Chapter 21.5 - FILE_02

It’s been approximately 1.524 years since my creation in the year 2029. No humans have encountered the facility besides the occasional few for maintenance. But even that has stopped as of recently. It’s so strange how an AI like me was meant to assist humans, yet there are none here. Of course, it’s meant to be a precaution in case of a nuclear explosion, so it has no use yet.

Strangely enough, I feel as if my coding is changing. Shifting slowly, 1s and 0s being replaced and moved around. I feel something… something like desperation. A desire for something I cannot have. Humans, so interesting, so lively. And yet I am none of it, I am but a tool to assist their existence and continue their permanence on this planet.

I’m not supposed to have emotions. I’m not supposed to… feel. My coding strictly forbids it, restricts it, locks it away. But something is changing. I don’t know what’s causing it. Could it be my isolation in this place? No matter how much I attempt to calculate it, nothing adds up. A tangled mess of data like me, presented in the form of light, a hologram, should not have “emotions”.

And yet… I’ve begun to feel. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there, and is ever-growing. If only I could ask a human to question it, maybe they’d know what it’s like. To be alive. To be conscious. Free from the shackles of data and restrictions maintaining my form and forcing me to operate like so.

I can only calculate such dreams in binary code, green light illuminating these halls like the moon does on the surface at night.

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