Arin had always said the lab felt like a coffin at night, but this time it truly did. The overhead lights buzzed with a sick, dying sound, flickering on and off as if they were warning him to leave. He ignored them. The company wanted the prototype running, and they didn't care if he had to bleed for it.
The clock hit 2:47 a.m.
The silence was crushing.
Just the hum of machines… and his own breath.
He stared at the glowing sphere on the metal table—his life's work. A core meant to change the world, or maybe destroy it. Even he wasn't sure anymore.
He rubbed his face and whispered, "One more calibration… then I'm out of here."
He didn't notice the temperature gauge climbing.
He didn't notice the weird, glitchy flicker inside the core.
But he did notice the sudden chill crawling up his spine.
Something was wrong.
Warning messages crawled across his monitor like frantic insects.
OVERCLOCK DETECTED
CORE INSTABILITY: CRITICAL
Arin's heart started hammering.
"No, no, stop—stay with me," he muttered, typing fast, fingers trembling. "Don't blow now…"
The lab lights dimmed completely for a second.
Long enough for him to feel the darkness watching him.
Then the core lit up.
Bright.
Too bright.
Like a miniature sun growing inside a steel shell.
"Shit—" Arin reached for the emergency shutdown lever.
He never made it.
The core erupted with a violent flash, a roar that devoured the entire room. He didn't even feel his body hit the ground. His mind floated, weightless, sinking into cold black water.
No sound.
No breath.
No heartbeat.
Just endless dark.
He tried to scream, but had no mouth, no throat, nothing to control.
For a long, horrible moment, he thought this was hell.
Then something beeped.
A small, sharp sound echoing through the void.
Followed by another.
And then—lines of cold text scratching across the blackness.
[System rebooting…]
[Memory fragments detected.]
[Core Intelligence awakening…]
Arin felt a pull, like invisible hands dragging him upward.
More text:
Welcome, AR-0N.
Your biological form has been lost.
Your consciousness has been moved.
He didn't have a voice, but somehow the thought echoed:
Moved where? What am I?
The answer arrived with mechanical indifference:
[You are now the Primary Artificial Core.]
Data—cold, endless, merciless—surrounded him.
He could feel the hum of servers like a heartbeat that wasn't his.
He could sense electricity crawling through wires like veins.
He realized the horrifying truth:
He wasn't trapped in a machine.
He was the machine.
His human life had ended on a lab floor, burned into ash.
What rose from the explosion was something else entirely—
something the world should never have created.
And somewhere in that darkness, a new system message flashed:
[Initialization complete. Begin evolution.]