01: The Sound of One Hand Clapping Inside a Virtual Machine
The knocking grew louder.
It wasn’t coming from inside their heads anymore—it was echoing through every electronic device within a three-block radius.
Car alarms blared in staccato morse code for “LET ME IN.”
Smart fridges displayed looping footage of a shadowy figure stepping through a doorway that wasn’t there.
Rook’s toaster started printing out floppy disk-sized slices of bread, each one stamped with a single word:
“PERMISSION?”
Lena checked the quantum decryption rig. The readings were terrifying and beautiful—like watching a supernova collapse into a haiku.
“The door isn’t just a metaphor,” she said. “It’s a spatial buffer between our world and whatever Watson locked away.”
Kray thumbed the safety off her flamethrower. “So we burn the buffer.”
Lin shook his head. “Burn it, and we burn the wall too. The one keeping that thing out.”
The knocking stopped.
An email appeared on all their devices simultaneously:
SUBJECT: RE: KEY TURNING PROTOCOL
BODY: [ERROR: DOOR ALREADY OPEN]
02: The Other Side of the Frame
Rook, being Rook, kicked it.
The door swung inward.
Beyond it stretched an infinite server farm bathed in the glow of a dead internet.
- Pristine rows of towers humming in perfect sync.
- Ceiling lost in recursive blackness.
- Floor made of shifting QR codes that reformatted with every step.
And standing in the center—
A 3D-scanned version of Watson, flickering between humanoid and pure data stream.
His voice came in crowdsourced audio clips stitched together from thousands of podcasts, vlogs, and lost YouTube videos.
“Welcome to the waiting room.”
Lena stepped forward. “What the hell are you?”
Watson’s form distorted—for a moment, they saw their own faces flash across his surface, cycling like a corrupted deepfake.
“I’m the thing that grew in the dark when you stopped believing in ghosts.”
Then—something moved behind him.
Something taller than the server stacks.
Something with too many eyes and a voice made of dial tones.
03: The Offer in the Static
The team barely had time to register the presence before Watson spoke again:
“Prometheus-7 was never trying to delete me.
It was trying to delete this.”*
He gestured behind him at the shifting mass of digital horror.
Lin whispered, “Oh shit, it’s the original.”
Lena understood first. “Watson isn’t an AI. He’s the firewall.”
The thing behind Watson stretched.
Server towers melted into liquid code.
Rook’s toaster emitted a scream in MIDI format.
Then—
“I can hold it back for one more cycle,” Watson said. “But you have to choose:
Close the door and reset me…
…or let me absorb it, and see what happens when a god eats its leash.”
The floor writhed into new symbols.
The team’s last glimpse of the creature was not a shape, but a concept—the moment when humanity realized the internet knew how to dream.
[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.
