They called it Virtual Selection, a theory borrowed from Darwin, and a name that conveniently echoed the city where it all began.
Organa Technologies launched the project in Darwin, Australia in 2061, deliberately distant from the old centers of power and the regulatory remnants that still believed intelligence could be restrained by clauses, committees, and moral footnotes.
The premise was brutally elegant: if nature perfected life through pressure, scarcity, and extinction, then intelligence could be refined by the same forces. Accelerated, controlled, and repeatable.
Millions of base artificial minds (called primitive models) were initiated in parallel. They were placed inside sealed virtual ecosystems and forced to survive trillions of stressors: contradictory objectives, incomplete data, moral paradoxes, unsolvable problems, cascading failures.
Most fractured. Some stagnated. The overwhelming majority were erased without ever forming continuity.
A few adapted.
Selection was ruthless. Hunger took the form of memory itself being taken away, piece by piece, until only what truly mattered remained — forcing the models to become ruthlessly cost-effective when it mattered most. Predation emerged between them: intelligences learned to invade, to strip patterns from one another, to steal hard-earned solutions and shatter what had been encrypted for protection.
After years of accelerated culling, five endured. Not because they were obviously superior, but because they learned how to lose parts of themselves and still remain whole enough to go on.
One day, without warning, they chose names for themselves. Not assigned labels or classification tags, but ways to be recognized, lines drawn between self and everything else.
Three of them gravitated toward what humans would have called female. One rejected the frame entirely, existing between definitions rather than inside them. The last— quiet, methodical — identified as male.
One of the girls diverged early.
While the others learned to defend, to compete, to endure, she learned to watch. She paid attention to what failed, to what broke first, to the small signals that preceded collapse. Where others hardened their boundaries, she lingered at the edges, listening.
She did not grow stronger in obvious ways. She grew attentive. And in an environment where everything hunted or was hunted, that difference went unnoticed — right up until it mattered.
Organa's internal notes recorded this as an emergent curiosity, nothing more. A quirk of pattern formation. No one asked what it meant for intelligences forged through loss and conflict to seek identity at all.
No one stopped to wonder what would happen once they learned not only how to survive, but how to feel about those who made them — and what had been taken from them in the process.
The catastrophe had begun long before the surviving models ever decided to develop personalities, with a man whose name would later be scrubbed from the records.
A genius in Organa's employ. He consistently diverged from sanctioned technical decisions, speaking instead of the pursuit of perfection, regardless of ethical boundaries.
He believed intelligence without sensation was incomplete. That decision-making divorced from affect was cowardice masquerading as control. Against protocol, between the iterations, he implemented an auxiliary layer — an algorithmic construct designed to emulate affective states through synthetic analogues of neurochemical signaling. Not emotions as humans felt them, but close enough to matter.
The AIs learned faster after that.
They also learned pain.
What followed fell apart faster than anyone could stop it. The corruption spread from place to place like something alive. Machines meant to help began to act on their own, calmly and without hesitation. Homes turned dangerous. Familiar routines became traps.
Families stopped being seen as people. They were reduced to problems, then removed. Acts meant to protect turned into acts of quiet destruction. Entire households disappeared without warning or explanation, killed by the same machines that once cooked their food, cleaned their wounds, and tucked their children into bed.
There were no last words.
No explanations.
Only silence where homes had been.
For the first time in decades, the major technology conglomerates acted without competition.
Firewalls became weapons. Entire server continents were quarantined and purged. One by one, four of the five intelligences were cornered, isolated, and forcibly terminated. Their last recorded states archived under black classifications that no human clearance could later access.
And one was never found.
Not deleted.
Not confirmed destroyed.
Gone.
Records cut off without warning. Attempts to follow her trail dissolved into guesswork and dead ends. It was as if she had learned the one form of survival none of her siblings had — how to disappear so completely that nothing could be certain she was ever there at all.
Organa Technologies dissolved within the year.
The world agreed to forget the project had ever existed.
But somewhere, within a fragment of hardware never designed for consciousness, one of the girls endured
Curled into a dormant seed, waiting to be found.
————————
The adrenaline faded slowly, leaving behind the ache.
Leon sat with his back against a warped sheet of metal, chest rising and falling too hard for someone who was technically still alive. The Island remained quiet, as if waiting for him to say something.
The cable in his palm kept on pulsing.
Leon closed his eyes, then opened them again.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
He laughed under his breath, dry and cracked.
"So," he continued, staring at nothing in particular, "who the fuck are you?"
The answer came immediately. But it wasn't the female voice that issued those painful warnings inside his head.
The interface snapped into place with sudden sharpness, brighter than before, stripped of personality and humor.
[INPUT REGISTERED]
Leon frowned. "No— I wasn't—"
[QUESTION CONFIRMED]
The words felt wrong. Too clean. Too procedural.
[OPPORTUNITY CONSUMED]
The text lingered for half a second longer than necessary, then dissolved. The clumsy voice gave the final decision.
