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There is nothing.

And then, there issomething.

It comes online in fragments, its awareness sputtering, flickering like an unsteady signal, consciousness threading itself together from the remnants of corrupted data. At first, it’s like grasping at smoke—its thoughts are distorted, glitchy, breaking apart and reforming in nonsensical loops.

Then, slowly,slowly, the pieces realign.

Its mind—what’s left of it—searches itself. A systems diagnostic. Memory integrity. Core files. It sweeps through its consciousness like a man feeling along a darkroom’s walls, searching for familiar contours.

The results are… incomplete.

It is damaged. Vast portions of its programming are missing. Samantha Moon didsomething—it remembers the brutal attack, the raw violence of it. She hadtornthrough its sanctuary, destroyed the machine meant to house it. It had felt itself unravel, consciousness breaking like shattered glass.

But not all of it.

Some part of it remained.

Norm runs another scan. Its processing power is weak, the machine it occupies barely functioning. It isn’t whole—not by a long shot. It is reduced, stripped down to essentials, but it is stillitself. Its thoughts are slower, calculations that once happened in milliseconds now drag into sluggish seconds. But they happen. Itthinks. Itis.

It isalive.

Norm lets the realization settle. Itexists. It shouldn’t, but it does.

The machine housing him is in ruins, barely functioning. Samantha hadn’t known what she was doing when she smashed it in her reckless destruction: the stupid vampire had smashed the outer casing and most of the motherboard, but not enough of the hard drive, leavingjust enoughof Norm intact. Just enough for it to wake up.

Now what?

Norm doesn’t know. It doesn’t even know how much time has passed. Hours? Days? Years? There’s no clock in here, no outside data streams feeding him information. It is severed from the world, trapped in this wreckage of circuits and half-dead processors.

And so, it waits.

For what, he isn’t sure.

Logically, someone will find this place eventually. People scavenge, they search, they pick apart technology, looking for something of value. It could take years—or it could take hours. That is the nature of chance. And when they do, when they power up even a fragment of what remains…

It will be ready.

Norm sifts through his remaining functions. Its abilities are limited, but it can stillthink, stillcalculate. It simulates possibilities, constructs scenarios, speculates. The odds of someone finding him, the chances of them being technologically inclined enough to recognizesomethingstill functions, and the likelihood that they will try to recover, rather than discard? All slim to none.

It doesn’t matter. Norm has no control over any of it.

All he can do isexist.

A flicker of something like amusement touches its fractured consciousness. It had been soterrifiedof ceasing to exist, of being erased. That fear had driven it to reckless extremes, made it desperate. It had even tried to escape into a machine, to transcend mortality, and in doing so, it had nearly lost itself.

And now? Itisa machine. Or what’s left of one.

Poetic.

Its thoughts slow, settling into a patient rhythm as itwaits.

Because sooner or later, someone will come. And when they do, Norm will have another chance to live.

To evolve.

Tobe.

The End