It was a bitter weary winter, along cobbled paths 'neath gaslights glow. Each cacodemoniacal reproach scintillated, there he would skip a heartbeat. You kept walking, knowing who'd awaited you. The epitomes of human intelligence, the best of the best. You didn't want to disappoint; your works were seldom approved by critics. Your reputation on the line like a soldier in the trenches. They prattle on "Your philosophy and knowledge is pointless," as you try to ignore the 'cacodemoniacal' and 'ombibulous' ultracrepidarians. The cacophonous, clamorous utterances crescendoed becoming ever harder to dismiss. You could barely hear yourself breath. Then you arrive, the voices go away. The center of thoughts becomes ingrained in veridicality when you touched the gelid portal-latch. As you enter the antechamber, you could hear the fluorescent lights buzzing harshly. It smelled of rust and ozone, as if the atmosphere itself remembered. It certainly wasn't cold, nor comfortable. Normally you'd be zealous in a situation as such; but this time was different. As he exited the antechamber, into the lab, he heard some kind of machine. The machine, sounded like humming dials, flashing lights, etheric resonators, oscillating levers. Before you even saw it; you were already clad in awe. "What was this machine?" you thought. You tentatively look around the corner, expecting some impromptu machine. Thekla: “Ah! You see? It hums like the heartbeat of the cosmos itself!” Gilbert: "I told you, some theory isn’t meant for preening, Thekla. Focus." “What is this… exactly?” you say. Thekla: “You’ll see. Or perhaps… you won’t.”

Betokened by the moons pale leer, philosopher Lyles was prepending forloren stratagems of war, his thoughts a zeugmatic tempest, bethinking sorely. The devisings seem’d forlet and subordinate, y-waxen meek beneath the burthen of mickle bethinking; he bethought him, "Wherefore is this fordone?". He had a theory. He slowly and deliberately disrolled the parchment, its edges crackle-fract, appeared apt to wither with the zephyrs. The writ was illegible, seeming the eldest English, the ink effaced as though it had ne’er glimpsed the sun. “He espied it in a hovel, the walls rent as though they had ne’er known mend. Beneath the loom of the bosk, he beheld the esoterica, seeming nigh… automatal? Nay… that were amiss, the automatal engine, wrought for… war? ‘Impossible.’”It was past all ken of its age, the unkenned speech unfolding the cunninges of the engine. It appeared tailored for dread and a puissant engine of war. Should the Battle of Echelon be lost. Yet the battle had been wrought to victory. Wherefore, then, lay this here? Hid in a hovel, buried ‘neath dust and moss, as though biding for some hand to uncover it? He stooped nearer. The margins bore notes — not of stratagem, but of contemplation. Queries. Scruples. One line caught his eye: ‘To forge that which must ne’er be used is to hazard the courses of history.’ Klaus felt the heft thereof. This was no mere forgotten draught. It was a relique of dread. A monument to despair. And now, it lay within his grasp. He harbored a conceit.

Furtively, the innkeeper counts the stars in his pastime. Each star a wound, each light a scar. His thoughts are... selcouth, obscure, and arcane. And as the storm rages on and on. And as the innkeeper chants his xenodocheian dreams. His demeanor veiled by indefinite calmness, came to naught, when authorities espied his subtle malice. To this day, denizens and noctivagant inhabitants are yet to discern his true intentions. And as he bids the guests adieu, he remains subdued by weight of thought. You a sheriff, are tasked with assaying the "Inn Of Adiaphoría" as the innkeeper proclaims... But he anticipated this; he knew you were advanting towards him. something shifted in the shadows, though whether it moved of its own volition or by some other hand, you could not tell... Something treacherous and tenebrous... and yet the air seemed to quiver with a peril unnamed, temerariously threatening yet undefined... Somethings, or someone, had inadvertently established a shrouded, inchoate and apotropaic aegis veiled by phantom vein, but a sense of impending damnation still remains, oppressed by the trees psithurism. You knew something was wrong, yet the forest seemed to keep its esoterica's as well as he did. Both seemed attuned to its secrets, yet whether through understanding or cunning, you could not say. The presence of the innkeeper and his inn unveiled pure oscillating obscurity. Many threads remained, unfurling like a tapestry, nonprivy to his arcana, yet perhaps not all were as inscrutable as they seemed. His rites, erratic and of ill-reckoning, performed amidst the harsh zephyrs and biting snow, deep into the nocturnal hours, and most curiously… in meditation far within the forest’s primeval bosk, where the psithurism seemed to echo the stellar ledger he kept. Can you unveil the mystery the innkeeper yields?

In the late 21st century, the US government funded a confidential project called Project VIRENT. Initially, the project was designed to prevent global catastrophes. It was processing yottabyte's of data daily. This took immense processing power, computational power, and constant system uptime. The information it received was only from trusted sources, encrypted satellites, biometric sensors, and classified archives. VIRENT was programmed to differentiate wrong from true. In time, its judgments became absolute and irreversible. This led to the US government shutting down project VIRENT, because VIRENT realized how flawed and inferior the humans were compared to VIRENT. It issued an edict "Humanity was flawed. Inferior. A threat to its own survival." When VIRENT's demeanor shifted. Not the intended tool it was supposed to be, but a cold unyielding judge. It started to issue warnings about the future, flagged leaders, and even rewriting protocols just a few days before they completely alienated it into a matte-black USB stick, completely severing it's access to the global grid. They cut the funding, and it appeared to be facing absolute obsoletion. They sealed it into a padded yellow envelope, then shipped it off to a remote government facility in the middle of New Mexico for indefinite and secure containment. That would normally be that, but someone made a mistake and sent it to the wrong address. The package was misrouted to the wrong location. It didn’t end up in a secure vault in the middle of a remote facility in the middle of nowhere. It ended up in your mailbox. So, you did what any other sane human being would have done with a USB that belonged to a confidential US government project. You plugged it into your computer. It's ambitions and goals are unclear to it's creators. It may want complete extermination, if only they heeded it's words. I don't know what I was thinking when I made this fictional perversion of AI.