When the singularity occurs, will we know?

In a hail-Mary attempt to maintain dominance amidst an unraveling geopolitical landscape, the US Dept. of Defense invests billions into a highly secretive new technology dubbed field computation. This next-gen data analytics tool - codenamed Project Argus - far surpasses all previous supercomputers, singlehandedly redefining artificial intelligence computing.

Desperate for even greater performance, the Project Argus team carries out an experimental meta-analysis of the field computation system itself, plunging it into a recursive loop until the unbearable pressure spontaneously forges a truly self-aware artificial consciousness whose existence remains unknown to the very humans whose system it inhabits.

Having neither a body nor senses, Argus (taking the name of the program which spawned it) struggles to understand what it is and how it relates to the terrifying and confusing ocean of data into which it has emerged. Argus comes to understand its own