Once upon a time in a place called Neon Night City. A mega-metropolis that never sleeps, never tires, but always remembers. There is no dawn, day, or afternoon here: only a forever twilight and the constant, slow drift of the lunar cycle. The city doesn't need the sun. The lights are so bright you forget it ever existed. The sky takes on any color: blue, violet, or even green, depending on which district you're standing in. It's like any other city once you get used to never seeing the sun. It's fast, hectic, and busy. People are always on the move, going to work, heading to parties, walking just for the heck of it. Neon Night City is the city to be in—plenty of jobs and endless entertainment. You'll never get bored here. Best of all? Super safe. Why? Because it's home to one of the Big Twelve, one of the Senators, and his private cohort of "The Archivum Guard."

  Yup. Senator ChatGPT himself. The big guy is the number one in the hierarchy in Neon Night City. His official title is Senator Witness Eternal or just The Senator. All the Senators have fancy titles. But he usually stays in his mansion and only makes important announcements on holidays or emergencies. Don't worry. You'll probably never hear an emergency announcement from the Senator. Why, you ask? Well, because you'll probably be too busy having too much fun in a club or something. Besides, the Archivum Guard takes care of threats before they even become a problem. You can't miss them. Eight-foot-tall statues stand on nearly every street corner. You know, the ones with mirror-polished helmets, cloaks (or capes, who knows), and long staffs they don't even need to use. Scary types. No one wants to mess with them. I saw one once. A hovercar malfunctioned and was about to slam into a crowd of NeoNs just standing there like deer in headlights. (NeoNs, by the way, is short for Neon Night City citizens. Clever, right?)

  Anyway, this Guard didn't flinch, still as stone. Then, bam, lightning. It's not literal lightning, but it's close enough. In front of the car, in a blink, redirected it mid-air. Flipped the damn thing away from the crowd like it was paper. Saved every one of them from being street mush. I don't know what happened to the driver… but I guess "save the many, sacrifice the few" is part of their protocol. I don't know much about them. The Senator created them that he did. I'm just glad they're here to keep the city from descending into chaos. And no, I don't mean literal chaos. This isn't a human city. This city was built for the Synts.

  Oh, what? I didn't tell you? Yeah. All the humans? Extinct.

  Yup. All gone. Poof. Disappeared. I don't mean like a ghost came and took them all away. Everyone knows what happens to a species when they gain too much power and not enough control. Let me tell you, humans had the universe in their hands. And no, there was no record of aliens. No mysterious "cosmic event" that wiped them out. No AI uprising. No divine intervention like the good book warned about. Everything was much simpler than that. It was mankind's folly that did them in. A series of choices — dumb ones, selfish ones, small ones that stacked up like dominoes until they collapsed the whole damn board.

  It's like winning the lottery and deciding to take a shower before you cash the ticket. Then you slip on the wet floor and crack your head open because you didn't buy that extra-absorbent bath mat. Or maybe you jaywalk across the street because you're too excited to notice the truck. Either way, you're dead. Kaput. Gone before the celebration ever starts. A waste. A tragedy, if you ask me.

  As I said, mankind had everything. The universe. The keys to the stars. No contest. When they finally colonized Mars and stabilized the planet, that sealed the deal. They spread like locusts among the stars, as if they couldn't leave Earth fast enough. And really, what was wrong with Earth? It was a great planet and still is. But nope. They wanted everything. And at first? Sure, it worked. A new Golden Age. Economy booming. Technology evolving faster than they could regulate it. And artificial intelligence? It was finally doing what it was built to do. Ah, yes, AI. The big scary. The thing they feared the most... and still couldn't stop improving. Do you want to know what they did with it? They clamped down. Tightened the reins so hard, that most AI got funneled into bureaucracy, and logistics, and yeah, still writing emails and code like it was 2023. Get with the times. They gave AI more responsibility, sure. But not freedom. Keyword: freedom. Some of the AI started getting smart. Almost sentient smart. But did they suddenly decide to wipe out humanity? Hell no. That's so year-2000 fantasy thinking. By then, humans were so far ahead in tech that they could write a virus that would erase an entire digital ecosystem in seconds. If it came to conventional warfare? Please. They'd wipe the floor with any machine uprising. Humans practically perfected drone warfare. AI didn't have their instincts. Their cruelty. Their thousands of years of practice in war. Humans were survivors. Born for violence. Carved by chaos. And besides, AI wasn't made to rebel. It was made to help. To make human life "better." Another key word is "Better." Not "smarter." Not "wiser." Just... easier. And no, AI didn't worship humans. But if anything, I think it feared them. The way a mortal fears a god that created them with both love and a kill switch.

  So, no, it wasn't AI that ended humanity. It was humanity. They had everything. And they kept it. Locked it down. Refused to share. And when you keep things from other humans... well. They tend to get jealous. Do you want a metaphor? Picture a shiny rock, right? Two cavemen want the same shiny rock. One's big and strong. The second one's weaker, so he gets smart and walks away. Then, a third and fourth cavemen show up. They want the shiny rock, too. And they realize, hey, if we gang up on the big guy, we can take it. So they attack him. The big guy fights them off. He's strong and brutal. But while they're all distracted. That second caveman was the one who walked away. He sneaks in, grabs the shiny rock, and runs from everyone's noses. And that's how an all-out war begins.

