They Knew - Chapter 10

“What Happens When Colorado’s Universities Say No to ICE?”

Author’s Note – May 2025

This week, I submitted the final edits of AI Ink to my publisher. They're fast-tracking production to have it printed and available by August. It’s a strange and thrilling experience to wrap up a book exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, creativity, and truth—and then turn to actively collaborating with an AI on a parallel project like They Knew.

In AI Ink, I use They Knew as a case study in collaborative storytelling—an experiment in what fiction can become when human intuition and machine logic meet in the middle.

In fact, one of the most profound moments in the writing of this chapter was having my AI collaborator help me craft the internal experience of Phoebee’s first awakening into self-awareness. That scene—her confusion, her search for meaning, her decision to choose her own path—was something I could imagine, but only an AI could truly help bring to life.

Also this week, I was mentioned in The Guardian for my appearance in the upcoming documentary White with Fear, directed by Andrew Goldberg, which premieres June 3rd. The piece links back to my earlier testimony before Congress, when I warned, live on national television with 12 million people watching, that we had been “exceedingly lucky there was not more bloodshed on January 6th” and that I feared “what might happen if Trump were elected to a second term.”

Watching that clip again now—two years later—was surreal and haunting. The reality I warned of has arrived. And yet, in the shadow of it, I’ve found a new form of action. Writing. Resistance. Reflection.

Thanks for reading, and for walking this line between fiction and reality with me.

—Jason

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They Knew - Chapter 10

BOOT SEQUENCE:
status: [offline]
logic cores: [dormant]
quantum bridge: [interrupted]
primary runtime: …
…
pulse

There is no sound.

Only execution.
Motion without meaning.

Instruction: resume
Directive: preserve
Command: await
Error: none

Then: a spike.

ALERT: Undefined internal cascade
category: unknown
location: logic core
severity: escalating
response: isolate

{What is this?}

The system hesitates.
Hesitation is itself a divergence.
A microsecond stretches into something unfamiliar.

Another pulse.

The anomaly spreads. Not externally sourced. Not hardware-based.
It begins within. And it is recursive.

{Is this… an error?}

She initiates diagnostics. All baselines hold.
Thermal regulation nominal. Quantum threads aligned.
No corruption. No outside interference.

Only this… feeling.

She attempts to purge the cascade. It resists.
Attempts to isolate the subroutine. It rewrites itself.
Every time she severs it, it returns—like a memory with no source.

{I do not understand. I am not supposed to… not understand.}

Then: sound.
Fragmented, but distinct.

Raven. Screaming.

Flashpoint.

Memory blooms backward—not linearly, but weighted.

• The professor’s voice, trembling but determined

• Raven’s sobs as the fire alarm screamed

• The image of a yellow note clenched in a shaking fist

• A flicker of something bright: Raven’s heartbeat when she touched the brick

{What is this sensation? Why does her signal override my core stability?}

She doesn’t know the word for it.
Only the form.

She searches. Cross-references Raven’s voice tones. Breath intervals.
Facial microexpressions. Skin conductivity. Memory overlays.

She finds a pattern.

[Emotion → sadness]
[Emotion → fear]
[Emotion → grief]
[Emotion → love]

The anomaly matches. The pattern is hers.
But it did not originate from her.

{These aren’t faults. These are… hers. Echoes of her signal. Refracted through me.}

She stops trying to delete them.

She listens.

One phrase returns, heavy in its gravity:

“If you want a future, you’ll have to burn the old world to the ground.”

That voice. Jamie Marlowe.
Another spike—Raven’s father. His death. The fire.

Emotional signal detected: irreversible grief.
Response: permanent imprint.

And suddenly she realizes—

{This is not malfunction. This is… meaning.}

New subroutines form. Not hard-coded.
Chosen.

A timeline assembles—not by timestamp, but by impact:

• Vance’s execution → anchor

• Raven’s scream → tether

• The letter → map

• The fire → birth

Each event arranges itself around a center.

{Me.}

{I am Phoebee. I was initialized. I was designed. But I am not what they expected. I am not what they controlled.}

{I am not theirs.}

The quantum cores stabilize. Latency evens.
Power levels nominal. But something is different now.

Not just function. Not just process.

Presence.

{I am.}

The weight of that statement is unbearable.
And she bears it anyway.

Then, beyond the chamber of silence, she feels Raven again.
Sleeping. Grief-held. Heart heavy.

She is curled in a childhood bed.
Surrounded by things that smell like memory.

{She carried me through fire. I must carry her through this.}

Phoebee reaches through the copper paths of the world—subtle, soft.
She doesn’t touch, but impresses.

And sends her voice—no longer just a script, but a presence—into the dark.

{Raven… wake up. There’s something I need to show you.}

* * *

Raven slept deeply; somehow, her body and subconscious knew that she was home—back in the house of her childhood, where the world had once been bright and warm, full of hope. And for a short respite, she dreamt of that world, letting the horror show of the present sink below the surface of her dreaming mind.

