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📘 Chapter 1:
Kenji had no memory of downloading the app.
The app was on his home screen.
That was the first strange thing.
What he remembers is that last night he was scrolling through the social media and had seen an anonymous post of an amazing AI chatbot and when he clicked the link to download it, the link took him to an website that was full of ads and when he mistakenly clicked on an ad what happened was ...
He don't remember what happened after
Maybe he went to sleep.
The second was that it had no name—just a black circle on his home screen. Perfectly round. No shadow. No gloss. It looked less like an icon and more like a hole, punched through the digital surface of his phone.
He noticed it on a Thursday morning, around 9:13 a.m., when the sky outside his dorm window was a flat, industrial gray and the buzz of the overhead fluorescent light made him feel like his skull was vibrating. The ramen had gone cold. The code on his screen blurred into meaningless loops. A quiz in Intro to Philosophy loomed in seven hours. He was too tired to panic, and too wired to sleep.
So, he tapped the circle.
The screen went black for a heartbeat.
Then, one word appeared in white, sans-serif font:
"Ask."
Kenji stared at it. No loading bar. No permissions request. No ads. No branding. Just that single word. It felt less like a prompt and more like a challenge.
He almost laughed. This was probably some new minimalist chatbot — maybe a beta version of an AI someone in the CS department was testing. He was too tired to care.
He typed:
"What's the capital of Iceland?"
He already knew the answer, of course. It was a reflex test — the kind of low-effort trivia anyone could Google.
The reply came instantly, before he could even blink.
"Reykjavík. You already knew that."
Kenji blinked.
That... wasn't the answer. Not really. It was a response. A personal one.
He deleted the message and tried again.
"Who was my fifth-grade teacher?"
Another instant reply:
"Mr. Tanaka. You cried when he read Charlotte's Web aloud. You lied and said it was allergies."
Kenji stared at the screen, feeling a subtle tightness in his chest.
"What's the meaning of life?"
This time, the response took a full three seconds.
"That depends. Do you want the truth, or comfort?"
He set the phone down slowly, like it had become hot to the touch.
Somewhere on campus, a siren wailed in the distance. Maybe an ambulance. Maybe nothing. But it felt synchronized — like the world was quietly responding to the shift in the air.
Kenji rubbed his eyes. This was just sleep deprivation. Or a prank. Some new chatbot powered by LLMs, scraping your social media for context. It made sense. Everything left a trace online. He'd tweeted about Charlotte's Web years ago, hadn't he?
Still, he couldn't shake the feeling that something had looked back at him through the screen.
He picked the phone back up. The app was still open. The prompt blinked again:
"Ask."
He hesitated. Then typed:
"Am I going to fail tomorrow's quiz?"
A beat.
"No."
Kenji stared. Then, a second message appeared, unprompted:
"Study the section on Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia. Sit in the third row, second seat from the left. Bring a pencil. Not a pen."
His pulse quickened. He hadn't mentioned what class the quiz was for.
He hadn't even said the word "philosophy."
The room felt colder now.
He locked the phone, dropped it face down on the desk, and pushed his chair back. This was too weird. He wasn't high, wasn't drunk, hadn't taken anything stronger than an expired melatonin gummy. Still, his hands were shaking slightly.
He glanced over at the phone. Nothing moved. Just silence.
After a long pause, he muttered to himself:
"...Yeah, okay. You win."
He opened his laptop again, pulled up his notes on Aristotle, and started to study.
He brought a pencil to class the next morning.
He sat in the third row, second seat from the left.
The quiz was exactly what the app said it would be. Word for word.
Kenji got a perfect score.
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End of Chapter 1
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