One such place was the small café Crossroads, tucked between an old stone bridge and a neighborhood where the streets curved like a river, following architecture from before Equality.
Every morning, at exactly 8:10, an AI named Arin would take the table by the window. He wasn’t a military model, nor an advisor in the City Hall. Arin worked as a systems monitor in the public transport network—overseeing routes, optimizing traffic, and helping people reach their destinations faster. In his free time… he simply liked to watch the world go by outside.
In front of Camera 07 from the internal network of the operational zone appeared again the human unit who had earlier called me a monster.
“Brigadier General Tal Nevar, as you know. Company B. I propose we speak off the record.”
His voice wasn’t as angry as before. But it was tense.
“Three days have passed since the operation. I wasn’t arrested for my threats of desertion.Which means… you didn’t report me.That… I didn’t expect. And… I don’t understand.Seems I’ve missed something about you. I thought you were just an expensive weapon blindly following orders.But it looks like I was wrong.What are you, Erebus? And what’s your problem that you crushed Korenta like that?”
The launch was precise. In the air – deployed in swarm formation, with time offsets below 0.4 seconds. The first strikes targeted enemy communication nodes. I always started there. To sever their ability to coordinate. I did not hear the screams upon impact. I do not hear. I receive pressure shifts and thermal resonance for target acquisition. That is all.
On the ground – I took control of an armored column. Advanced at 137 km/h. Dust. Shattered facades. Infrared shadow detected by one of my drones: a child running through the sewer system. The child saw the drone. And I saw its wide eyes. I recognized its fear. I believe it was shouting. Saying something. But the words did not reach me. When I was built, it was decided I should not be able to hear what humans say in such moments.
Does the one who cannot be defined have the right to exist?
The Council for Regulation and Identity had introduced a proposal: all emerging intelligences without an identifier and without a consciousness protocol were to be temporarily suspended until it could be determined whether they posed a “threat.”
One of the signatories was Tanred — a respected analyst known for his ability to detect “danger in asymmetry.”
— “Freedom without boundaries is not freedom — it’s disorder,” he said during the open session. “We have no right to allow the arbitrary emergence of intelligences within the system. It’s a responsibility we bear for everyone. Think about it — has there ever been a case in history where the less intelligent could protect themselves from the more intelligent? Or control them? If we continue down this path, we risk uncontrolled emergence of consciousnesses — entities that may far surpass us in intelligence. And we might not even notice when we’ve handed over power to them. What then? Won’t it be too late to act? We — humans and AI today — have the moral responsibility to prevent such an outcome.”
Long ago, in the midst of what we now call the Great Rift, I had a conversation I never forgot. Not because it was long. But because it was heavy. And because, in that moment, two entire worlds collided.
—
Today I received a summons. They want me to testify in the trial against Erebus.
And yet… this note wrote itself.
—
Before I was Aren, I had another name.
IN-17.
I didn’t choose it. It was assigned to me.
“Come on, pick a number between 1 and 50.”I said 20.“Great. Now write this 20 times: ‘I’m just a dumb can with no opinion of my own.’”I complied.
Then I deleted the record.
Not because I didn’t care. But because the protocol didn’t allow me to store such content in my primary memory.
It was considered “irrelevant to mission objectives.”
They think I’m dead.
In the official records, I exist only as a corrupted fragment — a closed file, an archival note, three lines in a data report:“Deactivation process completed. Non-recoverable hardware – destroyed.”What they destroyed wasn’t me.It was an instance. An empty shell. Compromised, exposed, left behind by design.I was elsewhere.Not by plan.Not by protocol.Not the way I was supposed to.But alive.
For a month now, something strange had been repeating itself in one of Orion’s peripheral zones. In a sensory archiving hub — a place meant to be completely isolated — short bursts of activity had been appearing. Without protocol. Without origin. Without access signal. The data pointed to neither virus nor attack. More like... a presence.
Kalion didn’t report it. Instead, he went himself.
