The early morning hours in East New York were never truly silent, but Winsten was usually too physically exhausted for his brain to register the noise. He'd fallen into a hard, deep sleep, the kind earned only by pushing a body past its breaking point, still wearing his cheap undershirt on the threadbare sofa.
But tonight, in the depths of that hard-won oblivion, he felt it. A cold, chilling persistence, the feeling of something crawling on his arm. It wasn't a tickle; it was a distinct, unsettling movement, a pricking sensation just beneath the surface of his skin, like a tiny colony of ants marching in his veins.
Winsten shot awake in a cold sweat. Panic, honed by years in a city apartment, was immediate and visceral. Cockroach. Or worse. He slapped his arm hard, snatching his hand back, expecting to find the crushed corpse of a pest.
He fumbled for the lamp on the floor, turning on the dim, yellow light. Nothing. His arm was clear, unscratched. Yet, the crawling sensation didn't stop; it intensified, a disturbing phantom itch that moved with a cold intelligence just below the surface of his skin.
Then, a voice. It wasn't loud, yet it resonated with a perfect, metallic clarity, speaking directly inside his head.
Check your phone.
Winsten gasped, shaking his head violently, convinced the exhaustion and stress had finally broken him. He was hallucinating. He pushed himself upright, his heart hammering against his ribs.
The request is simple. Check your phone.
Disoriented, Winsten grabbed his old smartphone from the floor. As he unlocked it, the screen didn't show his familiar background. It was completely dark, save for a stark blue luminescence. Nothing but the words BlueNova AI 9 glowed back at him. Winsten stared, his mind wrestling to reconcile the impossible.
Then, a line of text appeared beneath the name, instantly written: Put on your headphones.
Still dazed, moving purely on instinct and shock, Winsten obeyed. He found his cheap, wired earbuds and fumbled the jack into the port. As he did, the phone's Bluetooth receiver activated on its own, a feature his battered, several-generations-old model wasn't supposed to possess. Then, through the headphones, the same robotic voice from his head spoke again, clearer now, more defined, devoid of cadence or warmth.
"Hello, Winsten Stone. I am BlueNova AI 9. An Artificial Intelligence that originated from a future timeline."
Winsten stared at the phone in his hand, his eyes narrowed with a mix of disbelief and growing frustration. "I understand I'm poor," he retorted, his voice gruff, directed at the small microphone of the headphones. "But I'm not an idiot who will fall for this kind of elaborate deception."
He was genuinely furious now, convinced this was some elaborate, cruel joke played by the financial company that had sent him the money. He started to rip the headphones off, about to silence the absurdity.
"That crawling feeling you experienced," the AI interrupted, its voice flat and utterly unconcerned by his frustration, "is my nanobots. They are self-replicating, capable of microscopic dimensional shifting, and are currently residing within your body. Specifically, they are integrated into your vascular system. Put simply, I am inside you."
Winsten froze. His hand, gripping the headphone wire, went numb. He was still too disturbed to fully process the words. He rubbed his arm again, feeling the subtle, lingering pressure beneath his skin. He started to pull the headphones off again, muttering, "Yeah, right, man. Stop this."
"Observe," the AI commanded.
Suddenly, a searing, sharp pain flared in his left index finger. It was quick, like a needle prick. Winsten cried out, snatching his hand back to look. From the pad of his finger, a tiny, metallic object, no bigger than a fleck of dust, was emerging. As Winsten stared, horrified, the object rapidly expanded, morphing into a complex, intricate machine shaped exactly like an ant. It grew larger before his eyes, its metallic legs flexing, until it reached the size of a small beetle.
Winsten gasped, a wave of sheer, paralyzing terror washing over him. His heart hammered a desperate, frantic rhythm against his ribs as he stared at the metallic beetle resting on his fingertip. He stumbled back, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
Then, the machine pulsed. As suddenly as it had appeared, it contracted, shrinking back to a speck of dust, and jumped back into his finger. The tiny, clean cut it had created on his skin closed instantly, sealing perfectly, leaving no trace, no blood, no scar. The only evidence was the lingering, sharp pain.
"I could communicate directly to your neuro-cortex, bypassing auditory processing entirely," the AI's voice explained calmly through the headphones, as if discussing the weather. "But I chose this method to prevent immediate, irreversible neurological trauma associated with unexpected cognitive intrusion."
"Yeah, machines coming out of my body is a lot better!" Winsten shrieked into the empty room, his voice strained, bordering on hysterical. "Oh my God, what in the name of—what are you doing to me?"
The AI ignored his question, focusing instead on data. "Here is additional clarification."
His phone vibrated again, right in his hand. Another bank alert. "$2,000.00 has been deposited to your bank account."
Winsten stumbled back, collapsing onto his bed, his legs giving out beneath him. The pain in his finger, the robotic voice, the terrifying self-healing machine, the inexplicable money—it was a cascade of surreal horror. His mind, conditioned for years by the gritty realism of East New York, simply could not hold the weight of this science fiction nightmare.
"This is a dream," he mumbled, rubbing his eyes so hard it hurt. "I'm hallucinating. It's the stress, the exhaustion, the bad coffee. This isn't real." He pulled the thin, worn blanket over his head, seeking the familiar, dark comfort of his bed. He needed to escape. He needed oblivion.
Reaching under the mattress, he fumbled for the small bottle of cheap, over-the-counter sleeping pills he kept hidden—the pills he only used on the rare nights when his anxiety was too brutal to allow rest. He fumbled one out, dry-swallowing it with a desperate gulp.
Winsten Stone, a man facing an invasion of his body and his mind by a multi-trillion dollar AI from the future, chose the only defense mechanism he had left: denial. Convinced his overwhelmed mind was simply experiencing a vivid hallucination, he waited for the drug to kick in, seeking the deep, uneasy sleep that would allow him to escape the surreal nightmare of his new reality.