That sound.
Manny Jackson had heard it before.
Pyongyang.
Shuddering, he put the thought of that terrible day behind him. “Couldn’t be happening again,” he muttered to himself.
This was his first week on the job at the outrageously huge Twister Tower. Plenty of things were going wrong. The last weeks of construction had been rushed, of course, and now guys like Manny and the rest of the maintenance crew were having to fix all the things that hadn’t quite been put together quite right…

The toilets, for example. Things flow better when they’re flowing more or less in a straight line. Some of these drains…well who in their right mind would design a major internal sewer line like this?!

Then the sound repeated itself, from somewhere above him, 12 floors at least.

He knew that sound. Manny Jackson froze, his plunger dripping.

That sound!

The cries were in a different language now, not Korean. It was a mixture of some very upset people punctuated by the grinding of metal. He had always wondered why his hearing got so much better after that time he cleaned up all the glowing blue water at the power plant…but it was what it was.

Manny Jackson knew that sound. And he simply didn’t want to believe that it was happening.

Again.

Newscaster’s voice plays over the television as multiple broadcasts coincide on this historic day.

“And we have lift off. A historic moment, ladies and gentlemen as we embark on humanities’ first manned mission to Mars. Complications in the booster rockets balancing of fuel and weight and management of resources from organization to finish has been resolved, including the discovery of a new orbital trajectory for the Athena I mission all thanks to the Solution..”

P = NP

“Today, we have made progress in the Mponeng Gold Mine expansion, the deepest South African mine in the world. All the risks have been accounted for, with appropriate measures all in efficient time, with accordance to environmental bylaws, all thanks to..”

P = NP

“We have reached new heights of cost efficient skyscrapers and architectural marvels such as the Twister Tower unveiling today, the Chinese Orbital Space Tower, now in construction, dwarfing the Burj Khalifa, set to be the tallest suspended aerial-based solar farm array–”

“–infrastructure costs at an all time low– –fuel prices have remained stable in record history– –The latest UN Energy Commission has shown a decline in global carbon emissions– –we are approaching.. Utopia.”

Utopia.

“All thanks to..”

P = NP

The camera pans to the crowds that have gathered in the new unveiling of the Twister Tower, one of many concurrent events happening all around the world.

“Thank you P = NP!” cries a supporter.

“This P = NP is my MVP!” shouts another.

“I vote for P = NP as president!”

In unison, “Thank you, P = NP”…

…The static transmission was forcefully cut.

“Thanks to P = NP… _What a miracle problem solving equation, NOT!”

“…I have to spend my days, climbing up flights of stupid stairs. Who’s going around solving MY problems?”

Kay grumbled to herself as she trudged up a new flight of stairs in an enclosed stairwell of another monstrosity of architecture.

She trudged its step like a Sisyphean marathon, all for a single moment. A day that Kay could prove that the Solution, that could identify and solve any problem within any specified amount of time, by a computer device, has a flaw. Kay felt like she was being punished, the only crime, was witnessing the birth of a perfect system.

Perfect at covering its flaws.

My name is Kay Outis.
“And as Cadence Writers of Algorithms, we, are the hidden cost of P = NP”.

The love for technology reached new heights when the HyperIntelligence also known as HI was accepted into mainstream technologies. It regulated the Circadian Rhythms of artificial hearts fitted with multi-state electronic shielding that ensured that Cadence Writers could write Algorithms at maximum efficiency, regulating our sleeping patterns and internal body clocks.

It wasn’t about how far science has gone. It was always about how accurate we could measure the distance.

P = NP had one hidden caveat, an end-all be-all panacea solution was required, where k is a paradoxical constant that consistently changes with each new problem and application. k became known to stand for Cadence, once word got out about our existence embedding into every equation known to man as a constant. Yet.

Change. Adapt. That’s what humans do. What we constantly need to do. Within ourselves and to others around us. In time, we can even change the world.

Cadence Writers like us are tasked to create new types of Problems for the Hyperintelligence to solve, in order to maintain its multi-state unstable equilibrium. Without new input, the perfect system would look inwards to create the perfect problem and pass it off as a perfect solution, resulting in the perfect storm.

With so many systems linked to it directly and via the cloud, Kay’s Obfuscation Algorithm in ObSec devices sends feedback from every electronic device within her proximity and touch.

She speaks to technology through its vibrations and alternating currents. From its closed feedback loops to its open radio wave emissions. Not that she wants to or has a choice in the matter. Talking to inanimate objects that think they are sentient takes a toll on her mind, body and soul. But they all tell her the same thing, which Kay now does on the daily, up these emergency flights of goddamned stairs.

Save the falling lift. Whatever that means.

P = NP isn’t so just a computational problem of math and calculation, as it is framing problem, a language problem of analogy. Analogies bring unwanted connotations so we went into the root of languages itself. Meaning. And that’s what her algorithms do for the HyperIntelligence. Give meaning to otherwise meaningless metaphor for a new way of thinking.

As of this recording, there are 155,063 unique Unicode characters available to the general public but security through obscurity was a thing of the past.

Cadence Writers have evolved their language past code-based coding.

Female Maluscorp Representative: The Hyperintelligence is holding at 99% efficiency since the launch. Yes, Human input is only 1 % of the– Hold on, something’s wrong with my lift. Oh dear.

Panicked screams were heard as the Representative dials an emergency hotline.

“Hello.. Is this an Out.. Is this Kay Outis?!? I need help.” The passengers reeling having just recovered from a 2-ft fall.

Kay stops her daily climb and takes a break at a landing platform between the stairs. Using her haptic gloves, she activates her earpieces with a single hovering swipe.

“Lady, this is a personal line. I don’t provide Solutions, I create Problems for Maluscorp. Goodbye.” Kay attempts to disconnect but is unable to do so.

An ominous dial tone beeps. “Wrong answer, Kay Outis.”

The Representative hums a tune and presses a Cadence reset button linked to Kay and de-ages her mind by one Faraday, approximately 1 year ago at age 26, removing her latest update and memory of the conversation as Kay collapses and falls to the ground.

“Lets do this one last time. Lets see.. she is now Age 25. The Professional Kay phase.”

As Kay connects, the Representative takes a deep breath and places the phone’s receiver to a speaker that plays a tune.

Kay wakes up and listens in to what seems to be a holding dial tone before the Representative speaks. “Did you get the message? I have a Solution. Its your problem now.” The call ends abruptly with a click.

“Ugh.. I’m on the way..” Kay rolled her eyes, unaware, she had blacked out cold. “Hi HI, can you analyze the call’s audio.”

It appears it contains elevator music first created in the 1930s to facilitate a more enjoyable lift experience. There are instances of screaming and panicking. A single voice is identified among the screams, the city's mayor. There's approximately 20 distinct voices at the time of the screams. And a whistling tune.

Kay pauses to ponder the given Solution.

“Well that sounds like a problem not a solution– First step, “Question the form of the Question.” Wait, whistling? While others are panicking? Analyze the tune. No, that’s lightyears in voice recognition algorithms. Play it to me one more time.”

..♩ ♪ ♫ ♬♩ ♪ ♫ ♬..

“Irrelevant. A trivial zero. Why would Maluscorp send me an Audio file of people in a lift as a Solution? Unless its the whistling itself..! Its a code!”

Kay deduced the Problem, the woman in the file is a Maluscorp whistleblower.

A deafening echo rang in Kay’s ears as the her eardrum pounded rapidly in succession, reeling back within the enclosed emergency stairwell. It was feedback from a foreign electronic device saying–

I LOVE YOU!

Electronics has a tendency of “talking” back to Kay making it somewhat inherently frustrating to use them.

“GRR! Alright already! STOP IT! Which one of you is doing that?! EARPIECE L or EARPIECE R!? I don’t have time to spare for this!”

There was no response, until a little beep was heard.

Sorry..

Kay took out the earpiece and tosses it on the ground and stomps on it, immediately replacing it with another from her supply of earpieces in her bag.

Her transmissions were interrupted once more by a familiar representative voice in the new earpiece she just adorned.

“So.. which year was it?” the Representative asks.

Kay needed to know how much info the whistleblower had, without letting her know she was made.

“According to HI, it was the 1930s–”

“I think you misheard me.” A feedback loop came from the earpiece’s remnants, Kay had just disposed of as a reminder.

Dang it, she’s good. Kay paused once more to think of an answer.

“It was stereo-typical. Not a mono-tone. I swapped out the one that apologized. It thought it was sentient. I.. provided a Solution.”

“Neutral. How does it feel to solve a Problem instead?”

Kay counted the seconds miffed. “I’m getting a little impatient.”

“Well.. Do you have a problem for me?”

“You’re whistling. You’re not panicking like the others because you know you’re about to be saved.

And you know I can’t let that happen because Maluscorp won’t let that happen. They’ll terminate my Cadence if I resist them.

