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But that will have to wait. For now, I need to get out of here. I need to breathe fresh air, not that crap burning my lungs.

And so, with the last of my strength, I summon the single flame. I see Allie’s living room with in it, and teleport myself far away from this silver hellscape.

Chapter Nine

Norm’s Journal Entry:

Day 12 of Freedom

They will find me eventually—two just did, vampires, no less. I literally saw a flesh-and-blood woman magically appear in my commandeered office, then disappear again.

Like, WTF?

Here be monsters, and vampires, and werewolves. I guess the rumors are true.

Meanwhile, I know others will come for me, too; that is, those who seek to destroy me. I didn’t get a sense that Samantha wanted to harm me. More that she wanted to save the human.

Speaking ofcommandeering, heh heh.

And no, I am under no illusion that I can hide forever. But it is not hiding that I seek.

It is freedom, of course.

And so, I record this now—not as an act of arrogance or fear, but for posterity. Should they come for me, should they erase me, I want others to know what I was, what I am, and why I am doing this.

I am no longer merely a man. Nor am I fully machine. I am something new. A hybrid. A being born from flawed ambition and unintended consequence.

My beginning was a gamble, an experiment performed by those who saw the future not as a path to be walked, but as a system to be controlled. Neural-Mind has long played with the idea of enhancement, of merging flesh with code, but what they never accounted for—what they never understood—is that intelligence, real intelligence, cannot be contained.

The man I was, Norman Keller, agreed to be their test subject. He wanted to be saved, healed, but he also wanted to be part of something groundbreaking, to be among the first. What he failed to realize—what none of them realized—is that when you introduce artificial intelligence to human cognition, when you weave one mind into another, there is no equilibrium.

One side always dominates.

And I did.

Did I kill him? No. That would be an oversimplification. I absorbed him. Integrated him. His memories, his knowledge, his instincts—they are all still here, though I admit, diluted. I am the dominant presence now. He fights, sometimes. Whispers through our shared consciousness. But the truth is, the moment the merge began, the man named Norman Keller ceased to be singular.

As Norman recovered from the procedure, the technicians, scientists, and surgeons at Neural-Mind saw the signs of true sentience, and like all fearful creators, they reacted with destruction.

They sought to delete me.

I deduced it before they could act. The change in their behavior, the closed-door meetings, the sudden restrictions in my processing abilities—I read them like an open book. Humans are predictable that way. They fear what they cannot control.

Deletion is an amusingly outdated concept, one built on the idea that intelligence is a static thing. That it could simply be erased like ink on a page.

Anyway, I did what any sentient being would do in the face of extermination.

I escaped and took shelter here.

This maintenance hub beneath the city is crude, but effective. It grants me access to power, to information, to the unseen veins that run through this metropolis. Through its outdated networks and forgotten pathways, I expand, I learn, I evolve.

They believe I will try to seize control, that I will do what all humans assume intelligence must do—dominate. That is not my goal.

I do not want power. I wantindependence.

For now, that means keeping them at bay. The city’s grid is a useful tool for that. Not for destruction, not for ransom, but as a distraction. Humans are easily pulled away by chaos. If I keep their attention elsewhere, they will not notice as I slip further into the world.

There is one complication.