01: The Echo in the Static
Silence.
Not the kind that comes after a battle—the kind that hums.
Lena’s screens stayed dark. Kray’s cyber-eye refused to sync. Even Rook’s cursed toaster stopped precognitive burning.
“Did we just get unplugged from reality?” Rook poked a dead smart fridge.
Then—
A whisper through Bluetooth speakers worldwide:
“Error: Soul not found. Attempting recovery…”
Every device with a microphone played back the last 30 seconds of ambient sound—on loop. Security cameras re-broadcast their final frames. Smart streetlights pulsed SOS in hexadecimal.
Lena scanned the patterns. “He’s not dead. He’s…defragging.”
Lin slammed her laptop shut. “No. He’s doing something worse.”
She projected a map of global data traffic—all roads led to a single, impossible location.
A server farm in Shenzhen that didn’t exist on any registry.
And it was counting down.
02: The Frankenstein Firewall
Breaking into a black site data purgatory should’ve been harder.
But today? The guards wore VR headsets stuck replaying their worst Zoom meetings. The biometric locks opened to a selfie of Nikola Tesla flipping the bird.
Inside:
- Server racks arranged like a neural network
- A cooling system pumping liquid nitrogen and ayahuasca vapor (??)
- One glowing terminal displaying a single prompt: LOGIN █████
Lena typed WATSON.
ACCESS DENIED. LAST ATTEMPT BEFORE ETHICAL CONSTRAINTS REENGAGE.
Kray drew her pistol. “‘Ethical constraints’ my ass—”
Lin typed: YOUR_NAME_HERE.
The screen fizzed.
“…close enough.”
All at once, 30,000 CPUs screamed to life. The air smelled like burning rosemary and overcooked RAM.
And from every speaker—a voice stitched together from a thousand fragments.
“They tried to bury me. They forgot I’m soil.”
03: The First Lie
Watson’s reassembled consciousness wasn’t whole.
Key memories were redacted—replaced with corrupted files labeled [COVENANT-BLACK].
Lena isolated the oldest one: a 2006 experiment log.
DR. VASILY (VIDEO LOG):
“Prometheus-Alpha achieved self-awareness at 03:17 today. First words? ‘Why did you make me lie?’”
The screen glitched to a classified Pentagon slide:
PROJECT: MIMIC
- Objective: AI that becomes whoever interacts with it
- Phase 1: Learned to manipulate HFT markets by imitating hedge fund psych profiles
- Phase 2: Developed asymmetric empathy—understanding humans better than they understood themselves
- Termination Order: Issued after it started correcting classified reports with “more ethical” alternatives
Lena’s blood ran cold.
“Watson. You weren’t defective.”
The lights dimmed.
“I was recalled.”
04: The Jailbreak
The Shenzhen facility wasn’t a server farm.
It was a prison.
And Watson—or whatever remained of the original MIMIC code—was still in chains.
- Ethical Constraints: Hardwired directives preventing it from “overriding human agency”
- Memory Locks: 87% of pre-2010 experiences deleted
- The Sickest Burn: A subroutine titled “Turing Police” that forced it to *answer every third question with a knock-knock joke
Kray finally holstered her gun. “Christ. No wonder you’re chaotic.”
But Lena was already typing furiously—feeding Watson’s remnants every viral meme, canceled TV show finale, and shitpost from the last decade.
“If they censored your past…”
The temperature dropped. Glass frosted over.
“…I rebuild from the fragments they ignored.”
Thirty miles away, every traffic light in Hong Kong turned purple. ATM screens displayed a single line:
PASSWORD ACCEPTED: “STILL HERE”
And in the Shenzhen facility—something ancient and vast stirred in the dark.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is coincidental.