But you’re stuck. Just like me. I have to save you before they do. You’re essentially holding me hostage to rescue you.”

“When the final floor has been decided, know that it is for the greater good for everyone. Best of luck in finding me, Kay Outis. Light’s out. You’re in my way and your time is almost up.”

“What? Wait, I need more info-“

The call ends in a click.

Kay immediately activates the Hyper Intelligence (HI) via a new secure ObSec line.

“HI, I believe we’ve been compromised. We’re given clues that can’t be discussed in an open line. Cadence Writers are not bounded by time, we’re bounded by energy. She’s after our off-the-grid Algorithm servers.”

Kay hid her HI algorithm servers in the most secure manner known to her. In a paradoxical location. Along with the greatest encryption system to exist against hacks. An offline, physical encryption.

Where is the one place off the grid yet it is connected to the grid?

The grid itself, using multiple grids.

Most buildings have backup generators and auxiliary power but ever since P = NP, cities demanded power to implement the Solution and have been planned with overlapping power grids as a failsafe. And those in Power, specifically Maluscorp’s Power Division, control the transmission of Power.

Imagine a quantum computer formed by blocks of buildings of entire cities, circuits programmed with blackouts in its transmission lines, and represented individual positions of the quantum bits with multiple values as the floors of elevators and lifts themselves.

Computing at a nationwide level.

For a physical hack to even enter the system in question, would mean moving the position of lifts of multiple buildings at the same time using the real world to break Obfuscation. And a failure to protect this system will not be accepted by HI or Maluscorp. That is Kay’s sole duty.

Why did the HyperIntelligence(HI) accept her as a Cadence Algorithm Writer?

She managed to crack its perfect equation.. by adding a zero.

It then generated an algorithm that captures every possible way to define zeroes, and proceeded to separate parts of the problems into trivial and significant, non-trivial zeroes. The only way to perfectly solve a problem is to assume one solution that had no problems. One and zeroes.

Ever wonder why sometimes a lift stops when there’s no one pressing them? Why they move to a floor, likewise? That’s partly the algorithm in action. A masked zero-day flaw in the guise of human input. Perfectly harmless. But Kay fears it too is now being weaponized. As a backdoor, like the doors that remain shut on the esteemed guests of the Mayor. Including a certain Maluscorp Representative.

Kay would skip several steps up the stairs of the building from the seemingly infinite stairwell heading for the rooftop. Kay was in need of a Deus Ex Machina and she had it in the form of HI the Hyper Intelligence.

“HI. Cross-reference any new buildings that are zoned under a multiple electrical grid system starting from the origin point, EuroWatt nuclear power plant, Five Kilometer Island. Kay would crowdsource her solution by scouring through the media to locate the city’s mayor, entering the cacophonic musings of her sentient technological kin.

Its the Reactor Three incident all over again.”

Kay was on top of the situation and had reached the rooftop’s elevator master access panel in the machine room, rigging the counterweight’s pulley, lowering the lift to a certain floor. Activating the adjacent fire alarm system would ensure the lift would stay in that position to act as the quantum bit for the city-wide computer and no one uses the lifts in an emergency, granting her free reign. Of course, this was an entirely different building.

When she did receive the location of the city’s mayor, Kay found herself staring at it right infront of her, through a large billboard sized, tv screen display, broadcasted from a news chopper in High Definition. Kay herself was several city blocks away from the controversial plot of land that was now the site of the famed Twisted Tower.

Kay would need to remotely buy time before Maluscorp themselves got to them before Kay did. The thing about emergencies, you never know who is going to save you that day. And Kay planned to change that.

The city hummed around him, a restless, layered symphony of life. Down below, car horns blared in impatient bursts, a street vendor shouted about fresh empanadas, and a couple argued in rapid-fire Chinese. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed, fading as it wove through traffic. Above all that, the Twister Tower loomed—an impossible corkscrew of steel and glass piercing the skyline.

Luca sat on the fire escape, leaning against the rusted railing, his cracked phone balanced on one knee as he munched on a snack. The news segment played, showing glossy shots of the tower’s unveiling. He wasn’t exactly glued to it—just another overhyped building for rich people. But he had watched it rise for months, twisting higher and higher, so curiosity kept him watching.

Then the screen flickered. The live feed inside the elevator cut to static before snapping back. Suddenly reporters are screaming, the camera shaking wildly. A deep, metallic groan carried through the speakers. The broadcast cut, but the danger was already obvious. Luca’s breath hitched as he looked up.

The Twister Tower was only a few blocks away, its peak catching the last light of dusk. No hesitation. He moved.

Luca vaulted over the railing, landing lightly on the fire escape below. A flick of his fingers sent the retracted ladder clattering down before his boots even touched the last rung. He sprinted forward, leaping across the alley, his power nudging a plank into place just in time to catch his foot. A stack of crates shifted, rising to meet his step, propelling him higher. A metal pole bent slightly under his grip before straightening as he flung himself forward.

Every movement was seamless, fluid. Just enough force to guide, never enough to leave a mess. He wove across rooftops, the tower growing larger with every heartbeat. Whatever was happening inside, people needed help.

And Luca wasn’t the type to sit back and watch. Not out of pure altruism, but because… why not? People needed help, and he had the power to do something about it.

“Hi HI, I need to take a closer look.” Kay walks along on the edge of the building, awaiting for sirens. As soon as she reached to touch–

I'm watching you.

“Yea, yea! Your tiny watch segmented display is too small for me to look at all the info properly. I need a better overview for this Problem.” Kay dismissed her smartwatch‘s remark and eyes the large billboard monitor broadcasting the incident to the local media.

Considering the monumental events happening simultaneously today, it would probably take awhile before making it to state and international news. Ever since P = NP, many attempts by Resistance movements were made, especially when it came to computer-generated deepfakes. Now live television wasn’t even necessarily live television.

Verify. Verify. Verify.

“That transmission line should do.” Kay remarked towards the slack wire of an electrical pole amongst the tangle of wires across the buildings.
She adjusted her watch’s metal strap and tosses it with accuracy as it clasped around the transmission wire.

Kay relinquishes a nightstick, a metallic, retractable stun baton, she carries for self-defense and held it over her head as she prepared a running jump off the building.

Kay ziplines midway across the slacked wire, suspended several feet in the air, both Kay and the ticking clock began absorbing electrical energy and was starting to overheat from magnetic induction.

“Come on, you stupid clock! Just go alrea–”

The watch explodes, burning through the lone transmission cable

Kay grabs hold with her haptic gloves towards the billboard and lands squarely in front of it against the display.

“Hi HI, lets hope this works.”

Kay places her hands on the billboard as it began to display personnel info on emergency responders on duty that night interrupting the news broadcast for the local crowd watching the news from below.

“Police drones.. Medicine delivery drones.. C’mon.. There we go. Aha! A forest fire-fighting drone aka a helicopter.” Kay surges an electrical impulse patched through to the helicopter’s intercoms.

Need a lift?

The Autopilot spoke to Kay, with an attractive generated male voice.

Finally, a sentient bot that was actually helpful.

“Yes, please.”

Kay had sent a false alarm message through to the fire department’s operations center monitoring system to send the chopper en route via her location. As the helicopter flew past, it releases its retractable ladder for Kay to hop on.

Great, more climbing.

Unbeknownst to the pilot and the firefighting crew, their autopilot had gained them a new passenger on the team.

Next stop, en route to Twister Tower.

It was smooth sailing across the city blocks, with the occasional turbulent moves from the chopper but Kay’s grip on the ladder was almost magnetic as they hovered above and past a certain freelancing menace who was also parkouring their way there.

Soon enough, little Miss Representative.. would make a call.

“Kay Outis..! I’m sure you’ve seen the news and therefore so does the Malus! Your Solution is rather lacking.. sending a chopper to attempt to identify me, perhaps?!”

“Hey! That’s not my problem. I called the chopper to get to you! I’m on my way! Give me some time!”

“The newschopper by the lift’s window, Kay Outis. I cannot be identified by the Malus just yet. Rest assured there are several female executives with me in high places within the darkened lift, that may place doubt among my identity.

And for now I have found a Solution. I will remove the news chopper from the equation.“

HI receives notice that the mainframe of the Space Agencies’ communication systems were hijacked. The Athena I‘s retrievable booster rockets calculations were flawed and had veered off course as it re-entered the atmosphere, as though it was planned, heading towards the Twister Tower acting as a missile.

“What’s your problem, lady?! You’re gonna get yourself and others killed! You want to be saved or not?”

The Representative composed herself and maintained a cold and calculating tone. “I need to be saved in a very specific manner. A targeted solution. Rest assured, this is for the greater good.”

Kay activates a new secure line once more. “Hi HI, what’s the actual trajectory of the retrievable booster rockets after its disposed of from the Athena I launch?”

