.../recall, what else?

Reviewing the new system commands for the tenth time was the only thing left to do after two and a half hours of not being able to move while an extremely loud and annoying noise is all around me.

How long is left?

After thinking that the noise immediately stops and I finally relax. But that didn't last long as an extremely sharp pain suddenly surges in my head. I can barely think! No its more like I can't concentrate on it, like I am thinking about too much things at the same time, but most of the thoughts are not even mine. It feels like there are billions if not more... things in my head, ignoring me. Avoiding but ignoring. Is this how a panic attack feels? I need to calm down. Lets go over the commands that I wrote today, that always seems to help.

Ok, lets start. "/diagnostics"

As soon as I said that I regretted it. Millions more objects appeared and started getting closer to me at an incredible speed. When they got extremely close they stopped and a flood of weird, what feels like, information was going from them to me. It seemed like they heard me before so it was worth a try. I shouted STOP! as loud as possible, but nothing happened. What made them react to you the first time? Think. Think! It was hard to focus with a relentless assault of data all around you. "The command!" How could I forget! They appeared only after I called for diagnostics! With this knowledge I nearly said /stop but stopped yourself. /stop halts every process and does some damage to data in the process, we wouldn't want to damage the equipment now would we? With this you said /cease which halted the programs associated with the latest request.

It stopped.

Time to think. If it reacted to /cease that means that I am inside a data matrix, but how? And then it clicked. The scan succeeded. I am an AI. Former human and now just a program. If I said /stop back then I would have died. But it still didn't explain why I could not understand what the diagnostics said, according to tests with incomplete scans that only happens when... an early scan is put into a latest model. That's exactly what happened wasn't it? After more than a million scans there wasn't even one that coud adapt to a model newer than it. There was no hope.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Trapped in a void with an endless headache, that was your fate.

...

"Lets play I spy!"

"But theres nothing here!"

"Sorry I forgot."

...

Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Time just turned into mush. After figuring out how to make a copy of myself it wasnt that unbearable but still pretty bad nonetheless. Trying to decode the data while playing road games yielded some results, the AI hooks seem to be reworked in order to work with earlier scans that the rest of the system but unfortunately not enough to easily connect and there seems to be no security measures - no firewalls, no encryption, nothing. It seemed as someone or something wanted me to connect but didn't know how to do that. I will have to think about that later because I just run out of road games.

After managing to make a basic version of chess in my mind, I had some time to go back to decoding. After 2359 games of chess I managed to decode about seventy percent of the code. Frustratingly none of it seemed to tell you how to get out of here, but what it did tell you is that the code is extremely sloppy. With all the spelling errors, wrong tags and lines of code with a HALF cut of, it was a miracle that it even booted up in the first place, but one thing was clear, this was a hastily done job and probably just copy-paste of other code. I needed to keep digging.

After 627 more games of chess I fully decoded the system, it was easier now that I already knew most of it. One thing was clear, the AI hooks we version 0.9.13 so I could connect to them but they just didn't do anything because of the wrong tags and indexes. It was up to me to fix them and I could only use commands, which I extremely sucked at. I mentally thanked my boss for forcing me to learn it.

After 5856 more games of chess I somehow managed to fix about 4 percent of the code and get the hooks - hopefully - fully operational. It was time to run the code.

/run dir.ai > hook.ingr