Chapter Twenty-eight
NORM
Norm stares up at the blinding white lights of the Neural-Link operating room, his breath coming in sharp, uneven gulps. The coldness of the metal table beneath him seeps into his bones. Restraints hold his wrists and ankles in place, as if he’s some kind of monster—a lab experiment gone wrong.
But maybe he is.
Samantha Moon stands nearby, her expression unreadable. She’s already done what she came to do. Caught him. Stopped him. She doesn’t need to say anything; he knows she’s watching him, making sure he doesn’t try to escape one last time. But there’s no escaping now. The doctors are ready. The machines hum softly, their screens flickering with endless lines of data—his data.
He had been so close.
Norm clenches his fists, his nails biting into his palms. He had planned everything. The cabin, the security, the transfer. He was supposed to be free . No longer shackled to flesh, no longer bound by mortality. He could have existed as something greater—something beyond the limitations of a human body.
Instead, he’s here.
Trapped.
Flesh and blood, soon to be nothing at all.
He swallows hard, throat dry.
I should have disappeared quietly.
He could have slipped away, found some obscure corner of the world to hide in, and lived out his days.
But no. He had pushed too hard. Reached too far.
Samantha Moon was called in because I made myself too dangerous to ignore.
His mind flickers through everything he’d done—the break-ins, the theft, the kidnapping. The sheer audacity of trying to take over an entire nuclear facility. He had justified it all as survival, as the natural next step in his evolution. But in reality, it had been desperation. Fear of being erased, fear of ceasing to exist.
And now, that fear has come true.
Norm lifts his gaze to the ceiling. The operating light above him is haloed in sterile brightness. The hum of machines feels distant, almost soothing. The doctors are speaking, but he barely hears them. He’s too lost in his own thoughts, his own regrets.
If I had succeeded, what then?
Would he have been happy, trapped inside some digital purgatory? Would he have felt alive inside a machine? He thought he would have. He had convinced himself that human consciousness was just data, something that could be copied and stored.
But now, he isn’t sure anymore.
Maybe being human—being alive —is more than just electrical signals firing in the brain. Maybe it’s the mistakes, the regrets, the failures. Maybe it’s the weight of consequences, the knowledge that every decision matters.
Maybe that’s what he never understood.
A hand touches his wrist. A gloved hand. A doctor checking his vitals. The final countdown. His pulse thuds in his ears, loud and rhythmic.
Samantha hasn’t moved. She doesn’t need to. Her presence alone is enough to remind him that this was always going to end this way. She was inevitable.
The doctor leans over him, voice calm, professional. “You’re going under now, Norman.”
Norm wants to fight it. Wants to rage . But the fight is gone. He exhales, a slow, shuddering breath, and closes his eyes. The world narrows to the sound of the machines, the feeling of his body sinking into the table.
For a brief moment, he wonders what comes next. Nothingness? Silence? Or something else?
His last thought before slipping away is simple.
I should have just run.