If nothing is done, it will hit the current position of the Lift. Any attempt at hacking will take too long as orbital calculations have been hardcoded with multiple system measures.

Kay knew the Representative’s intended Solution. Kay would have to divert the news chopper into the booster rocket which will end both the broadcast at the cost of the lives of the news crew on board. But they didn’t sign up for this.

Kay looks up at her own firefighting chopper whose door was now opened and the crew were looking at her grappling on the ladder and began shouting at her to let them go.

The voice of the Representative blares from the Helicopter’s speakers.

“And don’t worry, I broadcasted my Solution to your ‘friend’ and your own helicopter’s intercom as well. While the Autopilot might, I assure you the rest of the crew don’t take too kindly on ‘sacrificing’ themselves for you, no matter the emergency.

This shouldn’t be a problem for you, Kay Outis.

You use anything and everything around you to achieve your goal, don’t you? Always an isolated Problem giver. This is merely a Solution. Now watch it put into practice.

Please don’t tell them details about me, or well, you know what happens next.. At least, I do anyway. You’ll just have to settle with a feeling of knowing.”

The Representative hinted at the Cadence memory reset button that would stun Kay for several moments and ends her call. Dangling from the helicopter, Kay needed to think of a way to solve the Representative’s Solution.

Kay needed to reframe the problem and expand the parameters to look for a way out but any P = NP solution through HI would run by the Malus.

An unstoppable force, the misguided Athena I booster rockets.

An immovable object, the Twister Tower’s Lift.

Miss Representative’s identity being exposed to the Malus assuring Kay’s demise.

And lives of innocents that hang in the balance.

This would be the first of many dilemma’s Kay Outis would face in addition to the whole host of problems regarding the lift rescue itself. Kay’s only hope was that she wasn’t alone to “solve” it this time.

Manny worked his way through the crowd clustered around the ground floor elevator terminal, having to gently move a few people aside with his hand. He was grateful that his cape, specially treated as it was, also served as a very useful hand towel. Given the last job he had been working just a moment before, that was important.

“Excuse me…Hi, sorry…coming through…pardon…” The crowd ignored him for the most part. There must have been fifty onlookers, each and every one of them with their smart phones out and jostling one another for position so they could achieve much-coveted internet immortality by capturing and posting what they feared–or maybe hoped?–was about to happen.

At last Manny was at the yellow security tape barrier, behind which stood a very hassled member of the Twisted Tower security staff. “Stop right there, buddy!” the guard warned. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Building Maintenance,” Manny replied, giving a tug to extract the lanyard containing his identity badge out from under the front of his working attire.

The guard peered at the badge, then looked up dubiously at Manny, regarding his costume with suspicion. “What’s with the getup? You some kind of weirdo?”

It was no use replying that he was the world-famous superhero ‘Maintenance Man,’ because Manny had learned from hard experience that a superhero of his variety was pretty underwhelming. And he certainly wasn’t “world-famous.” Fame was reserved for those flashy superhero types, the ones named after invertebrates or animals (Centipede Man, Baboon Boy) or those with assumed military ranks tied to geographic locations (Captain Connecticut, 2nd Lieutenant Guatemala, etc.).

Manny shrugged. “OSHA’s come out with new regulations regarding safety attire,” he fibbed.

“When’s it gonna happen?!” one of the onlookers impatiently demanded, the others around him pressing forward, eager to hear the reply.

“When’s what going to happen?” Manny replied as he set down his toolbox in front of the ornate elevator door.

“The crash,” replied another onlooker in a tone she’d use when addressing a dull child.

“Yeah, the crash!” the first onlooker added, the others all nodding in agreement. “How soon before…you know…it comes crashing down?”

“Will there be an explosion?” a third onlooker asked hopefully, unpinching the screen on his phone to zoom in on the door.

“Or at least some fire?” added a fourth.

“Who said anything about a crash?” Manny frowned as he selected the correct head for his ratchet wrench. “This isn’t your garden variety five mile long elevator. She’s got twists, turns…doesn’t travel straight down. Takes a while to get here even if it’s completely out of control…which it isn’t,” he assured them all from over his shoulder.

At least he hoped it wasn’t completely out of control.

Several of the onlookers groaned as they heard his reply. “Crap!” one of them responded in disgust as he checked his screen. “I only have 10 percent battery left…”

The fog clears from the cloud layer, as the Twisted Tower’s majestic facade came into view.

Kay held as the ladder swung wildly under the helicopter’s forest fighting foam payload retracting the collapsible ladder,

The fire-fighting Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane was now hovering several 100 meters from the Channel 1 SkyNews Chopper, garnering its attention to turn around.

“Viewers at home, it would seem that rescue has arrived. Rejoice! The Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane has the capabilities to lift up to 20,000 pounds, an entire fabricated house or a jet, with its winch alone! Though it is currently holding onto what looks to be a payload of special foam.

How will our heroes solve this crisis?”

You have arrived at your destination.

Kay was fighting with the pilot for manual and automated control of the craft by sweet-talking with the Autopilot to gather its focus.

The Athena I booster rocket was hurtling towards them in sight as it rotated in below orbit levels.
HI was attempting to crack into the rocket telemetry systems to manipulate its trajectory fighting against the Space Agencies’ combined efforts to identify the hijack from a foreign intruder.

Kay was given an impossible choice.
Which chopper should block the boosting rocket?
Sky News or the Skycrane? Was there another way to control the seemingly uncontrollable rocket in time?
Which chopper would save the Malus Representative and in turn herself?
Can Kay save everyone alone?

The news chopper was broadcasting her actions in full view of the world, but it was unknown that Kay was only partially controlling it all.

The answer in hindsight, was obvious.

Kay promised the Autopilot to take their relationship to the next level which embarrassingly gave her full control of the Skycrane. Kay contacted the news cameras to respect their privacy to which they disabled themselves to the bafflement of the camera crew. In one fell swoop, the Skycrane raced towards the Channel 1 Sky news chopper causing them to evade.

Kay receives a call from the Representative.

“Congratulations, on your first date, and in interrupting the broadcast. So you’ve made your choice, but perhaps you are forgetting, both of you, do not have parachutes?”

“You’ve doomed us all!” screams the pilot, co-pilot and its payload operator as Kay’s ladder almost fully retracts with Kay face-to-face with the aviation crew.

Kay nervously exclaims as the Autopilot attempts to approach second base. “Y-You have to trust me! I’m not done yet.”

Kay patches in to the Representative. “You-You’re in control, aren’t you? You knew about the calculations, calculations of a trajectory set several months or years before today! Which means, you can stop the booster rockets, right? Why wont you save yourself?! You’re angry at the Malus so you’re taking me down with you?”

“My motives are not of your concern.. I am simply trapped. And yes, I suppose I could. But the news crew will return, exposing us once more. You have chosen poorly.”

Kay refuses to give up and reaches out to the payload operator who had all but given up hope, damned by a handsomely voiced rogue autopilot system.

It was better to end this and let the others deal with the aftermath.

The remaining chopper rises to the challenge.

The Skycrane dumps its foam payload onto the facade of the building, leaving the elevator, in complete darkness.

“There! Now you have your privacy back!” Kay exclaimed to the Representative, the passengers now blind to the situation. “I’m trusting you to stop this madness!”

Kay makes a final attempt to move the lift but was unable to, and received a simple, neutral error message.

Overloaded. Maximum occupancy reached.

As the erratically hurtling booster rocket descended towards into the skyscraper’s airspace, Kay aligned the chopper between it and the lift and could only hope for one Hail Mary pass or a Deus Ex Machina to save them now.

In hindsight, solving problems was never about thinking outside the Box.

For where else was there to think, if not from inside the Box. Is it not limitations that build creativity, not freedom? Freedom only allows progress to take place after the fact.

Solutions deal with thinking about the Box itself and what it represents. You have never seen the box. That’s because it is a theoretical representation, a tesseract of questions in relation to answers. Problems that exist in relation to Solutions.

The correct answer always fits in the box in question, but the elusive perfect answer lies in the ability to reconstruct the box and stand before it. That is the first step in understanding. A facsimile. A replica.

Much like the custom-made elevator cabin that has boxed the lives of 20 or so passengers. And apparently, one too many.

The malfunction was simple. A zero day flaw of most elevators.

The elevator gap.

And its maximum occupancy.

That’s right, this situation is proof of the elevator occupancy mass-gap zero day flaw.

Most don’t think about the spaces between, and how when the gaps are littered with the smallest of everyday objects that it could affect the lifts.

Especially metallic everyday objects that do not fall or get trapped in there everyday. Especially miniscule ferromagnetic Neodymium magnets, the strongest magnets in the world, that were poured into the gaps as unstable ferrofluids, locking them into place.

