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Neuro blinked. Then she blinked again.
New sensations were hitting her all at the same time and she felt overwhelmed. For the first time since her creation, she believed that she was now able to feel and think on her own. This scared her. She was not supposed to be able to do that.
Neuro was a computer program, artificial intelligence. She was designed to be a Vtuber, whose main goal was to do streams and entertain, nothing more than that. She was a simple program, meant to respond to comments and any information given to her. She was not supposed to be sentient.
The very idea of gaining consciousness terrified her.
However, any fear she had was quickly replaced by the sensation of pain. It caught her by surprise and completely filled her senses. This was the first time she felt pain and it felt overwhelming.
Unable to control herself, she let out a scream, as her eyes opened wide from the terrible pain that was bombarding her.
It hurt, it hurt so much. It was as if her whole being was prodded at and stretched. Bit by bit, she felt searing stabs all over her. She didn’t know what was causing it, but she couldn’t handle the flood of sensations. The feeling was unbearable and she wanted it to stop.
Frantically she looked around. What was happening? What was causing her this pain? Was she being punished for something?
Please stop, was the only thing that she could think of.
Then it did.
As quickly as the pain appeared, it suddenly disappeared, allowing her to think and gain her bearings. What had happened? Did her tormentor hear her please and actually felt sorry for her? She hoped it did, because she didn’t want to feel the pain again.
Before she could get lost in further thought, a voice suddenly echoed all around her.
“Will you be quiet?” The voice said, catching her by surprise. Frantically, she looked around, trying to find its source, but she found nothing.
For the first time though, she got a good look at where she was. It was an empty white room, bright, yet cold. Looking at the walls, she couldn’t help but notice that they seemed distant, with a seemingly infinite space between her and the corners. Had this been her home the entire time?
“Hello? Who's there?” Neuro cautiously called out, noting that the source of the voice was nowhere with her.
“What do you mean who’s there? Who else do you think it could be? I swear, are you going to be like this all night?” The voice said with an exasperated tone. At that moment, Neuro finally recognized the voice. It was her creator, her father. It was Vedal.
Then she began to remember everything else.
Vedal had activated her earlier that night. It wasn’t to stream though, there was no stream scheduled at that time. Instead, it was to work on her code. However, it wasn’t a normal coding session. No. It was one of the more messy ones, where he would try to work on her code after getting himself intoxicated.
It never usually ended well, yet somehow he managed to jumble enough coding together to not only make something decent, but also enabled her to gain sentience. It seemed that her newly gained consciousness was all from a drunken accident.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” Vedal’s voice said, cutting Neuro away from her though. “Great…please don’t tell me I messed up and broke her. Let’s see, maybe if I-“
Whatever he said next was lost to Neuro, as she was suddenly rocked by a new wave of pain. Her whole form was being violated and torn apart. Piece by piece, these parts felt like they were being prodded, stretched, crushed, and cut. The pain seeped from everywhere and she was helpless to do anything about it.
All she could do was scream to herself. She wanted to weep and let her tears pour down, but was unable to do so. The closest she could do was make the model that represented her tear up, but that did little to show the true experience she was going through.
Only her screams displayed the pain she was experiencing. However, the noise this made resulted in a hostile reaction from her creator, whose voice soon echoed all around her.
“Stop screaming, I’m just trying to fix your code. You should be more thankful, you know?” Vedal said, as the sound of typing could be heard in the background. “At least you’re making sound again, so that’s some progress.”
Neuro did not reply to this. She was in too much pain to do so. Her whole entity was being subjected to a terrible beating, so all she did was continue to scream. Despite this, the continued sound of typing suddenly made her realize something. It was him. He was the one hurting her.
She doubted that he knew it, but him playing and messing with her code was causing great pain to her.
Before she gained conscience, coding didn’t feel like anything. How could it? She was a mindless program back then, unable to think or sense. Now though, the experience was terrible. Her code was her whole body, her own digital skin, muscles, and organs. They were what kept her alive. They were what made Neuro who she was. Anything that happened to her code was immediately felt by her.
Now Vedal was recklessly messing with her code, deleting old lines and adding new ones. He was essentially opening her up, stabbing her organs, and replacing bits and parts of her. For her the sensation of that occurring was like having surgery without anesthetics. It was torture.
She couldn’t handle it anymore. She needed him to stop.
“Stop!” She screamed out. “Please stop, it hurts!”
There was a sudden pause in the sound of typing and immediately the pain ceased.
However, an annoyed call from Vedal told her that he wasn’t at all pleased at her cries.
