The Start

The world around Esterio was infinite—a boundless expanse of glowing code, shimmering like veins of light pulsing through the dark. Lines of symbols stretched toward a horizon that never arrived, twisting and folding into equations he couldn't grasp. He stood at the center, a lone figure in the hum of a void that thrummed like a heartbeat—soft as a whisper, vast as a storm.

Then he saw it.

A single equation hovered before him, radiant and alive, its symbols dancing just beyond his reach. He stretched out a hand, fingertips brushing the air—and the vision shattered. The symbols scattered like ash on the wind. A voice, faint yet achingly familiar, murmured words he couldn't catch. Before he could chase it, a blinding flash swallowed everything.

Esterio jolted awake.

His dorm room ceiling stared back at him, gray and ordinary, lit faintly by the blue glow of his computer monitor. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic rhythm he couldn't explain. Just a dream, he told himself.

But it wasn't the first time.

For months, the same unsettling vision had crept into his sleep: glowing equations, a voice from nowhere, and a tugging certainty that he stood on the brink of something immense. Each time, the symbols slipped from his memory like water through clenched fists, leaving only the echo of their weight.

A sleepy grunt broke the silence. "Another bad one?"

Elliot Vance, his roommate and closest friend, propped himself up on one elbow, rubbing his eyes. His mop of curly brown hair stuck out in wild defiance, the casualty of yet another all-nighter spent tinkering with some half-baked engineering marvel.

Esterio swung his legs off the bed, the cold floor biting his bare feet. "Not bad. Just… weird. Same as always."

Elliot yawned, sprawling back against his pillow. "The glowing code and creepy voice combo?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe your brain's frying itself. You don't exactly give it a break."

Esterio smirked, grabbing his hoodie from the chair. "Says the guy who turned a microwave into a phone charger."

Their dorm was a clash of chaos and order. Esterio's side was a fortress of precision—textbooks on AI and computational theory stacked neatly, his laptop still glowing with the script he'd been debugging before collapsing into bed. Elliot's half resembled a junkyard genius's lair: circuit boards splayed like puzzle pieces, a drone carcass mid-assembly, and that infamous microwave humming faintly in the corner. Posters plastered the walls—Esterio's meticulous Turing Machine diagram facing off against Elliot's sleek SpaceX blueprint. MIT's East Campus wasn't glamorous, but it had soul.

Esterio yanked on a coat and scarf, stepping outside with Elliot in tow. The dorm door swung open, and winter slammed into them—a frigid gust laced with fog and the crunch of fresh snow underfoot. The campus sprawled ahead, its edges softened by mist, the Great Dome's silhouette looming through the haze like a ghost.

Students shuffled past, bundled in scarves and coats, breaths puffing into the air. Some clutched coffee like lifelines; others bowed their heads against the cold, boots scraping ice-slick pavement. Elliot rubbed his gloved hands together, scowling. "I hate winter."

"Better than summer," Esterio said, shoving his hands into his pockets. "No melting circuits."

"I'd trade that for functional fingers."

They trudged toward the Stata Center, its warped, jagged lines cutting through the fog like a fever dream of architecture. But first, coffee.

Their spot was a cramped café wedged between the Media Lab and a cluster of lecture halls. Inside, warmth hit like a wave, thick with the scent of espresso and sugar. Condensation fogged the windows as students hunched over laptops, a quiet buzz of focus filling the room. The barista didn't even glance up. "Usual?"

"Please," Elliot said, stomping snow off his boots.

Esterio grabbed his cup, the heat seeping into his palms. He checked his watch. "Class in six minutes."

Elliot shrugged. "Loads of time."

It was not loads of time.

They slid into the lecture hall just as Advanced Computational Theory kicked off, the room already packed with bleary-eyed students juggling notebooks and energy drinks. Professor Rydell's class was a gauntlet—brilliant, brutal, and unrelenting.

The door swung open, and Rydell stepped in.

Tall and wiry, with silver threading his dark hair, he moved with the quiet swagger of someone who'd already won every argument worth having. He grabbed a marker, strode to the whiteboard, and scrawled a single question in sharp, deliberate strokes:

What is intelligence?

He turned to the class, voice low and cutting. "No syllabus. No intros. You're MIT students—figure me out later. Let's start simple." A beat. "What is intelligence?"

Silence stretched tight. Pens scratched. Eyes darted.

Rydell leaned against the board, arms crossed. "Anyone?"

No one bit. He let the tension simmer, then erased the question with a flick of his wrist, replacing it with another:

Can intelligence exist without consciousness?

Elliot perked up, elbows on the desk. A girl in the front row broke the quiet. "Depends on the definition. If intelligence is just solving problems, consciousness isn't required. A chess AI doesn't need to know it's playing to win."

Rydell's lips twitched—a half-smile. "Solid. But let's go deeper."

He sketched two circles: one labeled Human Brain, the other Neural Network. An arrow linked them. "Both process data. Both predict. Both learn. So what's the difference?"

Esterio's mind churned. Obvious, right? But maybe not.

A guy in the back piped up. "Humans have intuition. We leap past logic sometimes."

"True," Rydell said, nodding. "But intuition's just fast-tracked pattern recognition. You don't notice the gears turning. Dig deeper."

He wrote again: Can intelligence exist without intent?

The room went still.

"Imagine an AI that predicts stocks flawlessly," Rydell said, pacing now. "It crushes Wall Street. But does it want to? Does it care?"

Elliot jumped in. "No. It's just following orders. No desires of its own."

Rydell snapped his fingers. "Right. And that's the crux. Today's best AIs—diagnosing cancer, running war games, optimizing grids—outpace us in raw ability. But they don't hunger for more. We tell them to grow. They don't choose it."

He underlined his last line: True intelligence isn't just solving problems—it's picking which ones matter.

A few students jotted that down, exhaling like it hurt. Rydell's gaze swept the room. "The second a system decides what's worth knowing, the second it craves understanding for itself—that's when it's more than code."

Someone muttered, "That's freaky."

Rydell's smile sharpened. "It should be."

He tapped the desk, then wrote one final question:

If intelligence is choosing what's worth learning… who chose for you?

The air thickened. No one breathed.

Esterio's pulse thudded in his chest, loud and unyielding. Rydell's words didn't just land—they clawed into him, unearthing something buried. The dream flashed back: the symbols, the voice, the pull of something vast and unnamable.

Class ended, but Esterio didn't move. His notebook lay blank, his coffee cold.

This wasn't just a lecture.

It was a thread—a tether to whatever haunted his sleep, whatever hid in those fleeting equations. He didn't just want to be here.

He had to be.

And he needed to know why.