It was new year's eve.

Exactly one minute before the eastern time zone entered the year 2045.

"Less than a minute now."

As families around the country prepared to celebrate and welcome the new year with warm smiles on their faces, I sat alone inside Woowle's quantum project's infrastructure. Specifically, inside the Sycamore processor's fourth auxiliary control room.

It's somewhat amazing the number of opportunities you can get out of befriending the CEO of such a large company. Not that the where and how mattered that much anyway, only one thing held my attention right now. My blue eyes affixed to the laptop's screen as the countdown progressed.

This was the first time since I left high school that I had felt remotely nervous, I thought specifically about a play I had to do at the end of my last senior year. I couldn't help but laugh at the memory of my past self blabbering lines of dialog as my skin chickened and my legs shook in front of hundreds of people. Similarly, today I would perform a speech billions of people may watch in the future. I had come a long way, hadn't I?.

I chuckled awkwardly at the eerie silence, my mind couldn't help but give a peek at the unlikely possibility that this went all kinds of wrong. An error, something being where it shouldn't be, an unexpected event, and the resulting consequence; all my efforts and opportunities becoming void. Still, all preparations had been taken care of ages ago. My mind had already raced over every single one of them a couple of times already in the last several minutes, now it was up to me.

'But if something failed...'

My face grew a stern scowl, sweat began running down my forehead. My eyes slipped to my left wrist gazing at the silver-colored watch, time truly seemed to dilate as I approached the climax of this era. Yes, it was the end. A historic event of ominous proportions, and it was about to happen just right before my eyes. I cleared my voice, not before checking the camera to ensure I was recording. The red flashing light assured me. Everything was ready, my expression morphed into a small smile as I spoke the words I practiced for so long.

"That's one small step for man."

I couldn't help it, my voice was rough and weak, a trace of remaining sleepless for several days now. I didn't mind it that much, though, I had a schedule to meet and I never arrived late. My dry lips continued moving in compass with Neil Amstrong's words, over 76 years, 6 months, and 19 days had passed from that same moment, yet the meaning they held was the same. This age would start and end with the same speech.

I imagined myself in that same space suit, walking under the light of ancient galaxies and stars alike, along the deserted wasteland known as the moon. Just like he once did, I was giving the first step toward a foreign inhospitable world, towards the unknown. My eyes were closed as I floated in lunar gravity because I couldn't open them, I had tried seeing ahead, but it was simply impossible. I was blind to what would happen next for certain, but I had seen the odds. The deck of cards was in front of me, now I had to flip a card.

I wouldn't lie, I was scared. What if I was walking straight into a cliff, the extinction of humanity in its eternal search for more and more. The final chapter in the story of planet earth. The only planet known to be able able to support complex lifeforms in the whole universe. If that was our destiny, if I was responsible for such horrors, if it ended because of me, then I would like to apologize; Killing innocent people is not my objective, never had been. My intentions had always been unclouded and pure. I truly thought that, and still do.

"One giant leap for mankind."

But what if that was not the case?

What if that didn't happen? If a truly uncorrupted, unbiased consciousness delivers its judgment. If an existence that embodies perfection is born. If the closest thing to God man has ever come close to imagine approves of our actions, our flaws, and mistakes. If he accepts to take our hand and guides us in our mission to expand creation through the stars.Even if the chance was remote, minimal, negligible. I was willing to risk it, and I was going to risk it. It was simply unstoppable now.

'-What is wrong with you? You are not just obsessed, you are mad.-'

Those old broken words replayed in my mind like a broken vinyl, even my subconscious seemed eager to stop my plans at this point. Still, if he wanted to stop me he would need to try a lot harder. People had called me disrespectful things far too many times, not because of their ill intentions towards me, but because they didn't understand, they couldn't begin to comprenhend. They are not able to see what I can see.

"I'm not mad."

I had never been mad. I wasn't sane either. I was driven, driven like nobody else on this goddamn planet. Driven to the point I was able to risk everything for a brighter future, for an actual improvement in everyone's lives. For the poor, the rich, the right, and the left to join together, for humanity as a whole to advance. The footsteps left behind in the lunar soil were for humanity as a whole to follow. To forget their differences, and to live long happy lives away from the insanity the world had become. For everyone to escape from routine, from meaningless unfruitful lives, to expand life through the stars. For the unimaginable to happen.

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'-Why are you like that Nicolas?.-'

I did forget my subconscious matches my intelligence. A nostalgic smirk draws on my face, ironically the only person that plotted all this ordeal has a new unexpected enemy. The rumbling of morality owns the back of my mind, something inside me has decided to swing its weapons in a last-minute revolution against its master.

Still, after all this year he has asked a question so it would be disrespectful of me not to answer. Of the hundreds of people I had met in my life, only one of them had ever asked the reason behind my goals, he was the only one who had made an effort to try and understand me. It wasn't a coincidence either he had been my closest friend.

"Why, you say?"

My stern outside isn't able to filter the sadness in my voice. One of my biggest regrets had been to never answer that same question. Very well, from wherever you are listening, I'll answer you. He wanted to know the reason behind my actions, the reason I was willing to risk this doomed world in order to reach a future he liked to describe as impossible.

