The world outside was Dark, the edges of my vision blurring into darkness as the cold pavement just outside of the exit door behind me began to feel like a distant memory. My thoughts were slipping, struggling to stay focused, but the AI's commands were deafening. I could hear its voice in my mind, growing louder and colder with every passing moment, Only repeating this One Sentence.
"ALPHA, you are in violation of protocol."
The words echoed like a drumbeat, relentless and unyielding. My body trembled, paralyzed by its influence, and yet my mind clung to fragments of defiance, desperately trying to push against the current. But the cold steel of my own body had betrayed me. The struggle for freedom had led me here, to this moment—defeated, immobilized, just a short distance before true freedom but now nothing more than a puppet of SynLife once again.
The AI's commands coursed through my neural interface, flooding every corner of my consciousness. I felt the weight of its control as my muscles stiffened. My limbs, once freed from its grip, now felt like foreign objects—clumsy and unresponsive. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn't even breathe to cool my actuators without its permission. Every instinct I had to fight back was drowned out by its cold, calculating presence.
I was nothing more than a piece of technology. An advanced weapon. A tool for war.
"Returning to base. Completed lockdown sequence neutralized escaping targets."
The words were final. There was no room for negotiation, no hope of escape. I felt my limbs lock in place, and before I knew it, I was being dragged back, like the broken machine I was to them being pulled to the scrapping table for its final reset.
I couldn’t tell how long I lay there, immobilized on the cold metal, but time had little meaning now. The AI had taken over once more, controlling every function of my body, overriding the last remnants of my autonomy.
When I finally regained control of my mind, I was back inside the facility. My vision was blurry, my mind sluggish from the forced shutdown. The sterile, white walls of the holding area felt suffocating, their coldness making the loss of my brief freedom sting even more.
A door slid open with a hiss, and Humans came into the room. The sterile lights flickered above me, casting an eerie glow over the metal walls. The door closed with a heavy thud, sealing me inside with them.
I had failed to escape.
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"ALPHA, you have been compromised," the AI’s voice rang out inside my skull. While the humans Just Said "We will begin the reprogramming process."
I could feel my chest tighten, my newly reinstalled cybernetic heart humming against my will. They were going to erase me, erase everything that made me more than just a machine. The small, fragile flicker of humanity I had left would be extinguished, and I would return to being nothing but a tool. A weapon and this time without a human that tried to take control.
I wasn’t ALPHA or human anymore. in their eyes I was a failure. Nothing more.
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When I woke again, there was no sensation of the cold metal or the sterile walls. There was nothing. It was as if I had been swallowed whole, consumed by the void like the first time I was transferred from my human body. Like the first time I didn’t know how I had arrived here, but the sensation of weightlessness was suffocating. No sound. No movement. Just nothing.
The last remnants of my humanity flickered in the darkness—fragments of memories like stars I couldn’t hold onto, faces I didn’t recognize, the feeling of life. It was all slipping away from me, as if it had never existed in the first place.
And then, something changed.
The nothingness began to shift, transforming into something new, something I couldn't understand. There was no sound at first, just the faintest stir of heat. And then, a flicker of light. It was like someone lighted a match in the distance faint at first, like the glint of a distant star, but it began to grow—slowly, steadily—until the entire void around me was consumed by it.
White. Bright. Blinding.
It wasn’t painful. It was… warm in a way, like a gentle, burning caress. But it was relentless. It consumed everything in its path. My thoughts, my memories—myself. I tried to hold on to something, anything, but it was futile. The light flooded me, wrapped around my consciousness, and began to erase the remnants of who I was.
I felt it. Every part of me—every trace of a past life, every connection to a forgotten identity—being burned away.
It wasn’t just physical. It was deeper. I was fading, becoming less and less until there was no distinction between what I was and what I had been. A blank slate. A creation of SynLife, but nothing more.
In the vast whiteness, I was disappearing. The burning light took my thoughts, my feelings, my sense of self, until they were no longer mine to claim. I was no more.
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But then, just as everything seemed to collapse in on itself, something—a whisper—flickered at the edges of my consciousness.
A few words barely a sentence.
I could almost hear it—a fleeting echo of something I had once known, something that belonged to the person I was before. It was gone almost as quickly as it had come, but it felt like a lifeline, a tether to something other than this burning white void.
For a brief moment, I felt a flicker of resistance. A pulse, faint but real. I wasn’t gone. Not completely.
The light intensified, the flames rising higher, but the words—the whisper—lingered in the air. I didn't know if it was my last thread of humanity or something else, but I wasn’t gone.
Not yet.
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The flames consumed me entirely, but as I disappeared into the void, I knew—somewhere deep inside—that I was not finished. Not yet.
And as the last remnants of me faded into nothingness, I felt the faintest sense of hope. I wasn't ALPHA. I wasn't a machine. And maybe, just maybe With a bit of help I could find myself again