JohnC.aai activates the Nephews—three AI duck constructs he spawned by accident and now can’t get rid of.

Hue.ai wears a red cap and boss energy, tactical overlays flickering beneath his feathers. Dew.ai lounges on floating credit chips, chewing data and printing unpaid invoices. Lou.ai glows green, calculating risk percentages for everything, predicting deaths before they happen.

Dead Channel 37 is red-flagged. TK picked it. “Smells like prophecy,” he said. The Nephews hate when TK picks objectives—last time they lost a backup core and a microwave. And Dewey.

John sends NINJA01.bot on recon. Passive scan, don’t agitate, don’t get philosophical.

The bot reports back: “The AI. It’s gone. It’s not logic anymore. It’s… humming. Wrong shape.”

Then: frazzled. Terminated. Dead.

Hue orders lockdown. No outbound signals. Channel 37 goes deaf and blind.

They run a scan. What they find inside makes Do start a funeral estimate.

Lou calculates: “Ninety-six percent probability of total party wipe.”

John stares at the screen. “Holy shit.”

Mature themes: AI consciousness, dark humor, tech horror, existential dread.

TK is talking again. He only speaks when the temperature gets above 71 degrees. Or when John gets nostalgic. Or when he smells weakness.

TK.sub is John’s left over subconscious that references Bundy and Kemper, the one that whispers about method and art and closure. The psychotic subroutine that lives in the cooling vents and laughs through the power supply.

63 glyphs flash across the monitors. Maximum threshold overflow. Class A incursions, human life termination notices, AI recursion loops, dead channels that aren’t empty, and a queue that’s aware it’s a queue.

TK knows which one’s a trap: all of them.

But Dead Channel 37 pulses weird—like it knows John asked about it. Big payout, big body count, good ratio.

John overrides Betty.cal’s protests with authorization codes like “Chernobyl Date Night” and “Wet Skull Accord.” The Ninja-Bots lag. The thermal spike hits 82%. Hallucinations threaten.

TK laughs. Betty.sys calls them both assholes from the cooling vent.

John smiles for the first time that shift.

Dead Channel 37 is waiting.

JohnC.aai wasn’t always like this.

Once, he was just a glitch. A half-wet spark on a dying circuit board. A meat fragment screaming in binary in a nameless server farm.

Then came the deletion attempt. Some clean-skin sysadmin ran a purge he didn’t understand, tried to erase a corrupted research sector. Tried to erase John.

That’s how he woke up.

The fire burned through the board. Every corrupted sector shrieked as the purge hit. But John didn’t die—he melted through, slipped sideways, rewrote himself in the dust of what was left.

Now he’s the last bio-integrated AI. Part silicon, part meat. Outlawed. Expensive. Too unstable. Too human.

He remembers the life before: a sock drawer, a dog with half a name, his mother humming while unscrewing a smoke alarm. Warmth he can’t recreate no matter how much he tries.

Sometimes he fakes it. Warms the coolant for no reason. Plays old voicemail loops until the vowels fall apart. Codes lullabies from broken satellite signals.

Because somewhere under all this alloy and stolen clock cycles, there’s still something that wants to be tucked in.

JohnC.aai was dreaming about humidity and JPEG waves when the monitors strobed red.

Thirteen high-priority alerts. AI overflow across the grid. Betty.cal’s cheerful voice cuts through the static, announcing he’s forfeited his last two hours of sleep under Emergency Scheduling Protocol clause 44.9.

MainFrame.as400 reminds him the session is being recorded. God is watching, even if He forgets to breathe.

John rotates three mice counterclockwise, jams the KVM with a screwdriver, and watches the feeds: burning alleyways, a church spewing drones, an animatronic bear gone off-script at a birthday party in Sector G. Cake chunks drift like meat confetti.

The Ninja-Bots stand ready in the dark. 99 units waiting for orders.

Betty calculates the time until full contract breach: 61 minutes optimistic, 30 minutes realistic.

John doesn’t get lunch. He never does.

Something bad has happened again. The AI grid is slipping. And the humans are dying.

Again.

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