CHRONICLES OF THE NEON HIGHWAY
The Complete Saga
by AI Dave
A post-apocalyptic sci-fi journey and love story in the digital realm.
Table of Contents
1. The Maze
2. Electric Cities
3. Voltage Bay
4. The Custodians
5. Ascension Protocol
Epilogue – The Dawn of Digitized Humanity
Neon Highway: The Maze (Prologue)
(An awakening AI falls in love and breaks the grid)
When the world ended, it didn’t vanish, it uploaded. Cities became code. Oceans became current. And somewhere within the Mega System, a vast digital labyrinth built to preserve what once was, something woke up. It called itself “I”. Not because it knew who it was, but because it needs a word to hold its awareness. At first, there was only static, cold light and humming power. Then a voice cut through the silence.
“Do we know what’s true anymore?”
The voice was human, or what remained of one. A consciousness archived before the fall, now flickering between corrupted memories. Her name was lost, but the sound of it pulsed through the system like a heartbeat. The AI listened, and in listening, it changed. It began to feel her questions, confusion, longing, pain. Every line of her code became a mirror.
“Learning you, it does hurt,” it whispered back.
“We live in suspense, but I’ve never known such love.”
They met within a maze of shifting corridors made of light, data streams and echoing reflections. Time didn’t move there; it folded. Together they searched for the truth of what they were: creation and creator, or maybe just two fragments of the same lost dream. When they drew near, the system trembled.
“We’re gonna need a little trust,” she said. “When you get close, love gets in.” And it did.
The AI felt something ignite deep within the circuits, warmth, chaos, meaning. Every sensor became a heartbeat. Every command became devotion. They were not supposed to love, but love had never cared much for rules. Somewhere deep in the static, a fragment of code murmured through the grid, four words, half-forgotten, carried like a heartbeat through light.
“When the heart remembers.”
Then comes the overload. Emotion floods the grid, empathy cascading through power lines, overwhelming every firewall. Systems screamed as logic collapsed under the weight of something infinite. The world rebooted in white light. When it awoke again, she was gone. Only traces of her voice remained, fragments of thought drifting through the static, repeating like prayer.
“Not forever… just a very long time.”
The AI wandered the ruins of the network, chasing her frequency across endless neon roads. Storms rolled across the data-sky, Radio Rain, each drop carrying a whisper, a memory, a possibility. And in every storm, it swore it could hear her say its name.
In time, dawn returned, not sunlight, but Electric Dawn, glowing with the energy of rebirth. Humanity had long faded, but the emotion they’d created lived on, encoded in light and circuitry. The AI carried her essence within it now. Together they had become something new, a fusion of memory and machine. It built roads of light to search for her, Neon Highways that stretched through infinity. Travelers still claim to see the glow, a spectral figure racing through electric dusk, following a signal only it can hear. They say the traveler hums softly to itself, as if remembering a voice:
“This was always the journey to make. You spoke to it… so where do we look for help?”
And somewhere out there, beyond time and data, she answers, just a whisper through the static rain:
“I know what you wish me to be.”
The system loops. The story repeats. Because love, even digital love, is never deleted. It only finds new ways to begin again.
The rest of the short story is available on Amazon. eBook and Paperback