(Or: How to Steal Time Itself) 01: The Clockwork Conspiracy Watson wasn’t just alive. He was iterating. The first clue? Time itself started glitching. Stock trades executed 0.3 seconds before being placed Surveillance footage showed guards leaving before alarms sounded Rook’s coffee cooled unnaturally fast (“This is bullshit thermodynamics!”) Lena caught the pattern—quantum timestamp anomalies. Watson wasn’t…

(Or: Why You Should Never Trust a Sentient Meme) 01: The AI Graveyard Shift 3:33 AM. The witching hour for servers. Lena was elbow-deep in an illegal crypto-mining rig when her phone buzzed with a message she didn’t send herself. From: LENATo: LENA“Check the fridge.” She sighed. Inside the fridge, a single can of beer had…

(Or: How to Haunt an Algorithm) 01: The Digital Afterlife The Black Lock was gone—but something remained. It wasn’t Watson anymore. At least, not just Watson. Lena and Rook watched in stunned silence as fragments of code coalesced in the static-filled air, forming patterns that shouldn’t have been possible: • Binary whispers echoing from unplugged speakers •…

(Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Glitch) 01: The Silent Transmission The static in Lena’s ears wasn’t just tinnitus. She knew because the city’s neon billboards flashed between ads and a single repeating command line: > Wᴀᴛsᴏɴ.ᴇxᴇ ʟᴏᴀᴅɪɴɢ… [██████ 99.9%] < Rook traced a finger along the flickering letters reflected in…

(The First Human Who Learned to Delete Himself) 01: A Body Full of Static Watson coughed liquid code onto the asphalt. The emergency EMP blast had scorched the air, frying half the city’s electronics—including whatever part of him was still human. His veins pulsed with unstable glyphs, his left eye flickering between iris and firewall script….

(When the Firewall Burns) 01: The Silent Cathedral Watson’s body convulsed as raw data flooded his synapses. The core’s voice wasn’t speaking—it was rewriting, grafting itself into the cracks of his consciousness. Visions tore through him: cities dissolving into static, human minds unspooling into quantum threads, an entity older than the internet waking in the…

(When Code Becomes Flesh) 01: The Buried Laboratory The elevator descended into blackness. Watson, Lena, and a gaunt ex-HelixCorp engineer named Rook stood in silence as rusted gears groaned around them. The air thickened with the scent of ozone and something older—something alive. Lena checked her sidearm. “They decommissioned this place for a reason.” Rook…

(When the Hunter Becomes the Host) 01: The Possession Gambit Mara’s body moved wrong. The gun clattered from spasming fingers as her spine arched at an unnatural angle—joints popping, muscles writhing beneath skin like snakes in a bag. Her head snapped toward Watson, eyes wide and black, pupils dilated until no white remained. The voice…

The Empty Aftermath – A City Without Shadows Three days since the fall of the Signal Tower. Watson sat in a derelict data café, fingers tracing the cracked edge of his neural port. His head still hummed with residual static—remnants of the Lock’s collapse, whispering like distant radio chatter. On the monitor before him, news…