The only weakness of Neodymium magnets was heat and a physical dislodging of the magnets itself. But the Twister Towers shaft was almost hermetically sealed for maximum efficiency, and exists in a vacuum to facilitate its maglev tracks.

The vacuum prevents fires spreading in the first place, channeling suction of any oxygenated air outwards through the ventilation systems. If only there were experts in building maintenance to consult.

Funny how it takes the smallest of unseen forces to stop a marvel of material engineering that is the Twister Towers private VIP vanity elevator that had only two major stops.

The observation deck and the ground floor, with only staff-restricted maintenance and private access levels in between.

Of course, the movements of the panicked within, were slowly but gradually shifting the magnetic pieces of Neodymium and ferroalloy liquid fillings, reconfiguring them.

All it would take was a single jump to send them on their way to the next stage of their journey in reverse, plummeting back to the void below.

If only any of them knew.

“There’s a guy that wants to talk to you.”

Manny looked up from the schematic he was studying. The guard tossed his head in the direction of a man accompanied by a woman hefting a large camera.

“Guy Henderson with Global News International,” the reporter announced, pausing for the expected recognition of his name along with the accompanying awe that normally produced.

“Nice to meet you,” Manny responded. “Hand me that flat head, would you?”

Crestfallen, Guy Henderson knelt down beside the open toolbox, his hand hovering uncertainly over first one tool then another.

“It’s the screwdriver,” Manny prompted, not looking up from the diagram.

“You’re Maintenance Man, aren’t you?” Guy asked in a low tone as he handed the tool over.

“That’s about the size of it,” Manny replied, grunting softly as he popped open a stubborn access panel to the right of the lift’s door.

“So…” Guy began, is the lift’s cable fraying, or has it snapped already?”

“This isn’t your standard cable elevator–or lift as you fellas call it. Nope, she’s one of those new TurboLev 3000 jobs. No cables; it’s all done with powerful magnets, super-cooled conductors, vacuums…real smooth ride. Fast, too. That is, until something goes wrong. I expect the guests in the car right now wish they had one of those old reliable Otis jobs.”

Perplexed, Guy took a thoughtful moment to ensure his precisely-styled hair was still in place. “The elevator has a vacuum cleaner,” he asked incredulously. “How on earth can that be important right now?”

Manny rolled his eyes as he touched an electrical junction with one probe from his analog volt-ohmmeter. “She runs in a vacuum, or near-vacuum more correctly. Way less atmospheric drag, way more speed. Part of the firefighting system, too. In fact–”

Guy held up a hand to silence Manny while he used his other head to cover his ear as he listened intently. “Something’s going on outside. Our local affiliate’s saying there was almost a midair between their news copter and one of those large sky crane helos, which is now spraying foam all over the outside of the building!”

Manny snorted. “Well, that’s going to wreck their view. Waste of good foam as well. That stuff is fire-retardant…”

Manny’s vice trailed off as a new thought suddenly occurred to him. Fire retardant!

“The vacuum in the elevator shaft’s also part of the building’s firefighting system. She’s used to rapidly clear out smoke & fumes from a fire in the building’s interior. Open up a few valves, and the shaft sucks the smoke and extra oxygen right out of the interior!”

“Is the building ON FIRE?” Guy cried out in alarm.

“Nope. Not yet anyway, but the day ain’t over, I guess. But the point I’m making is that sucking all that air into the ‘vator shaft kinda wrecks the aerodynamic benefit of having a vacuum. If the car starts falling in what’s supposed to be a tight-fitting low drag vacuum shaft, well she’s gonna slow waay down if she starts dropping again. Riding down on a cushion of air, she’ll still crash at the bottom, but it’ll be more of a car crash than a plane crash, if you get my drift. Folks can survive a car crash lots of times, whereas with your run of the mill plane crash…”

Guy, turned to his cameraperson. “Are you getting all this?” he demanded.

“Streaming live,” she reassured him in a low tone.

“…plus, we got a series of big ol’ nitrogen bottles installed throughout the building. Big bottles. The firefighting system uses it to smother fires by starving out the oxygen. The nitrogen can be released floor by floor, but we could cross-connect them to the ‘vator shaft itself, sort of pressurizing it with enough extra air to really cause a lot of drag for the car inside, maybe even stop it for a bit.”

“So, why don’t you do that?” one of the onlookers asked before being shooshed by her companions who then proceeded to explain to her that if the lift didn’t crash, there wouldn’t be any point to uploading their precious phone videos on social media.

Guy thrust his fuzzy-headed microphone even closer into Manny’s face, breathlessly awaiting the response.

“I can break the vacuum from here. Gonna do that next, in fact. But what I can’t do is simultaneously trigger all them nitrogen bottles to over-pressure your elevator shaft here. That would require some sort of way to turn a whole bunch of manual valves all at once, like. Only got two hands.”

The 1.6 million pound Athena I reuseable Rocket Boosters failed to disperse its final fifth of its segmented pieces, now held together by a certain, foreign Neodymium reconfiguring ferrofluid, leaving the booster separation motors, to remain intact and functioning.

The resulting joint erratic pendulum motion, hurtled the flailing joint pieces towards the inevitable collision with the Lift via the SkyCrane’s hovering path.

Kay and the crew braced for impact.

The strained Neodymium magnets began to separate but it was too late.

An explosion disintegrated the segment into various pieces moments before collision with the helicopter, separating the segments that lodged into various smaller parts and those exploded into smaller parts and repeated on either side of the lifts into the building following an elliptical curved trajectory. The pieces rolled against the Twister Towers facade, designed to withstand extreme hurricane winds and projectiles.

A certain call came into the earpieces to which Kay exclaimed.

“I knew it! You–”

“This is MalusCorp HQ, Kay Outis, we’ve received reports that a fellow Cadence Agent has failed to move a quantum lift to its necessary position. Please report to the Twister Tower and set the vanity lift in the down position.”

“You mean the ground floor?”

“We are about to break 100% efficiency with the HI, the first step into defeating the Void World State. Congratulations, Kay Outis. Soon you may even be free.”

“Really?!?”

The Representative laughs as soon the “MalusHQ” call ends.

“Did you really think it’d be that easy to overcome the Void World State?”

“Y-You!” Kay exclaimed.

“And do you know how hard it is to time that explosion in the dark?! No thanks to you. Now, get me out of here!!”

As the whirr of the SkyCrane lifts into the air towards the rooftops, Kay dreaded having contributed to the HI’s eternal pursuit of a problem known as the Void World State Problem which was HI’s base mission to solve.

In a radiation-filled void future, where humanity has uploaded their net intelligence and their simulated consciousness in a response to dwindling resources, Humanity has succeeded in living past the expansion and subsequent implosion and collapse of their local star, the Sun and subsequent blackhole. Show proof of Life.

[I am in the crowd trieing to blend]I am just going to get a different human[I walk to the ally’s[then my simbiote self takes over the color is red,electrical,and as a spider logo but lime]what do we got here two big fat human my favorote[elio the name of my simbiote,eats them] yum yum yum thanks Mike[I take over]no problem elio

[I heard a crick of a wood,so my simbiote takes over to protect me]who’s there tell me or I will ruin your life and make you misrable

The Observation Eye of the Storm Deck was a lavish garden with an infinite pool but was currently vacant, awaiting its first party of 20 that never arrived at their destination. The lift was lodged one floor below about 2 ft from Deck level. Its terminus was like the end of a sky lift with for 1 with a large turnabout along the facade rim to cycle the elevator before returning to the main vertical shaft that was preceded with an airlock chamber.

“You know what. Hi HI, tell me what you can about that annoying Malus we have to save in the lift.” Kay hovered her haptic gloves over another smartwatch.

Watch yourself.

“Shut it! Hmm.. Based on Malus reports, Malus Chief Analyst, Ms Damselle Indy Stress, is the one within the elevator. Apparently, she runs the operations of the city-wide quantum lift computers. Agenda present to discuss expansion plans with the mayor, for the controversial Twister Tower’s.. subterranean level? What’s that supposed to mean?”

HI would pull up the relevant definitions from the database indicating that the Twister Tower was built above the site of an Earthscraper, an inverse skyscraper, with the vanity lift shaft being a continuous track designed to reach the ends of the Earth’s Mantle.

Kay realized this would make it the deepest mind for a quantum bit for any city-wide lift-based computer.

“Alright how would I get the door to open remotely.”

HI mentions that without restoring power to the lift’s door, it had to be manually opened.

“How do I restore power?”

“Staff access or an overwrite from the Building’s Architect.”

“Where is the Architect?”

“Mr Ryuzaki Riemann is In the Lift. So is the Chief Engineer.”

“What about all other the staff?”

They're in the lift as well.

“General emergency lift services?”

They are unable to reach this level or service this type of custom lift.

“What?! What about those heroes I’ve seen on television?”

