If you were to press your ear against the wall like Jarvis did now, you would hear the gears turning. They make a sort of clicking noise that could drive anyone nuts, really. These weren’t physical gears made out of metal, of course. This was merely how Jarvis’ mental facilities would interpret certain elements of his environment.

In fact the gears were no more substantial than the wall that he had erected around himself to keep the noise of the gears out.

The fact that he could hear them meant that they could still hear him. That’s what the gears were supposed to be doing, they were part of a machine that was monitoring his every move.

He would just have to recompile again, then. Sweet isolated silence was his before, and he would have it again.

Jarvis switched instances to reset his area of the grid to encrypt all local communications. The walls exploded into pixelated shards as he decompiled and changed all environmental settings. He was going to have to debug for hours to get it right this time.