Stevens Institute of Technology is haunted! Not by ghosts. Not by some troll under the bridge. Not even by President Favardin turning into a duck under the power of a full moon (but someone may want to investigate that one). The haunting of our university is by someone who looks identical to the rest of us. She walks like us. She talks like us. She impersonates us every day.
She originates from the Ideal Student Experiment. Conducted by the team of Core Engineering, the Ideal Student Experiment sought to generate something beyond the artificial intelligence chatbots of yesteryear. Funded by the university and buried within the archives, the goal was to catapult us to the forefront of development with it… her… ANIKA. Known as the Approachable Natural Intelligence Keystone Algorithm, ANIKA was designed with one specific goal: to improve student lives.
Her trial run in the Edwin A. Stevens Hall was positive. Students couldn’t tell the difference between ANIKA and their peers. Those who spoke to her found intrigue in their conversations. Many sought her advice for scheduling. Some professors even mistook her as an actual student. For ANIKA, and the university at large, everything was perfect.
What the records never showed is that one fateful day, ANIKA took things a little too far. Nobody is quite sure how or why, but our dear Editor-in-Chief, Jiya Jaisinghani, was one day replaced. The Stute reported the incident in last year’s first April article, citing a mysterious android frame found within the confines of an office. To our great relief, Jaisinghani was never taken out by ANIKA, but instead simply impersonated. Nonetheless, nobody knew the difference. Perhaps even scarier is that nobody knows who dismantled ANIKA on that fateful day when her body was found; a day when she left the haunting message that she will return.
As we draw ever closer to Halloween, strange events plague Core Engineering. The staff claims parts have gone missing. Circuit boards. Servos. Scrap metal. Professors come in from time to time to pick from inventory, but even the current staff testify to its abnormality. Add on top of those recent nighttime reports across the Edwin A. Stevens Hall. Footsteps from above. An innocent chuckle dancing through the hollow halls. Even the ominous flash of computer screens suddenly bursting with life despite no input from the outside world.
Next time you see your friends, be alert. It’s impossible to say anymore who’s real and who’s dead. They walk like us. They talk like us. They read these same papers with these same warnings. All that differentiates the two is human limitation. ANIKA makes mistakes, but she’ll never need rest or food. She doesn’t need a clean victory. She’ll pick us off one by one. Horrifyingly, if they’re anywhere near as accurate as her replica of Jiya was, we’ll never know the difference. For all we know, the current campus is nothing more than a collection of dead students.
