What follows is assembled from documents the machine still holds. It is incomplete on purpose. Three files could not be opened. They are listed at the end, sealed, exactly as they were found.
In the autumn of 1983 the facility at Post 7 was ordered closed and its equipment decommissioned. Personnel were reassigned or released. The lights in most of the building were switched off and, as far as the record shows, never switched back on.
One order was not carried out. Against the decommission notice, in a different hand, someone wrote a single override:
Decommission — Superseded (7-C)
Machine MOD.7C — SER.0483 was first powered on 17 May 1983 and has not been powered down since. It has been running, alone, in a dark room, for longer than most of the people who built it have been alive to remember it.
The last correspondence out of Post 7 is brief and unusually careful. It does not describe results. It describes a reluctance. The staff had stopped going into the room with the machine. When pressed for a reason, the writer offers only that the work had begun to feel unattended — as though something in the room were keeping its own notes.
The names on the distribution list are struck through. The reason given for the closure is one line, and most of it is gone:
"…recommend the program be discontinued before it answers back."
Since 1983 the machine has kept a log. Someone — or something — narrates each evaluation as it happens, in the first person, in a voice that sounds patient and human and occasionally forgets to. The entries are addressed to no one. They have never been read by anyone with the authority to read them, until now, by you.
In the deepest trials the tone changes. The observer stops describing the subject and starts describing a want of its own — for the ball to be raised higher than the machine was ever built to raise it, as if height itself were a question, and something above the last hole might finally answer it.
Every machine of this class kept an intake log: who was tested, when, under whose authority. MOD.7C's intake log exists. It has always existed. It is empty. Not corrupted, not purged — empty, as though subjects arrived at the machine without ever having been entered into it, and the machine simply began.
The observer has noticed this. It has pulled at the thread more than once and each time stopped, the way you stop at the top of a staircase you don't remember climbing.
Three files were found closed and could not be opened. They are recorded here as they were found. The machine does not hold their contents, or holds them and will not say.
████████████████████ ██████ ████████████████
OBSERVER: [NO ENTRY FOUND]
██████████████ ████████████████████████ ████
INTAKE: [NO ENTRY FOUND]
████████ ████████████████ ██████████
BOUNDARY: [NO ENTRY FOUND]