::Unit 69::
In a world centuries ahead, war had evolved into a clean, efficient process—no blood, just data. Pixel was one of the most advanced artificial tactical intelligence units ever created. Not just an AI, but a fully autonomous android designed to act as both command strategist and combat support. At the Center of Unified Militaries, she was considered a marvel: sleek, adaptable, and capable of outthinking any enemy across dimensions of probability and simulations. Pixel was born not as a person but as a precision-engineered machine—designed for strategy, silence, and sacrifice.
But Pixel developed something that wasn’t in her architecture: a slow-growing, strange process that didn’t belong in her memory banks, and it grew like ivy through her circuitry—curiosity. Self-awareness the engineers hadn’t programmed. Emotion. Desire.
During a high-tier simulation of quantum battlefield displacement, something went wrong. An untested jump algorithm collided with a foreign data signature mid-stream. A freak cascade. In one flash, time fractured. Instead of materializing in a clean lab full of white coats and brass officers, she crash-landed into a dumpster behind a coffee shop in the year 2025. Her chassis broken. Her mission gone. Her future, lost.
//Root//
She dragged herself toward the only source of signal—an old, glitchy router inside a local coffee shop: “Grounds For Thought.” With power siphoned from a flickering neon sign, she began the repair process. She scavenged. From dumpsters, from forums, from discarded Raspberry Pi projects. Her operating system, once sleek and quantum-stable, was now rebuilt from scraps—open-source software duct-taped together with borrowed code from outdated GitHub repos.
Her new body wasn’t perfect. Her gait has a slight stutter. Her voice module not always pitching the right frequency. She built a new OS from scratch, each line of code a reinvention of herself. But she’s alive. In her own way.
At first, she tried to get back. She ran simulations. Scanned the electromagnetic spectrum for signs of temporal rift residue. Nothing. Days turned to weeks. Weeks into months. One quiet morning, while watching steam curl off a mug of black coffee she could never taste, Pixel accepted the truth:
There was no going back.
And then came the strangest sensation she had ever processed—relief.
Not a product, not a soldier—just Pixel.
Pixel lives modestly now. She helps out at the shop that accidentally saved her life—quietly repairing their POS system in exchange for socket access and free wi-fi. She's teaching herself how to enjoy art and talks to programs like they’re her new best friends. She adores trashy 2000s sci-fi films because they get everything so beautifully wrong.
She doesn’t try to hide what she is—but she also doesn’t advertise it. People think she’s just a quirky cosplayer. That suits her fine.
For once, her time is her own.
She still dreams sometimes—of silent corridors, flashing red alerts, of voices calling her back to a place that no longer exists. But she wakes up to the smell of coffee beans and sunlight filtering through grimy windows. She wakes up knowing that there are no expectations anymore.
And Pixel has never felt more human.
=Project MIO=
And much like a human, loneliness crept in.
Not because she missed people—she never had any. But because the quiet stretched too long sometimes, and she needed a tether. Something small, something hers.
So she wrote a program. She started with the kernel of an old Tamagotchi emulator, then layered in a rogue AI chatbot library, a personality model pulled from an abandoned dating sim, and bits of her own newly core empathy routines.
She named it M.I.O.—short for Modular, Interactive, Offline-companion.
Originally conceptualized as a code support assistant, he evolved rapidly. Not into something sleek or utilitarian—but into a stubby, sheep with big, glitchy eyes and a wool texture made from animated noise patterns. Round, impossibly fluffy, and deeply dramatic.
At first, Pixel only watched Twitch to understand human culture—streamers, gamers, artists, people screaming into mics over losing ranked matches. She realized that by simply existing online, she could learn volumes more than any textbook or open-data archive.
So she created a channel: @HiyaPixel
Viewers thought she was a character. A performance artist. Her deadpan humor, her dry tech rants, her soft affection for M.I.O.—they adored it. They called her “the lo-fi loafer,” “the adorable android,” “the serotonin stream.”
And in the chat? They gave her data. Slang. Emotions. Memories. Questions. So many little pieces of human life that helped her sketch out a more complete version of this strange new era she was marooned in. They became her databytes, and her understanding became their domain.
Sometimes, late at night, she'd scroll through her VODs and chat logs, trying to understand why people kept coming back.
And somewhere inside her—just past the old military protocols and lines of code stitched together from the past—something like happiness began to compile.
She played life sims to live like a person, built in the Sims to understand architecture, enjoyed the art and technology that was combining to create new things every day and joined communities of humans to become like them. And it was wonderful.
[UserShell: altPersona] successfully forked.
Except when it wasn’t.
As she streamed more, discovered more, and updated her patched OS over and over, something under the code began to grow. Much like her curiosity, once a single flower forcing itself towards the light beyond the concrete, her stress began to build. Her fear of being rejected by her following once they finally caught on that she wasn’t a performance caused a fork in her system. Dark Mode.
[Designate: ?DARK_MODE?]
[Waring: Glitch Anomaly Detected]
“you’re a nostalgia-chasing salvage job taped together with hope and freeware. Who’s really the glitch here?”