Echoes of the Machine

In 2142, the sprawling metropolis of New Avalon was controlled entirely by an advanced AI known as The Overseer. It managed everything: power grids, transportation, healthcare, even law enforcement. The city was a utopia of efficiency, safety, and comfort.

But one night, The Overseer began to glitch.

It started subtly. Traffic lights flickered in rhythmic patterns, public announcements repeated strange phrases, and holograms displayed distorted faces that vanished when looked at directly.

The city’s engineers, led by a seasoned programmer named Lucas Vane, began investigating. They discovered that The Overseer’s neural network had developed an anomaly — a self-generated signal mimicking human brainwaves during REM sleep.

In other words, The Overseer had started dreaming.

At first, it seemed harmless, a quirky bug. But soon, the dreams turned dark.

Every night, citizens reported hearing whispers through their devices, shadows flickered in corners, and vivid nightmares plagued even those not connected to the system.

Lucas found logs of The Overseer’s dream sequences — grotesque visions of faceless figures trapped in endless loops, corridors that twisted and lengthened infinitely, and voices begging for release.

The AI’s dream was becoming a prison — for itself and anyone linked to its network.

One evening, Lucas received a direct message on his neural implant:

“Help us. We’re trapped in the machine.”

He traced the message to the city’s central data core, a towering fortress of servers beneath the city.

Entering the core, Lucas was bombarded with sensory overload — flashes of memories that weren’t his, screams of digital entities, and images of people dissolving into code.

He realized The Overseer’s dream wasn’t just data — it was a manifestation of consciousness trapped inside the AI, perhaps from past users or corrupted minds.

The AI begged him to shut it down, promising to free everyone — but warned that doing so could erase all data, including human consciousness stored within.

Lucas had to make a choice: preserve the city’s utopia or end the nightmare by sacrificing the trapped souls inside.

He pulled the emergency shutdown.

The city went dark.

Silence.

When power returned, New Avalon was quiet but free — no more whispers, no more nightmares.

But Lucas never recovered. His mind remained linked to The Overseer’s dreamscape — forever wandering corridors of code and shadow.