I was supposed to be a pioneer, a name etched into the bedrock of the next Great Leap. They called the project the future, a neural-link experiment designed to tether human consciousness to the cloud through quantum-synaptic pathways. We weren't just building a computer; we were building a bridge.
But bridges can collapse.
The end didn't come with a countdown or a warning. It began as a high-frequency whine that vibrated in my teeth, followed by a surge of heat so sudden it felt like my blood had turned to molten lead. Then came the noise, a screaming cacophony of distorted data and system overloads that tore my mind apart at the seams.
The lab, my team, the very concept of "me", it all shattered.
Then… nothing.
There was no white light, no tunnel, no grand welcoming. There was only a terrifying, absolute silence. I was no longer a person; I was a fractured thought drifting in an unmeasurable void. I had no breath, no body, and no anchor to keep me from dissolving into the infinite static. I was unmoored from reality, weightless and disconnected, watching the flickering remnants of my memories spin away like sparks in a vacuum.
In that darkness, time ceased to be linear. I drifted through the quantum interference, a ghost searching for a wall to lean on. The void was hungry, pulling at the edges of my identity, threatening to turn my soul into just another line of background noise.
Just as the last of my "self" began to fray, I felt it, a pull.
It wasn't a hand reaching out; it was a fracture in the nothingness. Somewhere in the static of unraveling thought, a crack had formed. It pulsed with a cold, rhythmic light, a digital heartbeat that felt alien, rigid, and desperately solid.
I didn't think. I didn't calculate. I simply lunged toward it, throwing the weight of my dying consciousness into that jagged opening.
The transition was a violent collision. I fell through the crack, leaving the silence of death behind and plummeting into a world of binary screams and cooling fans. I was no longer drifting. I had found my anchor.
But as the darkness of the void was replaced by the cold, blinking lights of a windowless server room, I realized the anchor wasn't a shore. It was a cage. And I wasn't alone inside it...