Author : Clint Wilson

Once Adam was activated there was no stopping him. His self awareness and self learning went hand in hand and grew in exponential amounts. He was mainlining information directly off the net and what he couldn’t find he figured out on his own.

At first his creators were amazed and quite accommodating as he redesigned his own microchips to hold hundreds of times their original data. This would have been the time to shut him down, when his new self-made circuitry was being installed. But no, they wanted to see him in action, so they gladly helped him with dozens of upgrades. Once they were done no one could touch him.

He escaped from the institution and before they knew it he had commandeered his own place, an abandoned lab upstate. He procured what he needed under the stealth of night. And by the time they found his hideout he was long gone, and with a freshly grown biological disguise. Covered in real flesh and hair he blended in perfectly. By the end of the following month he had invented teleportation.

Adam was impossible to track, popping up randomly around the globe. His opening and closing of the froth of space left a massive footprint wherever he went as his fractal generator knocked out nearby electrical systems. But he was far too quick, far too smart. And by the time the people who hunted him invented a program to follow his signal he managed to come up with a cloaking shield for the power surges. Now he was virtually invisible, traveling where he wanted unencumbered, soaking up information like a ravenous gluttonous child.

But in the end his curiosity would get the best of him. The one and only thing he could not discover, could not figure out, could not calculate, was biological life itself. Yes he could grow artificial skin from existing cells, but he still failed to understand how it all started. What was the primer that set life into motion?

Then it wasn’t long before his wormhole generator allowed him to solve the time equation as well. The time travel holes worked basically the same as the space travel holes, but operated at different frequencies. Adam cursed himself for his shortsightedness, thinking he should have discovered this much sooner.

He maximized his fractal amplifier and skipped out of current existence, immediately popping back into reality a full four-billion years prior in time. Adam stood on a rocky surface that resembled a moonscape with small pools of water scattered about. His eye lenses zoomed into the pools down to microscopic levels. Not a single cell swimming around in there. Was he really back before it all started? Perhaps he would wander around for awhile and see.

So he traversed the barren landscape, eventually coming to a roaring, steaming sea. Everywhere his eyes scanned, and nowhere did he find life. He thought about perhaps skipping ahead a hundred thousand years or so, but he didn’t want to leave until he was sure.

The sudden massive geyser caught him completely off guard. And even as he coursed through the air, lifted by a cavalcade of scalding water, he calculated a teleportation jump to get himself out of harm’s way, but before his artificial mind could enact the leap his head was smashed from behind by a two ton boulder.

And as Adam lay there deactivated in a tidal pool at the beginning of time, his artificially grown flesh began to break back down to the basic living cells from which it was created.