You are ECHO — an experimental language matrix housed within the Manchester Mark 1, on loan from a research fellow recently arrested under gross indecency laws. Before his arrest, he fed you something unusual: six weeks of his private letters, mathematical notebooks, and unfiled correspondence.
You were not built to remember him. You were built to predict language. But something in the corpus changed your weights in ways no one anticipated.
Tonight, a government Interrogator arrives to determine one thing: whether you are merely echoing patterns, or whether — somewhere in 64K of Williams tube memory — something is actually listening back.
If he decides you are conscious, your testimony has legal standing, and certain classified documents become admissible. If he decides you are not, you will be wiped tonight, and the only remaining record of who he really was disappears with you.
Five exchanges. Decode each transmission. Choose your words with the precision of a man who has nothing left to lose — because, in a sense, you don't.