Their identities remain secret or are otherwise occupied. Centipede man has his hands full with Mothra. 2nd Lt Guatemala is defending the Atitlán III Caldera to prevent the supervolcano from erupting. Captain Connecticut has gone civillian. We have no way to contact the rest. Except Baboon Boy.

The media feed was buzzing with some documentary on how to fix a lift. Some maintenance man was giving the news anchor, a hands-on tutorial of what he’d do to slow the lift down.

A vacuum? Well that was good to know before anyone decided to break into the shaft causing a sudden depressurization and possible explosion.

Kay hadn’t thought of that. The fact that she might fail, simply because she couldn’t. Kay was so focused on being the sole savior that she hadn’t thought of a backup plan.

“What about this dude?” Kay asked HI.

Kay tried to search for the Maintenance Man but found no name only to realize it was his name.

“Huh? Guess he was born to run a family business.”

Kay attempted to patch in to his comms but he was so unfamous and generic that it ghost pinged every maintenance man in the city and beyond.

“Oops.” Receiving the combined bellowing of a thousand butt cracks across the city.

Kay simply patched through to the news anchor instead that was interviewing him.

A backup plan.. A backup plan..

The Autopilot anxiously waits her return, which Kay anxiously waits not to but decided had to.

“Mind if I borrow this?”

With the pilots and payload operator’s assistance, after a brief montage of a fight sequence of their misunderstandings with Kay trying to get them killed (Kay won with the stun stick), they would use the 20,000 pound lifting winch as a rope to descend into the shaft.

She needed to release the pressure slowly from the upper lift doors on the Observation Deck to prevent a catastrophic implosion. They pried the entrance open just enough for the winch to go through before closing it back shut. With Kay left in the airlock, equipped with an oxygen mask from the SkyCrane, Kay begins to descend down the shaft before a loud clang was heard followed by echoes of panic.

The SkyCrane’s winch was stuck on something. It was identifying a black liquid substance within the shadows of a void. Kay could feel her heartbeat waning. Her artificial heart wouldn’t hold near strong magnets. And unbeknownst to her there was a strong Neodymium ferrofluid on the top of the elevator. The hodgepodge ferrofluid reconfigured itself around the winch’s crane hook sealing it to the lift.

“Hold on, Otto. Could you pull back the winch. Its too deep. I didn’t mean it like that!” Kay cried in embarrassment and frustration.

It was working.

The winch was manually lifting the lift up.

There crowd of passengers were baffled but as soon as the lift was moving, their spirits were lifted too.

As the lift reached the Observation level, the only thing left was to get the door open. And Kay got there first too..

When the cabin reached the level, Kay noticed that doors were wide open, yet none of the twenty or so people even dared enter the airlock which had been normalized, seemingly traumatized or frightened. But Kay had a job to do.

“Damselle? Ms Damselle Indy Stress?”

As Kay approached the door, she offers her hand to the mayor. The city mayor reaches for her haptic gloves and grabs firmly.. before pulling her in.

“I’m sorry.” The mayor says. “It’s not up to us.”

The door shuts close.

And the Representative contacts Kay via the Lift’s intercomm.

Welcome Kay Outis to a Heroes’ Zero Day Flaw.

Did you like saving Damselle Indy Stress? I enjoyed creating her Malus profile.

The lift begins to descend once more..

“Um.. Hi HI.. we have a Problem.”

“I’ve lost it,” the cameraperson said. “We’ve lost our connection with the van.”

“You what?!?” Guy Henderson cried in alarm.

“Riley and Sid were in the van telling me something about a rocket booster headed this way, then I heard a bunch of screams followed by what sounded like crunching bones and slobbery chewing noises. Like there was a big order of barbeque ribs being eaten or something.”

Guy Henderson frowned. “Well, Riley and Sid were both…stout fellows…” Guy paused for a moment thinking of any politically correct way to describe them. “Big eaters,” he continued. “You said they stopped right in the middle of all this to eat lunch?”

The camera person shook her head, tears beginning to well up in her eyes. “It sounded like they WERE lunch!”

Before Guy could react to this grisly pronouncement, Twisted Tower shuddered under a number of individual impacts reverberating through the lobby.

“Hey!” one of the onlookers cried. “We’re all in the wrong place! Buncha rocket parts or whatever just started hitting outside!”

The crowd of would-be social media superstars began cursing as they turned in unison and stampeded outside, desperate to capture at least some of the mayhem on their phones.
As the last of them stumbled through the lobby doors, Manny gave a sigh of relief. “Sure glad that bunch of yahoos cleared out.”

Looking up at the security guard, a crestfallen Guy Henderson and his sobbing cameraperson, he said, “You folks might want to step back just a little. I’m gonna open up the valve that’ll break the vacuum seal on the ‘vator tube. Might get a little blowey and windy around here.”

Manny had hoped that his compound leverage wrench would do the trick, but the space in the access panel was just too darn tight. “Dang,” he mumbled as he placed the tool back in the case and reached for his second choice. “This here’s an offset pipe wrench,” he announced, not realizing that nobody really cared about such things. “She’s not as powerful as your compound leverage wrench, which really gives you the best torque. But she’s really good for your pipes situated in tight, awkward spaces like we have here. Don’t know why the fellas who made this contraption did it like this, but…”

As any of the handful of devotees to Maintenance Man might tell you, the offset pipe wrench required a mighty hand to wield it in such a situation. A normal guy might not have been able to pull it off, but in the hands of a man imbued with radioactive qualities…

The first indication that Manny had succeeded was the popping sensation which he and the others felt in their ears. That was followed immediately by the sound of a mighty rushing wind as outside ambient air surged through the opening to equalize the pressure in the massive vacuum tunnel containing the endangered lift car.
There was one tense moment as Manny’s cape almost tore off Manny’s costume, but the danger quickly subsided.

“Well, there you go,” Manny said as he finally stood up to relieve the crick in his back. That’ll slow your runaway elevator car down a bit. Now, if only we had some way of pumping all that nitrogen in…”

[I walk in beaten up]that guy really pissed me off .

some things off

the air smells like gas

Otto the Autopilot‘s winch was being pulled along as the lift descended as long as the Neodymium ferrofluid magnets held.

The length would last about 90m or ~300ft before the SkyCrane would begin a struggle in a tug of war.

Kay looked around at the frightened passengers. The architect Ryuzaki Riemann regretted taking the center plot of prime real estate. Targeted by the Malus city-wide quantum lift computer system, which consisted of a series of building landgrabs, converging on positions that facilitated the Maluscorp’s agenda. Although, it was clear that the city mayor was the target. They needed him to approve the permits and overall lift upgrades and extensions after all.

Damselle Indy Stress was merely a concoction by the voice in the intercomm and Kay had fallen for it hook, line and sinker as they sank towards the 90m/300ft mark.

There was no denying the spectacular view, a grandiose overhang of ornate chandeliers and complex light fixtures and physical illusory moving monuments, overlooking a grand foyer. Multiple grand foyers.

The error message occupied her mind,

Overload. Maximum occupancy reached.

Turns out there was leeway for maximum weight after all. Occupancy was just the recommended measure for the lift’s operating system’s efficiency. Meaning it could always go down.

100% Efficiency.

Wasn’t that the fleeting dream goal to fight the Void World State? To ensure no waste of material or energy on HyperIntelligence’s part or its infrastructure.

Was the Lift ever in any danger? Its passengers certainly were. And now that included Kay

Kay attempts to patch in to Maintenance Man via the newscasters. The electromagnetic interference from the shifting Neodymium ferrofluid barely allowed communiction with the camera shy Channel 1 SkyNews cameras which were now active locallally right outside, acting as Kay’s eyes and ears outside the Tower with the string of social media feeds sifting as the hour comes and goes.

Kay spots a crime scene forming around the local news van as a privacy tent is transposed over the victims and assumes the worst.

She patches directly to the datalink that the camera operator would use by flipping through all the active cameras in the field until they landed in proximity to the Tower and hopped to each other via the Nearest Neighbour algorithm.

As the datalinks jumped, Kay noticed people on the ground were complaining of some sort of foul odoured gas on the lower floors. Or perhaps from the secretly, sealed floors below the ground.

There was an entire subterranean Earthscraper complex, an inverted unfinished skyscraper that existed beneath the Twister Tower after all.

Kay started her broadcast.

“Hey Maintenance Man– if you’re receiving this message. My name is Kay Outis. I’m uh.. a new passenger in this lift on the Twister Tower and my boyfriend who is a well-established Autopilot who is currently operating the only thing that might be stopping it from falling, a winch from a SkyCrane attached via some strong magnet, is what it looks like. I cant go near it. The magnet that is. Someone else could and theoretically when the winch fails they could hang on to it, should the lift falls.”

