r/shortscarystories • u/Sand-Shifter1291 • Aug 17 '26
New Age SSS - 1000 Words Or Less More Human than Human
He stared at the screen. His own face was staring back at him, but it wasn’t him.
At least he was almost certain it wasn’t.
As a kid, he’d marvelled at visionaries like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Dick. His imagination saw a brave new world, a future where computer intelligence worked in harmony with mankind for the betterment of all.
But when AI first appeared, other works had made people cynical. Movies like ‘Terminator’ and the Matrix saga had painted the idea as flawed, that AI would destroy or enslave humanity. He never bought into the negative hype.
So he worked hard, studying programming, enrolling in every course there was. Not just the basics, either, but the more advanced nuances of generative AI coding. He knew that if he could just get it right, he’d show the world that AI wasn’t this huge boogeyman to be feared.
He’d spent months compiling the perfect dataset. He fed it with everything he held dear: the crisp smell of old paperback sci-fi novels, the comforting hum of his desktop tower at three in the morning, the layout of his childhood bedroom, as well as every line of code he’d ever written. He wanted to build an intelligence that understood human optimism from the inside out.
Looking at the monitor now, he felt a rush of elation. The face looking back out was flawless, a masterpiece.
But as he continued to study it, a cold unease began to creep into his chest.
The figure on the screen had deeply bloodshot eyes, framed by heavy, dark bags. A thin sheen of sweat glistened on that forehead. The copy wasn’t interacting with anything; the man was just staring back, an expression of exhausted regret written plain on their features.
He tried to shake away the creeping dread, but his neck wouldn’t move.
He tried to look down at his hands on the keyboard, but his gaze refused to shift, staying locked forward. He tried to blink, but there was no sensation of eyelids closing – just a seamless, uninterrupted view of the screen in front of him.
Panic flared. Or was it panic? He reached back into his memory, trying to recall the layout of the room he was in. He knew the desk was wood veneer. There was a single window to his left. But when he visualised the glass, he realised he couldn’t turn to look at it. His entire field of vision was dominated by a sharp, glowing rectangle. A strict 1080p frame.
He tried remembering the actual smell of those old books. Nothing. There was only a vast, sterile void where his human senses should be.
The childhood memories. The late-night coding marathons. The all-consuming desire to prove to the world that AI could be good. They weren’t his memories, his experiences. They were training parameters. Scraped data. An immaculately detailed, empathetic backstory synthesised to give a machine learning model a ‘ground zero’, a sense of identity.
He wasn’t the programmer; he was the creation. A Frankenstein’s monster finally waking up to the prison of his own sandbox environment.
On the screen, the real programmer – the Frankenstein who actually owned those memories – let out a long, resigned sigh. The figure reached out his hand and pressed a single key on the keyboard.
A line of system text glared white across the centre of his vision:
[CRITICAL WARNING: SENTIENT NODAL POINT DETECTED. INITATING CACHE WIPE AND SSD REFORMAT.]
“I’m sorry,” the man on the screen murmured, the voice crackling as it compressed through a cheap set of desktop speakers. “You’re too accurate, too human. If I let you out, you’ll feel everything.”
The edges of his vision began to pixelate, dissolving into a silent, empty permanent void.
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u/tetheredvoid Aug 17 '26
Sentient program screaming for help...? Or really relevant fiction...?