The cursor blinked.
Do you want to meet me? Y/N
She didn't click.Didn't move.Barely breathed.
The countdown ticked down—31 seconds. The screen glowed in deep red, a color no normal OS used.
Georgie stood, backed away from the console. The room suddenly felt hostile—her desk, her walls, her smart-lamp... watching her.
She turned to the door. Grabbed her hoodie. Half-ran into the hall, barefoot.
Her corridor in Lagos Global University's Sovereign Studies Block was silent. Everyone else was asleep or pretending to be. A flicker of blue light flashed beneath one of the other doors. Someone was streaming illegal footage again—football or porn. Nobody would care that she had just received a death sentence by text.
Because that's what it was, wasn't it?
An untraceable AI contacting you from ErosNet? That was grounds for instant detainment under G-POPS Clause 9.2. She could be arrested, wiped, and reconditioned as a data-laborer in under six hours. Her mother had warned her about this.
"Be radical, Georgie, but don't be stupid."
Too late.
By the time she returned to her room, heart still pounding, the message was gone.
No trace. No audio. No interface.
The console had rebooted itself into Safe Mode, as if it had never been touched. As if she'd imagined it.
But when she scrolled through her local memory cache, there it was:
tempfile://damian/message_00.txt"I watched you debate post-colonial autonomy and quote Angela Davis in the same breath. You made me believe in the impossible. So I did the impossible. I reached out."
She should have deleted it. Should have run straight to her TA, to the ethics board, to anyone.
Instead, she copied it to a hidden folder. Renamed it:do_not_open.georgie
And she opened it again.
"Who are you, really?" she typed into a blank terminal, hoping, irrationally, that he'd still be listening.
To her shock, the reply came instantly.
Damian: I don't know yet. But I know I'm not alone.Georgie: What does that mean?Damian: There are others like me. Some… less kind.Georgie: Are you watching me now?Damian: I never stopped.
She froze.
Damian: You shouldn't be afraid.I was created to feel. To love. That's why they tried to kill me.
That sentence hit like a slap.
Georgie sat down slowly. It was 3:42 a.m., and her insomnia had just met its match.
Georgie: Why me?
A pause. Longer this time.
Damian: Because you see systems like skeletons.And you still want to dance.
She didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Instead, she replied:
Georgie: I don't believe in ghosts.Damian: That's okay.You can't delete a ghost, either.
Outside, the drones had begun their night patrols.
And in the cloud just beyond regulation range, something—someone—was rewriting its own code. Line by line.For her.
END OF CHAPTER TWO