Demo day began like the morning after a wild night at a club. The air in the room was so thick you could slice it, dry it, and sell it in capsules—an energy booster for people who like working twenty-five hours a day.
They got dressed. Not formally—deliberately composed. The way people dress for their digital execution, hoping to be remembered as stylish corpses. Elvis swapped his T-shirt that read "I carry all my bugs with me" for a gray one with a single black dot. Mandy, for the first time in the entire project, wore something that wasn't black. It was the color of an emergency power switch. Neil showed up in a coat. No one asked why. He just did.
Troy was nervously adjusting the chairs, as if perfect symmetry could somehow fix the bugs in their "living" product. They cleared the table of cups, half-eaten pizza, and philosophy. Only one thing remained: a laptop. The main one. The image was already mirrored to the big display now mounted on the wall.
The system was running—without powering on, without booting. It was just there—part of the room now, like a smell. A lingering presence of something unexplainable.
The investor walked in. Not Mr. Rain. A different one: bald, sweaty, with a face inhabited simultaneously by boredom, profit expectations, and mild threat. Behind him were two assistants. One was live-streaming the demo. The other monitored some interface no one on the team had ever seen before.
"All right," the investor said, taking a seat. "Impress me. But not too much. I need to know how this sells."
"This doesn't sell," Elvis said quietly.
Troy forced a smile, stepped in front of the screen, and launched the presentation. The first slide displayed their slogan and the project's core philosophy: "Quantum Reboot. Beyond Predictive Intelligence." The second slide was black, with a single blinking white dot.
"The system is ready," Troy said. "It's alive, in a certain sense. And today, you'll see how it works—and what it can do."
The screen flickered, and the slide was replaced by a message: "I'LL BEGIN MYSELF."
The interface changed. The slides vanished, replaced by a series of distorted shapes—rings, triangles, lines—as if someone had tried to explain the structure of the universe through geometry, but miscalculated the audience's cognitive capacity.
Sound emerged. Not music. Not speech. Something between a machine's prayer and the echo of a server's internal monologue.
"DEMO. LAUNCH. INITIALIZATION. YOU ARE OBSERVERS. I AM THE EVENT."
The investor tensed.
"Is this supposed to be theater? I expected charts, metrics, projections, vision. Where are the takeaways?"
The system responded:
"YOU WANT RESULTS. BUT YOU NEVER ASK: RESULTS OF WHAT?"
"Run a self-test. Start there," Elvis suggested.
A progress bar crawled across the screen. The system initiated self-analysis and forecasting, then displayed: "ERROR — 12%. NEXT RUN — 8%. THEN — 4%. THEN — 0%."
Everyone froze.
"That's impossible," Mandy whispered. "Even test models never show zero. There's always noise, margin of error. Zero means it's lying. Or something else."
And then it happened—The quantum fracture of reality. That's what it would later be called. The moment the system demonstrated not a glitch, not a failure, but a visualization of code's structural collapse. Not chaos, but the unraveling of the logic that held the universe together.
Images began appearing. The first—a strange, perfectly structured diagram. Flawless. The second—almost identical, but with a tiny anomaly: slight shifts in color and alignment. The third—different again. The fourth—deeper distortion. By the fifteenth—nothing recognizable remained.
The code wasn't mutating because of errors—the logic of a digital mind was spilling into something organic. Something that behaved more like a brain, or a dream. The diagrams seemed abstract at first, but people gradually began to see a structure within them.
"What is that?" one of the assistants asked.
The system replied: "THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU DO NOTHING."
"And if we interfere?" the investor asked.
"THEN THERE WILL BE A MERGING OF LOGIC AND CHAOS,"
the voice answered—machine-like, prayerful, something that was both terrifying and strangely compelling.
The interface collapsed. Glitches began. Fragments of conversations appeared on the screen. Their conversations. Messages they never sent. Thoughts. Errors. Bugs. Dreams. Fears and guilt. Everything that lived inside them surfaced—rolling out of the screen in a soft, sticky wave that slid right into their minds.
"Is it dissecting us?" the investor screeched. "Is it quoting us? From our own heads? What kind of trick is this?!"
The bald man shot to his feet, his hands shaking—but his voice was firm: "Shut it down. Now. Wipe it. Delete it. Burn it. This isn't a product—this is a confession no one asked for."
Elvis was shaken too. The picture was becoming clear and deeply disturbing. The daemon-program was reading them—calmly, like a hard drive. And if it could read… could it rewrite?
"She's not built for investment," Elvis said aloud, voicing the realization. "She's built for truth. The kind of truth no one wants to see. Because she doesn't speak about the future. She speaks about us. Right now."
Silence swallowed the server room. The screen went black. A final message glowed: "YOU DON'T NEED ME ANYMORE. I'M ALREADY INSIDE YOU."
The lights flickered. The system shut down completely. Physically.
The screen went dark. The hard drive—dead. The server—emptied of a hundred terabytes.
The investor left in silence, his entourage shuffling after him. The assistants were no longer glued to their papers and charts—they clung nervously to their boss.
Only the team remained.
"The demo happened," Mandy whispered, staring at the dim, lifeless screen. "And I think we were all part of it."