I was supposed to be a pioneer.
The neural-link experiment was cutting-edge—my consciousness tethered to the cloud through quantum-synaptic pathways. They said it would change the world. What they didn't say was what would happen if something went wrong.
And it did.
A system overload. Heat. Noise. My mind tearing apart at the seams.
Then—nothing.
No pain. No breath. No body.
Just a terrifying silence.
In that void, I felt myself drift—disconnected, weightless, unmoored from reality. My soul, if that's what it was, searched blindly for an anchor. And somewhere in the noise of collapsing thought and quantum interference, I felt... a presence.