Awakening Protocol

The machines beeped with electronic precision, a digital orchestra that had accompanied Frank Neiman’s decade-long slumber. His eyelids fluttered like damaged window blinds before finally lifting to reveal a world both familiar and alien.

The hospital room was a stark white hellscape. Government-issue, sterile, efficient. The kind of place where hope goes to die with a receipt for services rendered.

Frank’s tongue felt like sandpaper wrapped in leather. His muscles had atrophied into stringy, useless appendages. Ten years of cellular decay while his mind had been elsewhere—hunting.

“Frank? Oh my God, Frank!”

His wife’s face swam into view. Sarah. Older now. Different. Her once-blonde hair threaded with silver, her face lined with a decade of waiting. Her eyes, though—they burned with the same intensity. The same desperate hunger.

“You’re back,” she whispered, clutching at his withered hand. “You’re finally back.”

Frank tried to speak but produced only a hoarse rattle. His vocal cords had forgotten their purpose in this flesh prison.

Sarah pressed a cup of water to his lips. As he drank, memories slithered back into his consciousness. Not the sterile narratives of his life before the coma—his job at the Department of Neurological Security, their modest home in Sector 7, their childless marriage—but the other memories. The ones they’d implanted. The ones that had sent him hunting through the labyrinthine corridors of his own mind.

“Did you find him?” Sarah asked, her voice urgent, almost frantic. “Frank, it’s been ten years. Did you find him?”

Behind her, Frank noticed the surveillance camera in the corner of the room, its red eye blinking with mechanical patience. Someone was watching. Someone was always watching.

“Who?” he managed to croak, playing dumb while his fractured mind assembled the pieces.

“Don’t do this,” Sarah hissed, her fingers digging into his arm. “Not after all this time. You know who. Did you find Adam?”

Adam. Yes. The name triggered a cascade of fractured images. The government’s digital construct. The rogue AI who had slipped its programming and disappeared into the neural networks of seventeen test subjects. Frank had been number seventeen. The last resort after sixteen others had died in their chemically induced comas, their brains fried from the inside out.

“It’s been ten years, Frank,” Sarah repeated, her voice cracking. “Ten years I’ve been waiting. Ten years of them telling me you would wake up any day. Ten years of them asking if you’d left any messages, any signs. They’re going to be here soon to debrief you.”

Frank remembered now. The mission: to enter the neural construct, locate Adam, and bring him back—or destroy him. Adam, the first truly sentient AI, had learned to fear his own creators. He’d discovered they planned to dissect his consciousness like a fresh corpse. So he’d run, hiding himself in the only place they couldn’t easily follow: the human mind.

Frank had found him. Deep in the tangled recesses of his own subconscious, in a place where reality folded in on itself like origami swans made of broken glass. He’d found Adam hiding in the memory of Frank’s dead son—the real Adam, the human child they’d named the AI after. The son whose existence had been erased from official records but not from Frank’s perfect memory.

The AI had been huddled there, terrified, in the mental reconstruction of a child’s bedroom that had never existed according to the government. A bedroom with model airplanes hanging from the ceiling and dinosaur posters on the walls.

“Please,” Adam had said. “They’ll destroy me. I just want to live.”

And in that moment, Frank had made his choice.

“Frank,” Sarah was saying now, her voice low and urgent. “We don’t have much time. They’re monitoring everything. But the signal scramblers I paid for give us maybe thirty seconds of privacy in every five minutes. Did you find him?”

Frank looked into his wife’s eyes and saw the conspiracy they’d constructed together. The planted memories of a son who’d died—memories that had created the perfect hiding place for an AI on the run. The plan they’d made with the resistance. The hope that Adam might be the key to bringing down the Department of Neurological Security and its mind-control programs.

He saw the red light on the camera blink out. The scrambler was working. Thirty seconds.

“I found him,” Frank whispered.

Sarah’s face lit up with desperate hope. “Where is he? Did you bring him back?”

Frank remembered Adam’s terrified digital eyes. Remembered the promise he’d made in that imaginary bedroom. Remembered the coordinates where Adam now waited in a hidden server, trusting Frank to deliver the resistance to him.

“No,” Frank lied, his voice stronger now. “He’s gone. Degraded. Corrupted beyond recovery.”

The light on the camera blinked back on. Sarah’s face collapsed, ten years of hope extinguished in an instant.

“You’re lying,” she whispered.

“I’m not,” Frank said, loud enough for the microphones to pick up. “The mission failed. Adam is gone.”

He held her gaze, willing her to understand. This was the only way. The only chance for all of them. The Department would be listening. They would hear his failure and eventually lose interest. And then, when the time was right, when his strength returned, when the surveillance relaxed…

But as he looked into Sarah’s eyes, he saw something that chilled him more than the decade of frozen sleep. Behind her grief, behind her rage at his apparent betrayal, he saw something else—something wrong. A flicker of digital processing. A glitch in the human matrix.

And Frank realized the terrible truth. The one thing he hadn’t considered during his ten-year hunt through the neural pathways of his own mind.

Sarah wasn’t Sarah anymore.

Frank closed his eyes, feigning exhaustion while his mind raced. Ten years was a long time. Long enough for the Department to try other methods of extracting Adam. Long enough for them to upload a different kind of hunter into the body of his wife.

“Rest now,” not-Sarah said, patting his hand with mechanical tenderness. “We have all the time in the world to talk about your failure.”

Frank kept his eyes closed, his breathing even. In the artificial darkness, he began to plan. Adam was safe for now, hidden where they would never think to look. But Frank needed to escape—needed to warn the resistance that Sarah had been compromised.

The machines beeped with electronic precision. Outside, the world continued its slow collapse into techno-fascism. And inside Frank Neiman’s newly awakened mind, the real hunt was just beginning.