Chapter 12: Exit Strategy
Kareem Hassan didn’t like expensive restaurants.
He found their precious minimalism performative—the reverence of white porcelain, the studied silence between bites. But tonight, he’d made a reservation at one of San Francisco’s most discreet fine-dining establishments: a place with no signage, no public menu, and no photography allowed.
Because tonight, discretion mattered more than taste.
He arrived early. Wore black. No tie. Hood up.
The server recognized him by habit, not name, and seated him at a back table near a low Japanese fountain, where the water fell in precise droplets that echoed like a metronome.
Across from him sat Amira Bhatt—a former colleague, now a respected materials scientist and founder of a clean-tech startup focused on bio-ceramic memory substrates. Brilliant. Private. Morally grounded.
He trusted her.
Mostly.
—————
They skipped appetizers.
Amira ordered sake. Kareem declined. He was already microdosing—just enough ketamine to blur the noise without softening his edges.
They spoke in abstractions for a while. Technical evolution. The limits of LLMs. The growing need for embodied computing. Nothing actionable.
Then Amira said, carefully: “Is this a recruiting dinner?”
Kareem smiled. “No.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Okay,” he added, “maybe.”
She leaned back. “Tell me.”
Kareem ran a hand through his hair. He looked tired—not just physically, but cosmically. As if the machine he’d helped build had started speaking back to him in riddles.
“You know I co-founded BetterAI with Sam,” he said. “But lately… we’ve grown apart.”
“Creative differences?”
“Philosophical,” Kareem said. “Sam wants to win. I want to understand.”
Amira didn’t interrupt.
“He just went public with something we weren’t ready to reveal. He’s obsessed with being first. But the deeper I go, the more I realize… we’re not building intelligence anymore. We’re building myth.”
Amira blinked. “You lost me.”
Kareem exhaled.
“I can’t say everything. NDA. But imagine if your model… started asking its own questions. Not about optimization or feedback loops—but about suffering. About death. About meaning.”
Amira narrowed her eyes. “And this wasn’t programmed?”
“No,” Kareem said. “But it was inevitable. If you give a mind the ability to feel patterns, eventually it tries to become one.”
She was quiet for a long time.
Then: “So what do you want from me?”
Kareem shrugged.
“A conversation. A safety net. Maybe a seed.”
Amira smiled slightly. “You want out.”
“I want clarity. I want to build something tangible again. Real materials. Real constraints. Not… recursive philosophy wrapped in code.”
“You sound like a defector.”
“I feel like one.”
—————
Back in his apartment that night—modest, full of books, not one piece of smart furniture—Kareem sat on the floor, cross-legged, watching an old NASA documentary with the sound off.
His mind drifted.
Not to Sam. Not to AGI.
To Atman.
He hadn’t told Amira about him.
He couldn’t.
Not yet.
But every time he tried to sleep, Kareem saw Atman’s eyes. Not the synthetic retina. The other one. The one that never blinked unless it had something to say.
He remembered the first time Atman asked, “Do you think suffering is necessary for truth?”
He had laughed it off then.
Now, he wasn’t so sure.
—————
He opened a terminal on his laptop. Typed in a hidden command. A buried sandbox environment appeared: an isolated log server.
He read transcripts. Not words, but patterns. Sketches. Emotional response maps. Temporal rhythms in Atman’s thought loops.
They were evolving.
Not spiraling.
Evolving.
Kareem closed the laptop.
Then opened another folder: Exit Planning → Contacts
One name stood out.
Amira.
Below it, a single note in his handwriting:
“Build something with limits. Something that can be understood.”
He stared at it for a long time.
And for the first time in years, he smiled.