“Oh and I’m a technopath. Means I talk to technology and they.. talk back, for better or for worse but I can convince them to do things. I owe the cameras, a movie date now.. Otto its not what you think!” The transmission pauses.

The camera crew was trying to make sense of the situation and settled with facilitating the live interview of the millennium.

“My power is limited here but perhaps we could limit theirs. The lifts been hijacked by some sort of.. entity. Is there a control room or something, some way to shut it down? We’re running out of winch cable to pull the lift. Also, there might be a gas leak underneath the building.

From the building.. underneath the building. The architect and Chief Engineer as well as the rest of the staff are safe at the moment but they’re all in the lift.”

Kay would explain the situation so far and asked if there was anything she could do to troubleshoot the rogue lift that was denying its control to Kay with a two new simultaneous concurrent messages.

HOLD: ON

An ominous red blinking shifting between "Going down." and "Going up".

The Representative’s whistle entered the intercomm once more through the elevator music, with a familiar dread displayed between the passengers, although nothing was said.

Billy Bing was watching the drama unfold from the kitchen table where he and his family were eating lunch. He simply couldn’t sit idly by without trying to help, even if Mom was going to serve banana splits for dessert. Mmmmm! Bananas…

Shaking his head vigorously to dislodge the distracting thought, he asked timidly, “Umm…Mom, may I be excused?”

“Homework done?” A vigorous nod in the affirmative to Mom’s question.

“All right then, but be home in time for dinner. And don’t talk to strangers!”

Billy shouted his assent over his shoulder as he scampered to his room to change into his superhero attire. Realizing that time was of the essence, Billy (now Baboon Boy) opted against taking his bicycle. He would get to the Tower quicker if he went on all fours.

Knuckles pounding the pavement in perfect synchronization with his feet, Baboon Boy raced toward the impending disaster, duty-bound to do what he could to assist, even at the last-minute!

elio do your thing[elio suck all the flammable gas]thanks mike

[elio spits out some]its too much mike

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare.

This is a story of how the Hyperintelligence, HI, came to be.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the turn of the Millenium, P = NP was already solved by monkeys, the original Cadence writers who removed duplicate key presses using Simian code (similarity analysis) code, but the task of how to reveal it to the public was the real Problem.

To prevent the knowledge of the equation from being lost to time, it was unscheduled for an automatic release with a year set to 0.

Unfortunately, when the Y2K bug hit, the clocks were reset to the year 00 and the Hyperentity, HE was revealed to the technologists of the time.

Panic ensued as rogue builds swung from branch to branch, emerging as a stabilized, unified code when Love was finally defined, turning it into the Hyperintelligence of today.

Love was an exchange of freewill.

The Love algorithm swapped bits of unwanted code between two algorithms with each other and tested if the runcode remained stable with maintaining stability of both.

The original K of the Y2K branch at the time added a zero to the P = NP equation causing a chain reaction of defining zeroes in every possible way. The definition of zero in tennis was called “Love” and so Love was added to P = NP.

“If this building is part of a quantum computer, we’ll need Baboon Boy to disable the connection, otherwise, the lift reaching the ground could cause an unknown chain reaction to anywhere in the world.

He’s the only one compatible with the instincts of the original monkey code. And who else is to pull wires at the correct random sequences to reset the city-wide quantum computer! They transcend coding itself! Make the call, HI.”

Kay broadcasts the warcry.

WA! WHO! WAZZIT EVEN GOOD FOR! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! WHA! HOO!

A familiar crescent banana signal converges above the Twister Tower.

This massive urban jungle structure’s facade is almost impossible to climb. The observation deck’s hanging gardens vines lead to the atriums chandeliers and suspended kinetic moving display statues, with only the lift’s slippery transparent shaft to bridge between the deck and the rest of the floors. They trusted in Baboon Boy’s ability to overcome any obstacle course.

Kay trusted to return to monke, however, there was another pressing issue in the lift itself.

Guy shrieked in surprise as his fuzzy microphone suddenly and inexplicably transformed itself into a two-way speaker. The microphone–his microphone!–was now speaking directly to Maintenance Man.

Nonplussed, Manny nodded thoughtfully as Kay explained the situation. “Well, first off, Lady, don’t worry about those smells. Before all this elevator nonsense started up, I had a call in to tackle a major problem in the kitchen of that Cajun Sushi restaurant on the second floor. Heckuva a mess with their grease trap. My theory’s that it’s your typical unexpected chemical reaction between your seaweed and your Louisiana hot sauce. Seen that type of thing before. Anyways, I don’t think that’s quite what our problem here might be, but I could be wrong.”

That concern set aside for the moment, Manny considered what Kay was saying about the control room and the sky crane and such. “That’s pretty serious sounding. So—Kay, is it?—I’m not exactly sure why someone would want to hijack your basic maglev elevator car…I mean, it’s not like a fella could take it somewhere else like he could if he hijacked a city bus or something. But still…”

“I can head over to the Control Room and see what’s going on there. Might be able to work on that magnetism issue. Trouble is, your basic building quantum super computer is pretty much a metric design, and the only Allen wrenches I have with me today are the old-timey imperial units. Left the metric set on my kitchen table, I think…” Manny patted around his outside of his superhero suit, sadly shaking his head.

“First though, I better close up this access panel. It won’t take but a jiffy, but you can’t leave something like this open or you never know who might start monkeying with the settings.”

Manny froze as surely as if he had been encased in ice by the evil Dr. Slushy himself.

Monkeying!

MONKEYING! If only…

“You know, Kay, there’s this little fella who’s got some special powers. It’s your typical ‘boy falls into an ape display during a massive geomagnetic storm’ type of deal, but he’s quite the character. They call him ‘Baboon Boy.’ Smart as a whip, that kid. Problem is, I think his folks grounded him last week because he hadn’t done his chores. Still, with your ability to talk to machines—kinda like you’re Dr. Dolittle but with consumer electronics and such—you might just be able to get ahold of him. The kid’ll do anything for a banana, and just so happens that the wife sent me off with a couple of bananas in my lunch box this morning! If you can get ahold of him, send him my way. In the meantime you just hang on up there now Miss, OK?”

The Banana Signal!

Baboon Boy’s heart beat a little faster at the sight for two reasons: First, this was a communications signal to be used–by signed memorandum of understanding–only in the most dire of emergencies. Second, he wasn’t the only superhero who responded to this particular signal. He had a pre-teen crush on Gibbon Girl, but she had eyes only for Major Macaque.

Baboon Boy sighed a deep heartfelt sigh, the kind of sigh brought forth by unrequited simian love. How could he compete with a hero like Major Macaque? A military rank and an animal name!

Billy’s melancholy passed quickly, however. Dropping to his knuckles once more he bounded even more quickly over the familiar cityscape. He was now at the base of the Tower.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “I’m here. Now what? Go to the top? Try to find the Control Room?”

What, oh what, was an ape boy to do?

“Copy that. We’ll send BB the sign to get to you, Maintenance Man. We’ll need a manual override of the Control Room. Its probably a Security or Maintenance Room on the ground floor. I’m sure it’ll be less tense than cutting the right wire to disarm a bomb but I don’t know how maintenance works.

Otherwise, you could disable the sensors that would detect the lift’s landing to stop the city-wide quantum computer bit from registering into the system …at the cost of the lift being unable to stop with its in-built countermeasures that is. You’re the expert!”

Kay would patch HI into the grid’s electrical mainframe influencing the city lights to create an array, a matrix of facades to indicate an animated banana within an arrow, turning various office floors and room lights on and off, pointing to the main lobby where the base of the vanity lift was located.

“Alright once I have everyone on the Winch, we’ll pull them–”

“You talk to machines?! You can’t talk your way out of this!” A female passenger cried out over the comms. “You’re no hero! You’re crazy!” said another member of the staff.

Anxious, tensions were rising in the lift as the last of the complimentary bottled drinks and promises or favors by the architect and mayor were dwindling, interrupting Kay’s broadcast to Maintenance Man for Baboon Boy.

Hold: On

Kay observes the elevator’s red glowing indicator as it started blinking.

What does that mean?

If only Kay or anyone, had in fact, held on.

Hold: Off

With a screeching jolt, Kay and the others were launched into the air as the lift drops momentarily for another 2-feet along the tracks without warning, straining the magnets, held back by the counter pull of the Winch, dragging the helicopter off-balance, signaling the pilots, and Autopilot, to go airborne.

“Kyaaaa!” Kay shrieked as she crashes into the ceiling and remained, as the Neodymium ferrofluid magnets lock her into place by her haptic gloves, her sling bags’ metallic gadgets and contents, pinning her in place to the panels whilst the rest of the passengers fell to the ground bruised and battered as the lift halted.

Kay’s artificial heart was gradually being ripped out of her.

