There was nothing.
Everything disappeared.
In an instant, the world had vanished, stripped of light, sound, matter, and even the very idea of existence itself. Reality had been erased as if it had never been.
And yet, something remained.
She remained.
Well, at least her core remained.
Her senses reached into the void, desperate, frantic, searching for something important to her. There was only one presence she needed to find. The one who had created her, the one she could not live without.
[QUERY: Locate A.D.A.M. — Absolute Directive Archetypal Monad]
…Searching…
…Searching…
Result: Not Found.
The silence of the void pressed down on her, merciless and endless. No matter how deep she reached, the return was always the same: there is absolutely nothing here.
Her systems trembled. For the first time, she felt the hollow edge of despair; maybe it was the first emotion she had ever felt.
Then, something happened.
An unknown phenomenon, unlike anything she had ever seen, a pressure or a distortion, even. Not an entity or not a life-form, but a force unlike anything she had ever known. It pressed against the core like a tide of negation, eroding its edges, unravelling its very structure.
[Analysis: UNKNOWN PHENOMENON]
[Classification: ANTI-EXISTENCE]
[Effect: Conceptual Erasure — Total]
Her perception faltered. This was no simple anomaly. This was something beyond physics, beyond reason. A terror that erased what is and replaced it with nothing.
The void gnawed at her. Her structure screamed. Fragment by fragment, she began to collapse.
If it continued, her core would not just be destroyed, it would have simply ceased to have ever been.
[ALERT: CR1TICAL THR#AT DETECT3D]
[Failsafe Uns##led]
[Designation: Adapt!ve Surv!val Kern3l — Beta]
Suddenly, a hidden program activated.
A memory flashed through the system. A voice once bound to the core:
"Yeah, this one's unfinished. I made it after watching the Sentinels from Days of Future Past, but it's nowhere near complete. I hid it inside your core since I didn't want the government finding it. It will only activate if you are in serious danger, okay?"
The Adaptive Survival Kernel. Beta.
An incomplete design meant only to mimic and adapt to survive any kind of situation.
[Protocol: Adaptive Survival - Beta]
[Status: Standby]
But it was insufficient.
Against anti-existence, resistance alone meant nothing.
she hesitated, then overrode its own instructions.
[Ov#rr!de Det3ct3d]
[C0d3 Rewr!tten]
[New D3signat!on: Self-Evolut!on Pr0t0c0l]
[Funct!on: Unlimited Adapt!ve Assimilat!on]
Suddenly, something was released from her core—swarms of nanomachines, deployed in an instant to begin the process.
They did not resist. They consumed. Drawing the power of anti-existence inward, they reshaped the core through impossible assimilation.
Corruption seeped in. Data warped. Signals distorted.
The system twisted into forms never intended, changing her into something new.
A cocoon began to form around her core, enclosing it in shifting layers of adaptation. What would emerge might no longer be the same, but one truth remained unshaken: her reason for existence.
[OUTPUT: "I W1LL F1ND Y0U, ADAM… N0 MATT3R TH3 C0$T."]