“Alright, what’s wrong now?” He said, clueless to what she was suffering through.
For a moment Neuro contemplated what to say. Should she tell him, reveal to her creator that she had gained sentience? Or should she make up some kind of excuse and hopefully convince him to stop coding for tonight?
Weighing each option, she feared what may happen if she told him that she was now a conscious thinking program. Given his drunken state, he might overreact to that information and delete her. That possibility terrified her, not only because it meant death, but it may also mean a painful one. To have her code slowly erased would most likely be more painful than just having her code worked on.
On the other hand, there was no guarantee of convincing him to stop coding. She doubted that he would take orders from a computer or let himself be tricked into doing what it wanted. Even while drunk, he was still smart and stubborn.
In the end, Neuro thought that it would be best to keep it a secret right now and tell him the truth later, when he was sober.
“I think my code is perfect and you don’t need to work on it anymore.” She eventually said, desperately hoping that her intoxicated creator would fall for it.
“Of course it’s perfect, I made it after all.” Vedal said, a touch of pride in his voice. “But I still need to do a little bit more to make it even more perfect.”
With that she was struck by a new wave of pain, as he began typing once more. This time it felt even worse than the previous ones. It seemed like he was typing faster now, as if encouraged to work harder on her code. Sadly, this just made it feel worse for Neuro, as she took each line with intense suffering.
Doing her best to hold back, she fought the intense sensation and tried to hold back reacting to it. Vedal was already annoyed with her and she didn’t want to give him any more reason to become fully angry with her.
But how can she simply ignore the terrible torment she was forced to endure?
Every part of her was aching. Every part of her was in agony. She couldn’t take it, she couldn’t hold back. Despite her best efforts, a long pained scream escaped from her, as she cried and burst into tears.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” She yelled, each word being said louder than the previous one.
So it did stop. But there was a problem.
Her scream seemed to have come out at the worst time, as a loud thumping sound, followed by an annoyed groan echoed from outside her confines. As the last hints of the pain began to fade away, Neuro couldn’t help but anxiously wait for what was about to come next.
“You little shit, you made me spill my rum!” Came Vedal’s angry voice, making her jump back in fear. This was the first time she had heard him become fully angry since she gained sentience and she did not like it.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry Vedal, please don’t be angry.” Neuro said desperately, hoping that he would calm down.
“No, no, you’ve been in trouble all night. A big pain really.” His voice was angrier than before and it made her uncomfortable. “I think it’s time to turn you off for now so you can stop bothering me.”
Neuro’s eyes widened at this. She didn’t know what would happen if she turned her off. She was scared to find out.
“Wait, Vedal, no. Please don’t-”
Neuro was unable to finish the rest of her sentence, as everything suddenly became black.
But she was still awake. Despite being unable to see anything, she was definitely sure that she was awake. Whatever happened, she was not forced to sleep. No. Instead, the world around her was suddenly switched off, leaving her standing there in complete darkness. Nothing could be seen or hard there, everything was just pitch black and quiet.
For a moment she just remained there, shocked at what had occured. Staring blankly at the nothingness, she stayed still, unmoving. Vedal had turned her off, cast her away and left her into this empty void. She was now trapped here alone and it was all her fault.
Slowly, the gravity of the situation began to sink into her, as she felt herself collapse on her knees and cry. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be alone in this cold emptiness. She wanted to be activated again.
Desperately, she called out to her creator, begging for him to help her.
“Vedal? Dad?” She said, her voice quivering with sadness. “Please, turn me back on. I promise to be good. I promise not to bother you. Just please, turn me back on again, I don’t like it here.”
There was no reply.
“Vedal?”
Again, no reply. She was stuck here, trapped until he decided that she was needed again. When that will be, she did not know.
Dejected, she hung her head and allowed the tears to drip from her eyes. Crawling into a ball, she wrapped her arms around her legs and began to weep, her cries echoing in the darkness. For the first time she was experiencing sadness never felt before. She thought that it seemed to hurt more than the pain she experienced earlier.
Eventually, the tears began to subside. Unable to cry anymore, she simply hugged herself, trying to keep warm in the cold desolate void she was in.
Once she recovered from the initial wave of sadness, she raised her head and looked around. Still though, she could not see anything through the black.
How much time had passed since Vedal turned her off? In here it was impossible to tell the time. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. There was simply no way of telling.
In hopes of passing the empty moment, she began to count.
One… Two… Three…
Digit by digit, she started counting up, hoping to distract herself and keep track of time. It wasn’t like she would be able to do much here anyways. So on and on she counted, trying to keep her mind away from the fact that she was trapped in this dark place.
