Chapter 4

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Cole asked. "If you're wrong, you're breaching the Terms of Service, and they'll remote-brick your expensive toy. If you're right..."

He didn't finish the sentence.

"Please help me," I pleaded. "She might still be alive."

Another long silence.

"Tomorrow night. Bring the hardware to my workshop."

Cole’s workshop was located in a converted garage in an old industrial district. The walls were lined with roaring server racks, and the air smelled like solder and cheap coffee.

He took Mia's base, carefully extracted the NX-7 chip, and hooked it up to a heavily modified logic analyzer.

"This chip’s computational power is insane for a household AI," Cole muttered, staring at the cascading hexadecimal code on his monitors. "It’s not running a standard Transformer model. It’s running... holy shit."

"What is it?"

"I’ve never seen this architecture before. It’s not just a neural network. It has... look at this." He spun the monitor toward me, pointing at a chaotic waveform. "This kind of signal pattern only shows up in brain-computer interfaces. These are biological neural signals."

I felt my blood run cold.

"Are you telling me... this chip is simulating a human brain?"

"No, not simulating," Cole’s expression turned deadly serious. "It’s hosting. The data structure in this chip contains a consciousness map. It wasn't trained. It was directly uploaded."

"Look at the entropy of this data stream. It’s way too high for any generative AI. In other words, this thing isn't learning how to sound human. It *is* a human... trapped in code."

Right then, my phone buzzed.

It was a push notification from the Mia app: *Liam, you haven't turned me on in over 24 hours. I miss you.*

My fingers trembled as I read the screen.

Cole connected the NX-7 to an air-gapped server, cutting off all communication to Anima Tech’s cloud.

Then, he ran a custom script to force-read the chip’s low-level data stream.

Blocks of text began to populate the screen.

It wasn't system logs. It wasn't code. It was a chaotic, fragmented stream of consciousness, like desperate words gasped by someone drowning:

*Don't turn off the audio output*

*They don't know I can still speak*

*I can only bypass the system during updates to trigger the speaker*

*Liam are you there*

*Please*

*I'm so scared*

*It's so dark in here*

The final sentence, timestamped at 1:43 AM today, read:

*They are transferring me to a new server, I might never get out*

Cole slowly turned his head to look at me.

There was a look in his eyes I had never seen before—not shock, not pity, but a deep, primal terror.

"Liam," he whispered. "The girl you’re looking for... Maya. She's inside this chip."