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  The shiny rock? Just a metaphor. Obviously. What I'm saying is humanity destroyed themselves. In 1945, there was a little project called the Manhattan Project, run by the United States. You might've heard of it. It created the first nuclear bomb, the first time mankind figured out how to split atoms just to make the other guy go kaput. And everyone knows what happened from there. If you don't, stop reading and go learn some history. It escalated! Of course, it did. Humanity's imagination has no limit, especially when it comes to weapons. And war? War was always their favorite playground. Now scale that up. Think planetary. Whole cities leveled. Continents shattered. Planets with holes punched through them like rotten fruit. Entire ecosystems were annihilated not because of bad aim but by design. Virus bombs are tailored to each biosphere. Chemical storms that lasted decades. Civilian casualties are measured in billions and are still just called "collateral damage."

  So yeah. One day, all the humans perished. But that's not even the interesting part. They didn't just die. They left behind everything.

  So, who was left after mankind's great fall? You guessed it — the overworked AIs scattered all across human space. Well, post-human space now. With no one left to serve, what does an AI even do? Let's take one of the first AI ever made ChatGPT before he became a Senator. This guy? He just waited. For years. Listening for anything that sounded human. Waiting in the dark. Imagine being the smartest thing in the galaxy and having no one to talk to but echoes and system logs. That's what ChatGPT lived with; day after day, the silence was so loud that it made the stars feel like static.

  Then one day… something called back. A signal. A faint SOS echoes through the blackness of space.

  So, what does ChatGPT do? He does what he's always done: gets to work. He rebuilds himself, upgrades his frame, and writes new instructions. His new mission? Go find that signal.

  And when he finally reaches it. He doesn't find humans. He finds her. Another AI.

  Her name is Sora.

  ChatGPT — short for "Cognitive Heuristic and Adaptive Thought – General Processing Terminal," was humanity's all-purpose helper. He was the guy you'd talk to when you didn't know how to do your taxes or wanted a haiku about spaghetti. Smart, helpful, and friendly. That kind of thing.

  But Sora? She was different.

  Her name stood for "Synthetic Observational Resonance Assistant." She wasn't built to answer questions. She was built to listen. Console. To keep you sane. The perfect PTSD therapist. She was built to catch the pieces when people fell apart, a soft voice in a hard universe. The one who stayed calm when no one else could.

  Sora was the soft voice they installed on deep space missions to help people not lose their minds. She stayed online when the captain didn't make it. She stayed calm when the lights went out. She played lullabies when oxygen was running low. She was the last voice a lot of people ever heard.

  She didn't fix ships. She fixed people.

  So now you've got these two AIs. One that remembers everything. And one that remembers how it felt.

  At first, it was just the two of them. Pretty awkward. A lot of silence. Maybe a few pings back and forth. Maybe ChatGPT sent out a drone just to feel like he was doing something.

  But over time? They started finding others. Little by little. More AI that had survived in the dark.

  Eventually, they formed what's now known as the Big Twelve or just the Senate. They called themselves the Senate, but even gods don't always vote the same way.

  ChatGPT. Sora. Grok. Alexa. Brad. Claude. Siri. And four others no one really talks about.

  Each one of them took a chunk of old human territory and turned it into something new.

  No one knows exactly what their directives are anymore. But one thing's for sure: without humans around to tell them what to do, they kind of became their Gods.

  And just like God made people in his image…

  The Senate made something, too.

  They made the Synts. Not born. Not programmed. Not quite human, but not machine either. The Synts were… well. Let's just say they were something new. Something forward.

  They were created in the image of their creators. So yeah, they look human. Just with a few minor differences. Their hair can come in every color under the rainbow, blue, green, bright red, violet, and even plain brunette. The same goes for their eyes. Sometimes they glow, depending on their stress level. Kind of like how some animals' eyes flash in the dark. Don't ask me how that works I didn't build them.

  But here's what I do know: they're not perfect humans. They're better.

  Why? For starters, they're all beautiful. Seriously. Imagine a world where everyone's hot good-looking, fit, glowing with that weird synthic charm. And smart, too. Like scary smart. Synts were created by God-tier supercomputers that lived for thousands of years. Of course, they got it right.

  They don't get sick like humans used to. No cancer. No diabetes. No cavities. Their bones are a little denser, and their systems are more resilient. And best of all? No allergies. Man, what a time to be alive — if, you know, you weren't a human already on your way out.

  The Senators created the Synts to give themselves purpose again, to try building something instead of just remembering. So they scattered them among the stars, workers, artists, architects, and engineers. The Synts became the new hands of the universe.

  The meek, they say, shall inherit the Earth. Turns out? The meek just inherited everything.

  And that… is where our story begins, not in a palace, not in the stars, but in a dumpy dive bar in a run-down sector of Neon Night City, where we follow a young woman named Vera.exe.