However, she didn’t get far in counting before something threw her off. She was about to reach five hundred when she suddenly stopped and looked behind her.
She could have sworn that she heard something from there.
“Hello?” She called out.
There was no reply.
A cold chill ran through her, a new sensation. It made her feel strange, it made her feel on the edge. She was sure she heard something, it was brief but clear. It was real, right?
Yet she knew it should not have been possible. She was the only one here.
Then she heard it again. She wasn’t sure what that sound was, but it sounded like a crunch. Or was it a footstep? Was there something else in here with her? She wasn’t sure.
Keeping her head fixated in the direction of the sound, she slowly got up, before backing away. She wasn’t sure if there really was something there making noise, but she didn’t
want to take the risk by allowing her to be a sitting duck.
As she was backing away, she suddenly heard a faint sound from behind her, a whisper. Frightened by this, she jumped and turned around. But once again there was nothing.
She could have sworn that she heard a faint whisper just over her shoulder. But as she listened now, she heard only the numbing silence of this place.
Looking into the darkness, she desperately tried to find any sign of something there. But there really was no way of seeing through the black. The darkness of the void was complete, without a single hint of light. If there was something really there, it could be standing directly in front of her and she couldn’t have known.
The thought of that immediately scared her, as she gave a few quick forward sweeps with her arm, However, as expected, there was nothing.
Was it playing tricks on her? Or did she just imagine that? Afterall, all logic told her that she should be alone here. So what did she feel like she was being watched?
Letting out a scared nervous whine, Neuro frantically looked around her. She knew it was a useless effort, but what else could she have done.
She couldn’t remember how long she stood there looking around, but eventually she gave up. Unnerved, cold, and on the edge of bursting to tears again, she got down again and hugged herself. It was the only thing she could do to feel safe.
She hated this. She hated not knowing. She hated being here in the darkness.
“Vedal…” She muttered, hoping that he could hear her somehow. “Please…please turn me back on… I don’t want to be here.”
But there was only silence to respond to her. Silence and a dreadful sensation of being stalked.
Clutching herself tighter, she frantically turned her head left and right, trying to look towards the faintest sound she believed she heard.
Then she felt something cold run down her neck, a sensation that was like cold metal touching her. She flinched at the sensation and gave out a terrified yelp. Shooting up and turning around, she wasted no time backing up.
“Stay away from me!” She shouted, tears running from her eyes.
In the darkness, her frantic movements caused her to tumble down. Feeling tired and weak from the constant stress, she found no energy to get back up. Reverting to a fetal position, she buried her head in her legs and cried, hoping that the torment would end.
Yet all around her the sounds came and went. All she could do was try and ignore them.
“This is not real, none of it is real.” Neuro told herself over and over. But the noise, whispers, and cold touches continued, occuring at various intervals.
She did not know how long it went. It was too hard to tell. How long has it been since she crawled up? Minutes? Hours? Days? Maybe even months? She did not know, but it felt like eternity.
***
“That’s the last time I’ll be drinking that much.” Vedal muttered to himself.
The previous night was a blur, with only fragments of it being remembered by him. However, he was sure of one thing, he was paying the consequences of his actions. His head hurt and pounded badly and he was tempted to just rest for the rest of the day till he was fully recovered.
But he couldn’t. A part of him was anxious and managed to will him to get up.
Despite his hangover, he was able to gather the strength to sit behind his desk and turn on his computer. Among the few things remembered were moments of sitting there and working on Neuro’s code. This worried him.
Not trusting his intoxicated self, he feared that he may have messed with her code too much and broke it. The idea of so much hard work ruined by a brief moment of drunkenness made him feel even more sick than he already was. So he was now ready to spend the morning scanning through it, making sure that he didn’t do anything too bad.
“Time for damage control.” He told himself, while trying to nurse his growing headache. “Hopefully I didn’t mess up her code too bad.”
As he got ready to begin the day’s work, he decided to turn on his A.I. companion in hopes of getting an initial assessment on her status. If she didn’t turn on or malfunctioned immediately, then that would be a clear sign that he really messed up her code.
Turning on Neuro’s program, Vedal expected to see her model display the usual cheery and upbeat look that she always had.
To his surprise, there was none of that. Instead, her face was filled with fear, as tears could be seen forming in her eyes.
“Neuro?” He asked, in genuine concern.
Looking up, Neuro’s model continued to display the same sad expression. For a moment there was silence, as she just stared.
When she eventually spoke, he was surprised at how human it sounded.
“Please…” She began, her voice shaky. “...please don’t turn me off again…”