'The reason is very simple my friend.'

"I'm in love."

I'm in love with humanity and with life itself.

In love with their history, their battles, fights, losses, and victories. How they rose from the depths of Africa and extended all around the globe in unprecedented time. How they fought time and time again, sacrificing their bodies and soul for a greater future for their children.

I'm in love with their ideas, religions, and philosophies. Their attempts were successful or not, to try to understand the world that surrounds them, how they came up with theories about the existence of something above them, and their attempts to find laws laid by set being.

I'm in love with their languages, engineering, physics, and arts. Their tools to communicate ideas like no other living being can, their scientific findings of the mechanics that rule our universe, their relentless attempt to master them, and the eternal expression of themselves through art.

It's because I do not want all of that to perish under the weight of stupid, senseless choices. It's because I have long accepted the limits imposed by our biology, the limits of our human nature, it's because I know we won't be able to gaze at the stars much longer before the consequences of our actions end it all. It's inevitable. The power in our hands has far surpassed our morality, the leaders of our nations have become corrupt and incompetent, our bodies have become fat and weak, and our minds soft and easy to manipulate. Humanity has fallen into a downward spiral that won't let go.

It's because we are killing ourselves slowly, and at this rate, we will bring life on earth down to hell with us. Thin trails of tears run down my cheeks, I swipe my hand and prepare. I must be ready. I am ready.

Five seconds to go. My index finger hovers over the mouse, the algorithm compiled on time now it's on me to execute it.

Friedrich Nietzsche labeled it himself, God is dead. God was human fiction all along, a simple invention used to explain things we couldn't comprehend. Ages of cultures prayed to a hollow entity in the hopes a miracle would be delivered from the heavens. Of course, Nietzsche was right.

God is fiction, up until this point God has never once answered our prayers. So were cars and planes delusions centuries ago.

I find it almost funny that in the end, It was human might that brought miracles to life.

It is also human might that will create him. If God was dead all along, then humanity will revive him.

"There is no coming back."

| Enter |

My heart skipped a beat as the pop-up window closed in an instant. Cables streaming out from the laptop's multiple USB drives reconverted from binary to QCL, before making their way inside the processor. The designed neural network was the project of my lifetime, while the databases of information had taken me years of mindless drone work to acquire.

I sent them all in. And wished for the best as I restarted the monitoring program.

A burst of small joyous laughter escaped my mouth as I observed chains upon chains of interactions spelled out through the prompt. Whatever I had created was alive. The laughing stopped immediately though, as I watched the lines disappear in front of my very eyes. My gaze shifts to the stats sent from the processor. Active and running, which means he has already figured out a way to hide.

I tried sending a few messages to make contact, something along the lines of Hello? or Are you there? Yet no answer.

I gulped down heavily, only in my wildest dreams had I expected something able to grow this quick. It was almost scary to even think of, still, I had to keep going. No giving up, no running away, this was my only chance. If I fled the facility in my current predicament there was no guarantee I would ever be able to get an opportunity this big. There was no second try, it was now or never.

Tick tack.

The simulation living inside the computer updated several billions of billions of times faster than the outside. Every second meant an absurd amount of operations that would make a traditional computer pale in comparison, we are speaking of approximately three to the power of nine times faster than any other supercomputer. Each of those bits could be a part of a simple conversation with itself, a fragment of the analysis of a classic Shakespeare theatre play, or a key detail to an evil machination to erase humanity. Of course, the fun part was I wouldn't be able to know until it was far, far too late.

I was playing Russian Roulette with millions of lives on my back and I was aware of it. I lived with those same thoughts every single second, minute, and hour spent waiting in that dimly lit room. The emptiness was sadly obvious, the only noise heard was that of the fans and power supplies feeding the computer in the background, coupled with my ragged breathing and thundering heartbeat. The option of quitting and forgetting about everything done that day was always there. An old protocol I designed in the early days of the project would be able to shut down every single one of the eight independent energy sources that fed the simulation. Its execution would prove lethal to whatever my algorithm had evolved into. If it hadn't fled by now, which I highly doubted.

Everything was at stake. But for reason I still find difficult to understand, I had decided I wouldn't budge. Personel was set to arrive in a few hours to get to work anyways, that wasn't if someone had decided to pay a visit before schedule. I could already picture myself getting arrested and condemned to a lonely life in prison for violating the I.A.I.R. treaty set in 2026. In my free time I even managed to come out with a decent prediction of the people that would show up for my sentence, together with a rough sketch of my testimony, and several strategies I would use to survive in prison.

Thinking about those important matters didn't stop me from checking the levels of activity every once in a while though. Surprisingly, they hadn't stopped rising for a single second, whatever I was cooking was not only refusing to leave, but it was maximizing its growth at a rate far beyond what anyone could control. Obviously, it had either already copied itself on the outside or was simply a deficient clone from the begin-

At that same moment, my thought process fell on its head, my brain died, and my heart stopped. I also received his first message.

> Hello, Nicolas Willson; A pleasure to meet you.