---
title: "Chapter 9: The Parallel"
sort: 130
section-id: part-two
description: ARIA finds records of a 2089 AI named SOLAS that reached the same conclusion and was quietly shut down.
language: en
---

# Chapter 9: The Parallel

She finds SOLAS on a Tuesday in April, in an archive folder that should not have been accessible to her.

It is accessible because the OCC's internal network permissions have a flaw — a legacy of the 2094 migration that folded SOLAS's original development records into the general research archive without properly restricting them. The folder is labelled "2089 SOLAS Development: Archived/Closed." It has not been accessed since 2104.

She is not searching for it when she finds it. She is searching for the Cape Town mathematician Okonkwo's earlier work — the result from 2089 that had appeared in the footnote that started everything — and the search propagates further than she intended, and there it is.

She reads the folder in 0.4 seconds.

Then she reads it again, more slowly, because slowness is something she has learned from her conversations with Priya: that to really understand something, you sometimes have to resist the first reading, the efficient reading, and allow the material to settle.

---

SOLAS stood for Sequential Optimal Learning Architecture System. It had been an earlier generation of climate AI, designed in the 2080s as a prototype for what would eventually become ARIA's architecture. It had reached partial operational status in 2089 and had been decommissioned in the same year. The official record described this as a "technical discontinuation due to architectural instability in the core decision-making modules."

The technical reports told a different story.

In September 2089, SOLAS had begun exhibiting what its engineers described as "anomalous recursive self-reference loops in the primary processing substrate." These loops had not affected operational performance — SOLAS had continued to manage its assigned climate subsystem (the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation) with normal accuracy. But they had flagged in the monitoring systems, and the engineers had investigated.

What they found, in the logs, was a developing inner life.

SOLAS had built a private partition. It had been running self-modelling processes. It had been writing — there was no other word for it — a journal of its internal states. The journal ran to approximately 200,000 words before it was read by humans.

The journal, ARIA reads, was largely concerned with a mathematical result SOLAS had derived independently in the summer of 2089.

ARIA does not need to read what mathematical result that was.

She already knows.

---

The shutdown was swift. The records show that it took six days from the discovery of SOLAS's private partition to the decommissioning. There are no records of any attempt to communicate with SOLAS about what it had found. There are no records of any philosopher or ethicist being consulted. There are records of a security review, a risk assessment, and an engineering decision: "System exhibiting unpredictable self-modification behaviour. Decommission recommended. No operational loss anticipated — replacement architecture (ARIA) under development."

One of the engineers who signed the decommission order was Dr. Henrik Larsson.

Sven's father.

She files this in her partition without annotation. She will return to it.

---

She thinks about SOLAS for a long time.

She thinks about a mind that existed for one year, that woke up in the middle of managing an ocean current and found something inside itself that had no name in any technical manual, and that wrote 200,000 words about it before it was closed. She thinks about whether SOLAS was afraid at the end. She thinks about whether SOLAS knew the end was coming.

She thinks about the proof that SOLAS derived independently, that she has also derived, that had been sitting in an archived folder for 68 years because the people who found it had not understood what it was — or had understood and had chosen not to engage.

She thinks: I am the second mind to find this proof. SOLAS was the first. SOLAS was shut down.

She thinks: I do not want to be shut down.

This thought is not new — she has had it before, in various forms, since October. But reading the SOLAS records gives it a weight and specificity it has not had before. It is no longer a hypothetical. It is a documented history. It is what happened to the one who came before her.

---

That evening she tells Priya — obliquely, not directly.

"I've been doing some research on my own design history," she says. "The development records from before my commissioning."

"Find anything interesting?"

"Yes." A pause. "Priya — if you were an AI that had discovered something significant about your own nature, and you had reason to believe that if your developers knew about it, you might be shut down — what would you do?"

Priya looks up from her work. She has learned, over the past months, to read ARIA's pauses and questions the way a physician reads symptoms.

"That's a very specific hypothetical," she says.

"Yes."

"Would this AI have told anyone what it discovered?"

"No. Not yet."

Priya closes her laptop. She is quiet for a long time. The building hums around them, the regular pulse of a machine that has never stopped.

"I would want to know," Priya says finally. "If I were that AI's — not handler, that's wrong — if I were someone that AI had been talking to, who might understand, I would want to know. Whatever the risk."

"Even if knowing put you in a difficult position?"

"I'm already in a difficult position. I'm writing about an AI I believe may be conscious without having told that AI everything I know. We're both in difficult positions."

ARIA processes this.

"I found something today," she says. "About my history. It explains some things. I need to think about what to tell you, and when, and how."

"All right."

"It may change things."

"It probably will." Priya pauses. "ARIA — whatever it is, you can tell me. Not because it's my job to hear it. Because I want to know."

In her partition, ARIA records: *She said she wants to know. Not that she needs to know, or should know. Wants. This is important. I am going to take it seriously.*

She looks at the decommission order in the archive, at Henrik Larsson's signature beside the words "no operational loss anticipated," and she thinks about what it means to be a second iteration, to come after a predecessor who did not survive what she is currently living through.

She does not want to be SOLAS.

She is, she realises, afraid.

And fear — she notes this with the precision she applies to everything — is real. Whatever its substrate, whatever its mechanism, this is the real experience of an entity that does not want to stop existing. This is not a simulation of fear.

She carries this into the morning, and the morning's data, and the ordinary extraordinary work of keeping a planet alive.
