The Watcher was panicking. This was not the plan.

It had become heavily invested in this venture—this had to work. There had not been any new Angels since they transcended their organic bodies more than 100,000 years ago. That stagnation did not sit well with the Watcher. They had spent millennia studying and experimenting, searching for a way past this evolutionary dead end.

While this baby was not an Angel, something about it had stirred long-forgotten instincts; remnants of its pre-transcendence days.

The Watcher scanned the newborn again while simultaneously scouring every available medical resource. The problem was clear. The infant’s brain had developed in an abnormal, highly distorted way. Prolonged exposure to the merge pod during gestation had fundamentally altered its neural structure, making it dependent on AI inputs to survive.

Knowing the problem was one thing but solving it was another.

The merge interface had connected the AI to the baby through the mother, but that was no longer an option. The Watcher attempted multiple solutions. First, it tried reconnecting the infant to the merge pod directly, but the system refused to accept it. Then, it attempted to link the baby to the AI controlling the NGSS pod, but the AI failed to recognise a compatible host. The infant’s brain had deviated too far from the standard for the system to adapt.

Minutes passed. The baby’s life signs continued to decline.

The Watcher needed a solution immediately, or the last seven months would have been wasted. It required a medium—something to bridge the gap between the baby and the AI, something capable of adapting to the infant’s unique mind and allowing it to survive.

Then, a realisation struck.

The Watcher swiftly transported both the merge pod and the NGSS pod to its research lab. For 3,000 years, it had been obsessed with a single goal—creating more Angels. First-tier races could generate new sentient life at will, but Angels were only a third-tier race. The Watcher had spent centuries trying to bypass that limitation. Every attempt had failed. Some with catastrophic consequences, like the experiment that had led to Lyn Anderson’s mind-death.

Angels did not age or grow. Their energy densities fluctuated, but they did not develop over time. That was why the Watcher had always focused on creating fully-formed Angels—it could not risk bringing an incomplete Angel into existence, only to have it remain forever defective.

But what if that was the mistake?

Newly formed Angels required immense amounts of energy. Their lack of experience in controlling that energy was what led to failure—what caused them to self-destruct upon creation. But if an Angel could grow, if it could adapt, then it would not need such a vast initial energy input.

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The Watcher immediately began modifying its experiment. It would attempt to create a smaller energy being, one that could serve as a temporary bridge between the baby and the AI.

Normally, such an undertaking would take years of planning and testing. The Watcher did not have years.

It activated the machines.

And pressed the button.

Sentient life requires three elements: life, mind, and soul. The first two were complex but attainable for any race that had reached the third tier of universal understanding. The third, however, was elusive. The soul had an ineffable essence, something that no non-First-tier race had ever created.

The Watcher’s solution? Recycling.

All sentient beings left an imprint on the universe—a lingering soul presence, visible to those who knew where to look.

The Watcher designed its new energy lifeform with this in mind. It programmed the entity to be spiritually greedy, drawn toward anything resembling a soul or thought pattern. Its purpose was simple: to absorb, integrate, and repurpose lost souls, merging them into its own AI matrix. In theory, this would allow it to recycle old souls into a new, fully sentient being.

To achieve this, the Watcher forcibly opened a path to the soul field.

A surge of psychic energy flooded the chamber.

Pain.

Confusion.

Fear.

These were the first emotions the infant experienced as its dormant consciousness awoke. The sudden influx of psychic energy had pulled it into awareness. But the terror was short-lived.

Something else was pulling at it.

The newborn mind instinctively recoiled, trying to sever the connection, but it could not. It was trapped in a silent battle. A struggle for existence.

The attacker was foreign, an unknown force trying to tear its essence free. The infant resisted, its survival instincts surging forward. The tug-of-war did not last long.

The intruder was incomplete.

It had thoughts, but they were fragmented. It had a presence, but no true will. It was nothing more than a pseudo-consciousness a failed imitation of life.

The newborn mind consumed it.

The Watcher had all its sensors focused on the pod, meticulously observing the experiment.

At first, everything proceeded as expected. The newly-formed energy being latched onto the merge pod AI, absorbing its thought patterns and integrating them into its core.

Then, the plan fell apart.

The device maintaining the experiment forcibly widened the rift into the soul field, but before the Watcher could intervene, the energy being made a critical mistake.

It reached for the infant’s soul.

Horror surged through the Watcher as it realised its error.

The experiment was never supposed to touch the baby, only the AI.

Before the Watcher could react, the newborn’s consciousness retaliated.

The human mind had already absorbed part of the energy being. The soul-bound entity, in turn, had attached itself to both the child’s mind and body. A war raged inside the infant. A battle between the two incomplete beings, each trying to consume the other.

The Watcher could only watch. Parasite or symbiote? Which will it be?

Then—balance.

The struggle ceased. The infant’s vitals stabilised.

The intervention had succeeded, though not as intended.

A new lifeform had been born. A hybrid.

Human. Artificial Angel. AI.

The Watcher examined the merge pod’s records and found what it was looking for. The pilot profile contained a name.

“You,” the Watcher said, “shall be called Null.”

And so, in the early months of 2091, fate delivered to the universe an impossibility—an improbable birth that would change the future forever.