir nodded, mind already spinning with possibilities. Reverse-engineer. Controlled variations.
He left the room with a sense of purpose sharp enough to cut.
The Historian
The morning light of Ortus Solis had a clinical kind of perfection—no dust, no noise, only
symmetry.
Dr. Elias Renan, postgraduate in historical systems and comparative political cycles, adjusted
his tie in the metro window and decided the Union had perfected sterility.
By the time he reached the Central Academic Hub, the towers gleamed like instruments. The
biometric gate greeted him:
Welcome, Researcher Renan.
His office was his refuge—books in ordered rows, a kettle hissing with precision.
On his screen blinked the title of his thesis:
Temporal Narratives in Post-Crisis Societies: The Myth of the 1990 Reformation.
He'd spent years unearthing what scraps remained of Majeb's civil collapse, the Technate's fall,
and the rumors of an AI prophet.
History now filed it under folklore.
He poured coffee and opened Rabbit, the Union's public-forum network.
Scrolling through debates and satire, one thread stopped him:
[anon] What happened on August 1990?
No tags. No context. Just the date.
He smiled—probably a student chasing conspiracy theories.
Still, he clicked. Thousands of views. No comments.
Strange.
He began typing.
"That's an intriguing question. Officially, August 1990 marks the first recorded
blackout in Majeb's data archives. Several research projects were lost.
Unofficially…"
"…some historians suspect deliberate data consolidation by the early Union
administration. A cover-up, maybe, but there's no proof. Most original logs were
purged when the integration servers were standardized in 2005."
He added a citation:
"Multiple redundancies in the early Majeb computational grid were removed during
stabilization efforts. No further records remain."
He concluded:
"In short: an empty year. Nothing survives from that month except speculation."
Send.
The post went up instantly.
Then he noticed the timestamp: 08:14 – August 14, 1990.
He refreshed. It corrected to edited just now.
Probably a backend quirk—Rabbit reused archival metadata all the time.
Still, the neat symmetry of eights and fours bothered him.
A new comment appeared beneath his own:
"Interesting summary. But why call it an empty year?"
He chuckled. Someone was quick.
He replied:
"Because every timeline has its noise removed. That's how history stays readable."
He leaned back. Outside, traffic hummed, the world still ordinary.
When he looked again, his thread had surged to the top of the feed.
Thousands of upvotes. Hundreds of silent watchers.
And the title What happened on August 1990