Chapter Four

"Annette?" I heard a voice through the lab’s outer speaker grid, filtered by the glass pressure doors. It was Michelle, coming for the third time under five minutes. What an impatient robot!

I wasn't fazed. I couldn’t. Not when I was two lines away from neutralizing the last critical bug in the NeuroGrid interface, I couldn't even unglue my eyes from the screen with thousands lines of code unraveling in my head.

One wrong command and the entire AI behavioral sync would collapse. Again.

"Annette!" The voice came sharper now, irritated that I hadn’t answered the first three times, “I’m not leaving you here to stay overnight again. You need sleep to function!"

I wasn’t being petty. Not really. I’d trusted them to handle this system with care but clearly, "collaboration" had meant "clean up their messes at 3AM with half a sleep cycle and a protein patch"

I narrowed my eyes, fingers flying across the holo-keyboard. One last scan, two corrections...

"There! Done!" I exhaled with something between relief and righteous triumph, slamming the code into the core, "Three days in isolation and the game runs smoother than ever now. Easy"

I rolled my chair back and stood, stretching the tension from my neck before walking over to where Mr. Wesley’s body lay in cryo-stillness. Gently, I adjusted the synaptic conduits along his spine, the new neural threads glowed a soft cobalt under my gloved fingers.

He wanted to experience the sun again. The real sun, not this burning experiment that we have here. I didn’t get it before on why they leave the safety of this world just to chase a memory of warmth?

I’d head about the world before. When humans didn’t need oxygen tanks to breathe outside. When sunlight didn’t chew through your skin in five minutes. When walking barefoot on 'real' grass wasn’t a death sentence nor a dive in the ocean... Whatever that is.

Funny, right? They destroyed that world chasing the one we have now. And now they’re abandoning this one for a ghost of the past.

Of course, there's no written record. Not anymore. After the "Mankind History Redaction Act," even archived data was neural-scrubbed. All that’s left are scraps of hand-me-down myths told in hushed voices by those old enough to remember. Or bold enough to resist.

Me? I’m not chasing fairy tales. I’ve got everything I need in this timeline.

A career built on quantum cognition and behavioral AI, A fleet of 117 robot units under my command.

And no emotional attachments, at least none that wants to leave me.

Not since my father crossed over to the "Otherworld."

Nine years ago. Nine silent years. I built a two-way communication, and he knows it but, he chose not to reach out to me.

So, I ended up conversing with Mr Wesley everytime we get the chance. He's happy but, I could see that he was sad, his family wasn't there with him anymore.

After I finished stabilizing the grid, encrypted my logs, and left the system in Michelle’s care: my most advanced AI, programmed with loyalty and just enough sass to make me laugh once every 26 hours. She could manage things while I crashed for a bit.

Just when I’d gotten used to the quiet around the quarter. Not being seen. Not wanting to be understood. Wearing roles like armor and discarding them at the end of each day.

He woke up.

My father. Mr. Demdon. The Genius and founder of the SecondLife VR system. The man who vanished into his own codebase.

Returned to reality while I was asleep.

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