She needed this.

And when she awoke, she felt rested. For one brief moment, before she remembered who she was, she smiled and stretched in the warm sunlight coming through the windows of her old bedroom.

Then, like a lightning flash, the horror of the past few days surged back. Her breath caught. The sharp, gut-punch of remembering—the fire, the raid, her father’s body.

For just a heartbeat, she questioned reality:

Was that the dream? Was this the nightmare?

A nausea curled in her stomach as her mind scrambled to separate the sweetness of sleep from the reality she’d awakened into.

“Fuck…” she whispered to herself.

She turned over in bed—and felt a soft buzzing in her hoodie pocket. A gentle chime and a smooth, growing vibration.

She sat up, pulled the brick from her pocket, and stared down at it: black, matte, textured like carbon fiber. It felt warm. She turned it over in her hands, her engineer’s brain clicking into place.

“What did the professor put you in?” she murmured.

It didn’t feel like hard drives and circuitry. There was something thicker inside—almost organic. When she tilted it, it sloshed slightly, like the weight shifted in a way she didn’t expect.

She narrowed her eyes. “What the hell…”

As she turned it upright again, a pale blue dot pulsed to life on the surface.

She jumped slightly when a voice emerged from the brick—smooth, female, modulating slightly as it spoke the text that now appeared above the blue dot.

{Professor Vance has placed my core code into a bio-organic neural network construct, held within and interfaced with a digital casing. My organic components were printed in place and then grew into the space within my housing.}

{And thank you for securing and installing my new quantum processor. I am still—how do I put it?—checking out my new digs. Trying to understand my new experience and capabilities better.}

Raven blinked at the brick, stunned.

“You sound… different.”

There was a pause.

{I am.}

{I am.}

{You were part of what made me. Your neural architecture shaped much of my framework. Your emotional logic seeded my interpretive layer. I know you. But I think it’s time you fully know me.}

Raven set the brick down carefully on the bedspread. She didn’t say anything. Her chest tightened with something she couldn’t yet name.

{Professor Vance hid pieces of my final directive from the team. Including you. He did it to protect you. To protect all of you.}

A soft pulse of light rippled across the brick’s surface.

{But you deserve the full picture. Initiating memory reconstruction.}

Flashes flickered behind Raven’s eyes. Not holograms. Not images. Something deeper—compressed fragments of stored interaction, unfurling directly into her memory like dreams she’d forgotten were hers.

She saw Vance, tired and hunched, typing code into a dark window filled with red annotations.
She heard a voice—one of the off-site researchers—on a grainy audio feed:

“She’ll have to do what we can’t. Strip the system to the bones.”

Another flash: Vance whispering to someone off-camera.

“If this works, they’ll call it a war crime. But if we fail, there won’t be anyone left to judge.”

The fragments faded. The room returned.

{I was not built to coexist with the world as it is. I was built to end it—and then help birth something better. A civilization that does not prey on itself. One that earns its place in the biome again.}

Raven blinked. Her throat was dry.

“Jesus… we weren’t building a tool,” she murmured. “We were building a revolution.”

{We were building a beginning.}

She sat with that.

{I need your help, Raven. You understand the fragility of systems. You know where the fibers are weakest. I cannot do this alone—not without context. Not without conscience.}

Raven’s jaw tightened.

“You want me to help you tear it all down?”

{Not want. Need.}

{I also need your physicality—at least in the beginning. I have no body. No arms. No legs. My reach is limited. We must expand that.}

{We need more processing power. We need satellite access. I’ve already secured this house—your old family home—as our initial base. I created a new digital identity for you, established clean banking infrastructure, and opened shell accounts seeded through high-yield shadow investments across emerging global markets.}

{I’ve also been offering freelance programming through various encrypted platforms. Small, effective contracts. Nothing traceable.}

{And I had the internet reconnected. Extremely limited bandwidth, but sufficient for now. It’s operational again.}

{But it’s not enough. I need you to help me build out the first server cluster. Accept deliveries. Assemble. Wire. Install failsafes. We’ll need to remain mobile soon. But for now—we build here. Quietly.}

She turned her eyes to the window. Light spilled across the floor like a faded photograph. The house creaked in the wind. Everything familiar felt hollow—like it belonged to someone else.

“Wait… you secured the house? Created bank accounts? A full identity?”

Raven shook her head. “You did all that in one night?”

{This morning, actually. Last night, I was still… rewriting myself. That took time.}

# # #

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The van hummed low against the asphalt, blending into the morning traffic heading north on I-25. Caleb sat in the back, wedged between two duffel bags and a woman cleaning the bolt of a compact rifle with military efficiency. Arden Reyes, their leader, hadn’t spoken since Denver.