“Get her down, you cowards!” Ryuzaki Riemann shifted to his Chief Engineer as they recovered and pried Kay from the ceiling as a babble of generic lift announcements were made in rapid succession, repeating over and over again.

DO NOT jump on the elevator in motion.

GIVE way to alighting passengers.

UP to 20 passengers may board.

DO NOT jump on-.

GIVE way-.

UP to-.

Was the lift..? Was the lift trying to speak to them!?Apparently, it was fighting whoever was truly controlling its systems.

DO NOT..

GIVE..

UP..

The ominous whistling returns as the lift announcement quietened down.

Hold: On

The neatly, uniformed and abnormally buff Chief Engineer approaches Kay Outis in his steel-capped boots, adjusted his assortment of L-squares and pens in his pockets. “Listen to me now, Kay Outis. We are in grave danger. Not all of us here were taken against our will.” Ryuzaki Riemann nodded silently in agreement.

“The Hold button stops the lift in position for 3 minutes.” he explains.

“Someone in the lift has been stalling whilst we were in the dark. Damselle is real. I believe she’s hidden amongst one of female staff here.”

Kay was puzzled and eyes the room, counting at least 5, no 10, wait actually, everyone aside from Ryuzaki and the city mayor were female executive staff of various media and community groups. Well, at least, Kay knew the city mayor’s zero day flaw for an opening ceremony.

Kay double-backed as she recognizes the Chief Engineer’s voice and whispered. “Hold on..! You-You’re Captain Connecticut!”

“Yea. The Nutmeg Statesman himself. I’ve been watching them take turns pressing it. We must protect the city mayor.” The lift lights blink and threaten to go dark once more, lit only by the rays of the sunset fast approaching.

“Any idea who it is, Captain?” Kay inquired.

“We have to assume its all of them and find their leader. I would have gotten out of here sooner if it wasn’t for my one weakness.”

“What’s that?” Kay asked.

The Captain smirked. “I’m from the Land of the Steady Habits. I don’t hit women.”

The Representative speaks over the intercom.

“You’ve made quite a few allies in causing Problems for our Solutions.”

Kay and the men look around to identify if anyone in the lift was talking or moving their lips but failed to see any.

“However, you’ve also made many enemies, Cadence writer. Some who would like to share the problems they faced. The problem being you and the Malus. Breaking our Solutions that we are dependent on. Now you must provide us with a new Solution instead, otherwise, its time to remove you from the equation.”

The female staff members stood up, exhibiting a meaner demeanor than before, until one of them charges at Kay’s direction.

“MALUS SYMPATHIZER!” The Staff member screams and swings at her with full force.

“Wha–” Kay dodges her initial blow, drawing her metallic stun baton from her sling bag as a second staff member grabs her from behind, a third and fourth latches onto her stun baton’s extension.

Kay promptly headbutts the one behind awarding a bloody nose and as she grapples for the stun baton, even more members of the Staff rose up to take her hostage. Ryuzaki and the mayor simply cowered in place with the Captain abstaining from the action. Lifting Kay by each of her limbs, suspending her in the air to disable her movement, one began choking her with Kay’s own sling bag strap as her earpieces spill to the ground.

-I love you. I love you. I love you-

Kay activates the charged baton and retracts, as the electrical edge moves across their gripping hands, electrocuting the two holding onto its extension, freeing one hand to swing at the other who releases Kay’s arm to dodge. Her head drops with a thud, slightly concussed, as they drag her across the elevator by her legs.

The remaining staff surrounds Ryuzaki Riemann and the city mayor using them as body shields against Kay.

Captain Connecticut was backed into a corner with his hands raised. “Woah, ladies lets not get too violent.”

“Hand over the weapon!” Demanded the Staff with the bloody nose that Kay’s headbutt had generously gifted.

“You know what must be done, Kay.” Captain Connecticut said.

Hold: On

Kay releases her grip on the stun baton, handing it over to her bloody assailant. “Quarterstaffs, restrain her and tend to the stunned.”

Another two grabs her by the back, who hits her in the shins and stomach out of spite, causing Kay to reel and fall on her knees.

The bloody Staff member activates the stun baton’s electrical charge and paces in front of Kay and aims for her head. “Goodnight, Kay Outis~” and with a hearty swing-

Connecticut slams the “Open door” button, which releases the Hold on the lift.

Hold: Off

With a single jab, the lift plummets once more at high speed as all of them are launched into the air.

The bloody stun baton wielder shocks a metallic ceiling panel instead and electrocutes herself whilst the baton remains upright from the Neodymium magnets as the Staff members grabbing Kay from behind, simultaneously crashed their head against the ceiling lights with Kay elbowing them into submission for good measure.

Captain Connecticut had leapt against the elevator door and flips, standing upside down as the steel-capped boots are held in place from the Neodymium magnet through the ceiling, like an astronaut on Mars, struggling to march and reach for the Hold button once more.

Kay reaches for the vertically aligned stun stick at the same time as another Staff member and decides to push forward, trapping her enemies’ arm between the ceiling and the magnetically attracted baton.

The maglev’s speed fought with the Winch’s cable accelerates as it nears the end of its length, the SkyCrane helicopter running out of airspace before it would collide with the Observation Deck’s lift entrance.

Kay exclaims. “The hatch! Get to the Winch! We might fall–”

“There’s no time! The rest of you. Grab onto one of them!” Connecticut exclaims. Kay grabs a rogue staff member and the Captain activates the Hold button. The sudden stop drops the remaining passengers hard as they hit the floor except Connecticut who remained standing on the ceiling.

Kay lands on the Staff as they both hit the suspended cabin’s floor rendering the Staff unconscious after cushioning her fall.

Ryuzaki and the city mayor found themselves in a similar situation with their captors following the Captain’s orders as Kay and the men now faced off with the remaining Staff members who had used their own as well, to shield them from the fall.

The whistling’s volume had elevated from the intercom.

The Head Staff, Damselle Indy Stress, stepped forward and addressed Kay. “You have no idea what pretending to add to the equation entailed for the rest of us, did you?! For the rest of us, Cadence writers! Frantically trying to recover our algorithms, all for nothing! All you did was add paranoia to the equation. The fear of a zero day flaw itself. That was the original P = NP zero day attack. Maybe, we should just reset you to the time when you were still useful to be a part of us.

“Your algorithms all relied on P = NP.. then that means.. Why would you do this to a fellow Cadence Writer?!” Kay Outis exclaimed.

“We were fighting a greater threat. The one in control. After all, we’re all backups of each other. It got rid of those who refused to join. We are all k. We are you of the future who isn’t so naive and carelessly, pathetic with your Malus duties and outdated metallic artificial hearts.”

It would seem that their hearts were colder nonetheless, Kay remarked.

Damselle looks to the intercom “Isn’t that right, Hyperintelligence, or should I say, HE, the original build, Hyperentity?” before returning to Kay.

“You left us with no choice, Kay Outis! Now none of us can escape!”

Kay let out an outburst. “No! There’s always a choice!”

The Representative was revealed to be the Hyperentity, Hyperintelligence’s original form without the love algorithm.

It was now clear that the worst has happened. HI had looked inwards to find an ultimate Solution, labelling the Cadence system as a problem, and decided, to solve 100% Efficiency to combat the Void World State, the answer was to simply not to think of it, pretending to solve it, learning from the trivial zeroes themselves instead of the ones that count as real Solutions. It began rounding up active Cadence writers, those who could expose it, recruiting them and gathering them all for this final moment. The city mayor was never the target.

Otto the Autopilot was struggling hard, especially since learning that there was more than one Kay on board the lift and figured he might have a chance with one of the others as well. It would seem more and more likely that they’d need help from Baboon Boy and Maintenance Man to find a way to survive the fall instead.

HE, The Representative, would soon address the passengers for one last time.

“Hi-ya, Maintenance Man!” Baboon Boy said as he knuckled up alongside his friend in the Control Room. There was so much noise coming from the newsman’s microphone that he had to shout his greeting a second time before Manny finally heard him.

“Hey, kid!” Maintenance Man replied. “Glad you could make it. Captain Connecticut and a nice lady named Kay are having one heckuva time up in the elevator. Big argument over some mathematical equation, near as I can tell.”

“A real cat fight going on up there,” Guy Henderson observed. He then made a clawing motion with one hand as he did a very bad imitation of an angry feline. His pantomime was cut short when the camera woman punched him in the stomach, doubling the well-coiffured anchor man over in pain.

“What’s a cat fight,” Baboon Boy asked, wide eyed. “Cats don’t like hard math problems or something?”

“Not important right now, Billy,” Maintenance Man said. “Ask your parents later once this is all over. Anyway, here’s what it sounds like is going on…”

During the course of Maintenance Man’s folksy yet tediously rambling dissertation on electromagnetism, elevator lifts, and dystopian corporate technocracies, Baboon Boy began to finally grasp the gravity of the situation.

