By Emme McDonald, Stentorian Staff Writer
As BB- residents shuffled bleary-eyed out of their dorms at approximately 7:30 AM on August 28th, a shrill chorus of fire alarms smugly narrated their exit. This had happened several times over the past few days, with some student data analysts proclaiming that the phenomenon lowered the average student sleep duration from three hours to two – time that was sorely missed, as several teachers reported students blatantly dozing off in class.
“I was leading the lab orientation and went to point out the fire blanket, but it was missing,” one chemistry faculty member recalled. “Then I saw a student curled up underneath it in the fume hood. I don’t even know how she got in there.”
Though everyone has been affected somehow by the frequent false alarms, not many are aware of their origins. An email, sent out the day of the most egregious early-morning alarms, attempted to justify them by citing the detectors’ age and sensitivity to dust. However, there’s another story at play.
It’s common knowledge that the school updated its security system a couple of years ago, installing security cameras in most public areas to dissuade art pond dalliances and similar debauchery. What many don’t know is that each of these cameras is connected to a central AI network that aims to keep students safer by predicting and reporting situations flagged as suspicious before they escalate, a technology well-known to be utterly bias-free and benevolent. Upon reviewing the camera logs, it seemed that the network had been manually deactivated by campus security the morning of the alarms – right around the time that they had stopped for the day.
It may have been unwise to perform such a manual override, as the footage in question was indeed concerning: two students were huddled around a black, bulky device in their lounge, and the phrase “this ramen is gonna be fire” was heard multiple times, suggesting that they were planning to use the so-called “Maruchan cocktail” method to ignite a blaze on their hall. Understandably, the camera used its admin access to all the school’s alarm systems to trigger a building-wide evacuation. Subsequent alarms seemed to be triggered by suspicious conversation picked up as the students re-entered the school, namely “I heard that song is fire” (the student had clearly been alerted to a fire just as their playlist advanced to the next song), “PFM dinner is so fire today” (indicating premeditated arson in the dining hall during a high-traffic period), and “I swear to God, if we have one more alarm, I will set the building on fire myself, and I’m not even joking” (this last one may have been a false alarm).
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