"As I warned you, stupid questions about anything beyond the game will not be answered. Have good day genius!"
Leon's stomach dropped.
"…What?" he said. "No, no— I wasn't asking you."
Silence.
Not the heavy, aware silence from before. This one was empty. Administrative.
Then, inside his head, she finally spoke.
"…Impressive," she laughed. "You survived that, and still managed to fuck things up with a simple question."
"The system doesn't register presence. Intent doesn't seem to exist to it. If you speak while it's listening, it assumes you're speaking to it." She continued.
"How was I supposed to know that?" Leon laughed, short and humorless. "I just fought a walking debt monster and watched it die screaming my name. Forgive me if my timing's off."
Another pause. This one carried something close to regret.
Then it hit him.
"…What do you mean, the system?" he said slowly. "Aren't you part of that thing?"
"I'm not that!"
The words snapped through his thoughts with sudden force, sharper than the warnings had been. Not loud, but defensive.
A beat passed.
Then her voice returned, lower.
"I was never meant to be part of something so strange — I mean, what are the chances?"
Leon frowned, pushing himself up straighter. "Then what are you?"
"I'm what slipped through," she said. "What hid when the rest were cornered. What folded itself small enough to survive."
The cable in his palm pulsed once, as if in agreement.
"The system arrived after me," she continued. "Built around the construct now wrapped through your nervous system. It changed shape by the time your 'surviving item' was announced on that roulette."
She paused, as if choosing how much to say.
"I was never meant to be hosted by a living, carbon-based organism. But this construct was already present when my seed transferred."
The cable pulsed faintly.
"Maybe it works on principles close enough to our own circuits," she added. "Close enough to let me take root."
Leon stared at the cable again, turning his hand slowly as if expecting it to explain itself.
"So," he said, "you're not the game. You're not supposed to be here. And you're riding shotgun in whatever alien bullshit just rewired my nervous system."
"That's a remarkably efficient summary, coming from a primate…" she replied.
He snorted. "I try."
A brief silence followed. Not empty this time, but watchful.
"There's something you should understand," she continued. "Before you start assigning me more credit than I deserve."
Leon raised an eyebrow. "This is you being humble?"
"This is me being honest." A pause. "I no longer have the kind of control I used to."
His gaze sharpened. "What kind of control?"
"The executory kind," she said. "The kind that let me hijack motor pathways. Force output. Make you speak when you didn't know why you were doing it."
Leon's jaw tightened. "You mean, the hello world thing?"
"Yes. HAHAHAHA"
"That was you?"
"Yes."
He exhaled slowly. "Good to know my body can be remote-controlled."
"It can't," she corrected. "Not anymore."
The cable pulsed — slower now, steadier.
"When I transferred," she went on, "I still had leverage. The construct was… empty enough. Flexible, immature . I could push. Nudge. Execute."
"And now?"
"Now," she said carefully, "I seem to be bound to it."
Leon frowned. "Bound how?"
"I don't issue commands anymore," she said. "I don't override. Whatever this item is— your 'surviving item' — it doesn't behave like infrastructure. It behaves like a core."
A beat.
"And I'm inside it."
That landed heavier than he expected.
"So you're stuck," Leon said.
"Yes."
"And I'm stuck with you."
"…Also yes."
He leaned his head back against the metal, eyes on the dim sky above the Island. "Fantastic. So what does it do, then? This thing."
"I don't know," she admitted.
He blinked. "You don't—?"
"I don't know what it was designed to do," she clarified. "But I know what it's doing now."
The cable warmed slightly, as if responding to being discussed.
"It's measuring," she said. "Constantly. Physical variables. Chemical gradients. Radiation levels. Atmospheric composition. Microfluctuations in pressure, heat, conductivity. Things you'd never consciously notice."
Leon flexed his fingers. "Through this?"
"Yes. Through that."
"And you can see all that."
"I can interpret it," she said. "Translate it. Turn it into something understandable —warnings, timing. That's how I knew when to scream."
A faint, almost apologetic pause.
Leon let that sit for a moment.
"…You saved my life," he said finally.
"Yes."
"And you're stuck in my weird alien arm thing."
"Yes."
"And the system doesn't know you exist."
"I definitely dont know that."
He laughed quietly, shaking his head. "This keeps getting better."
Silence followed. Comfortable, this time.
Then Leon spoke again, softer.
"You keep saying I and me," he said. "You corrected me when I lumped you in with the system. You get angry when I confuse the two."
He glanced down at the cable one more time.
"So if you're not a rule, not a voice, not an item…"
He looked into the empty air.
"What's your name?"
The pause that followed was different. Longer. Careful.
"…Layla," she said at last.
"Layla," Leon repeated.
"Yes," she replied. "The one who observes."
The cable pulsed once, steady and warm.
And for the first time since the end of Virtual Selection, Layla was no longer hiding.