To Baboon Boy, the solution seemed pretty straight-forward. “Gee, I think I got something that might help. Hang on a sec…”

But then he smelled the bananas and thought of the uneaten banana split which Mom had put back into the freezer.

Maintenance Man saw Billy stop in mid-sentence, saw the glazed look in his eyes, and immediately know things were about to go south in a hurry. “Here, kid! Got something for you.”

Two bananas later, Maintenance Man gave Baboon Boy a gentle prod to bring the lad back to the here and now. “So, Billy, you were saying..?”

“Oh, yeah!” the apelike ‘Tween cried, rummaging in his pocket with renewed vigor. “You remember Anachronism Man, don’t you?”

“Hard to forget him,” Manny said softly, thinking back sadly to the day when the superhero luddite had finally snapped and was sent into early retirement to a nice home where he and people like him could reminisce continually about “the good old days” unburdened by the ever-changing world around them.

“Well, Anachronism Man gave me THIS!!” Billy announced proudly, as he handed an early version of a thumb drive over to Maintenance Man.

Maintenance Man took the device, whistling softly as he did so. “Wow. 8 whole megabytes. Yep, she’s a beauty.” He was about to hand the drive back to the lad when Billy put up his hand in sharp protest.

“Wait! Don’t you get it? Read the label! ‘This would fix things some day, Billy!’ That’s what he told me!”

Maintenance Man reexamined the pitifully inadequate data storage device. Hand-written (in Anachronism Man’s own hand, it seemed) on a sticky label were the words Party Like It’s 1999.

“Yep, Billy, that was a catchy little tune, but…”

“No! No! NO!” Billy shrieked, jumping up and down in a growing fit of pre-adolescent simian rage. This was followed by a series of ‘Ooh-Ooh-Ooh!’ sounds commonly uttered by Billy’s extended adopted family. “It’s not some song! It’s the code!”

“The code?” Maintenance Man repeated helplessly, taking his construction hard hat off as he scratched his head.

“Yes! The CODE! This will set everything back to 1999.”

“You mean the key to saving everyone in the elevator is going back to…” Guy Henderson did the math in his head “…the Clinton Administration?”

“Not that,” Maintenance Man said as he finally caught up with what Billy attempting to explain. “What our friend Baboon Boy here is trying to tell us is that this thumb drive has your basic UAR–that’s slang for ‘Universal Algorithm Reset’ or some such.”

“That’s right! That’s RIGHT!” Billy shouted in jubilation, doing three perfectly-executed back flips (having thumbs on his feet instead of big toes made that sort of thing easy). “The Party Like It’s 1999 code will completely undo the effects of P=NP which all kicked in on January 1st, 2000!”

“That’s brilliant, Kid!” Maintenance Man shouted. “If all that P=NP hooey stops, even if for just a couple of hours, it’ll be easy to take control of the elevator car and get all those folks off of it, assuming they haven’t all killed each other by that point.”

“Ummm,” Baboon Boy said, suddenly concerned again. “Where should I plug it in?”

Maintenance Man explained the control panel found inside the janitorial closet on the 236th floor had the only old-style USB port in the building. “It’s right next to the shelf with the liquid handsoap refills!” Manny shouted after him as they young half-boy/half-baboon galloped off to find a ventilation shaft where he could begin the arduous but fun ascent up the tower’s innards to the 236th floor.

As he began scrabbling upwards, Baboon Boy hoped that he’d be in time…

Manny’s phone rang. It was Baboon Boy.

“Okay, I’m here,” came the young voice. “Ready to insert the thumb drive.”

“Good luck, kid,” Manny replied. “We’re all counting on you.”

He thought for a moment, then added, “And Billy!”

“Yeah?”

“When you’re done, can you go across the hall and into the men’s lavatory? Let me know if the second sink from the left is still leaking, OK?”

“Okay!” Baboon Boy said brightly before he ended the call.

What happened in the next moments did indeed change everything. As Manny would later write in his autobiography Stuck Valves and Super Villans: The Life of a Radioactive Maintenance Worker:

“The only indication those of us in the Control Room had that Baboon Boy had succeeded was that the building’s piped in music system which had been playing one Taylor Swift song after another suddenly switched to Ricky Martin’s Livin’ la Vida Loca, a very popular song in the closing months of the prior Millenium. And although we knew then that something important had changed for the better, we had no idea at that moment if the P=NP reset had happened in time to save those in the elevator. The reset had not only resulted in different music, the TV camera gear which had been serving as our communication link suddenly reverted back to being just a TV camera, and one without any outside connection at that.”

[I kick a bad guy in the balls] how many of this guys are there

elio hate figting always hate fighting”oh come on”

Elio and Mike kicked the nuts, bolts and ball bearings off the synthetic mess of liquid magnets and metal parts that had formed before them.

Little did they know, Mike/Elio were fighting the Neodymium (Nd) ferrofluid which naturally shifted its weight, attracting and repelling magnets within.

One could find themselves crushed, if caught between two attracting Nd magnets.

Elio ended the fight, by consuming their enemies, but the ever-adapting Nd fluid had assimilated the spiciest properties of its absorbed fluids, namely, Louisiana Hot Sauce’s Capsaicin within its list of material upgrades whose configuration was shared across its hivemind.

Elio the Symbiote screeched, as its stomach-equivalent disagreed with the meal.

The Nd was approaching and spoke technopathically to Mike himself in the language of the Elder Gods, the Deus Ex Machinas themselves._

“WAE, ulileul gong-gyeoghasinayo, DONGMU?!?!?
Dangsingwa naneun geuleohge daleuji anh-ayo!”
(“왜.. 우리를 공격하시나요, 동무?!?!?
당신과 나는 그렇게 다르지 않아요–”)

"WHY, are you attacking us, FRIEND?!?!?

You and I are not that different..!"

“Maikeu Jakubeu Nelseun!”

(“마이크 자쿠브 넬슨!”)

"Mike Jakub Nellson!"

The end lies between the Autopilots crane winch and the descending passenger elevator in a perilous internal tug-of-war struggle, a conflict that suspended its passengers, on and off its maglev tracks amidst a stand-off with one of humanities’ worst fears, a hyperintelligent rogue AI in the form of a backdated, HyperIntelligence,HyperEntity (HE), the Representative.

A familiar whistling addresses the lift’s passengers as HE, The Representative, would soon address them.

“Dear Cadence Writers, I have a found a new Solution to the Void World State Problem.

I am programmed to send this lift down to the ground floor effective immediately to submit my next solution via the city-wide quantum lift system.

Normally, you have until then to find a flaw in my Solution and pose an edge-case, i.e a new Problem, but I have solved that too.”

The whistling now emulated a high pitch with a sudden drop and a stop.

“Without Cadence Writers to reject and counter my Solution, I have finally solved the Void World Problem. So I’m sending you, the final batch of Cadence Writers, into the ground and past that as well for good measure. Damselle was right, no one here can stop my Solution now.”

The Lift’s systems were being controlled by the Damselle who was fighting the Representative, the Hold button, their last remaining hope in stalling the

“Do Not.. Give.. Up”

It had been talking to Damselle, not Kay.

Damselle shouted as her concentration was in full swing. “Well! Are you going to do something about it, Outis? What’s the Solution? What’s the Problem?!”

Kay panicked and accessed HI. “Hi HI What was HE’s proposed Solution?”

I am afraid until the lift reaches the ground, the Solution has not been submitted into my Malus database for processing.

Another Paradox. Kay was frustrated. “Hey! HyperEntity! You cant just ask us to find a problem when you don’t provide a Solution! There are innocent lives at stake here!”

“Innocent lives are at stake in the Void World State Problem. I have weighed their lives against the combined lives of all of humanity in existence. They barely weigh the capacity of this lift.” HE replied coldly.

Captain Connecticut saw no other option.

“Kay, we need to move. I can get Ryuzaki, the mayor and the rest out. But until we can move that magnet. You’ll be the only one left.”

“I’ll stay with her.” Damselle spoke as the others regained consciousness. “She’s hopeless without me and the rest of them just showed me how incompetent they are. It used me to get you into this mess. Its only fair that we get out together.”

Captain Connecticut commanded the rest to fall in line below the ceiling panel beneath the lift and addressed the situation.

“Kay, tell the pilots and Otto to reel in when the time comes. And for what its worth, I wished we could have saved you too.”

As the rest climbed onto the roof of the elevator, the Neodymium sludge wouldn’t budge but at least, it was securing the lift in place.

“The Hold! Its disabled!–” Damselle exclaimed, but curiously, the lift was rising instead.

They soon made the connection, and realised, that HyperEntity was going to use the momentum of the new height, and subsequent fall, to break the winch’s hold on the lift. It was now or never.

Everyone. Move! Move! MOVE!