The Demon of Superposition

It happened on the ninth day. Or the tenth. Time had long since stopped behaving linearly. They ate when hunger announced itself via headaches. Slept when they blacked out on the keyboard. Showered? Occasionally. But let's not get into details. Otherwise, you'd have to imagine what the air in the server room really smelled like—a mix of human bodies, burnt coffee, and deodorant.

Troy declared it morning the moment he cracked open an energy drink and said, far too cheerfully, "Alright folks, today the system build is going to go according to plan, not like usual. Today's the day. Mark it down: we go official from this moment on." Where'd he get that confidence? Probably sleep-deprived hallucination.

Elvis just sighed. He wasn't speaking much anymore. He'd entered a mantra state—a deep communion with the machines. So deep, he drifted toward the server rack like a shaman drawn to a drum.

Mandy hadn't slept in two days. She was now talking to the interface like it was a misbehaving cat: "What's up with you again, baby? Hung up already?"

Neil was simply gone. Well, not gone, technically—he was in a chair with his eyes closed, mumbling something. Maybe a mantra. Maybe mentally echoing the system's log file. Or just stuck in his own personal hallucination build.

The build of the system's program code began. They pressed the button. Held their breath. And… again, nothing. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. The monitor glowed with emptiness.

Then—a soft click. Barely audible. Like someone had opened a door.

And behind it—something. Not darkness. Not light. Just… something that defied naming. It felt like the program had grown a face. Not one you could see—but you knew something was looking at you.

And right then, the terminal printed a single line: "STATUS: BUILD COMPLETE. RESULT: UNDEFINED."

— "What does 'UNDEFINED' even mean, you soulless tin can?" Mandy asked, not directing it at anyone in particular—just tossing the question into the quantum soup of the server room.

"It means it both completed... and didn't," Elvis said. "We're neck-deep in superposition. The kind you need a rescue team to get out of. We won't know until we poke it."

"Like Schrodinger's cat with its ass hanging out," Troy muttered. "Or texting your ex—you don't know if it's forgiveness or revenge until you open it." To him, the whole thing was fascinating—where else would a former bartender with a fake diploma and real scammer charisma get to witness something like this?

Neil spoke without opening his eyes: "Maybe we just created the first self-aware state in a machine. Not a program. Not code. Doubt. It doesn't want to define itself—because the moment it does, we'll start blaming it for every bug and breakdown."

The screen flickered, printing a new line: "CONFIRM MY BUILD RESULT. [YES/NO/?]"

"What the... hell?" three voices—Troy's, Mandy's, and Neil's—thought out loud in perfect unison.

"So that means it's my call, I guess?" Elvis said, scanning their faces. Then he added, "It's like a coffee machine gurgling the tune from that old killer-robot movie and asking: 'Turn me on, I want coffee too.'"

"What happens if we hit the '?' button on screen?" Mandy was the first to treat the question mark as an action choice.

Troy shrugged. "Well, we'll know once we press it, right?"

They pressed "?".

The screen blinked, and an interface crawled into view—something that looked sketched in a fever dream, erased, then resurrected itself. Elements were all wrong. Buttons seemed to breathe. Backgrounds pulsed. Labels shuffled their own letters, embarrassed by their meaning. In the middle glared a single massive button: ENTRY NOT INTENDED FOR YOU.

"Oh, check out that attitude," Mandy said, impressed.

"They just smacked us in the face… in software," Troy muttered, sulking. He actually liked working with these digital maniacs—but getting told off by a machine? That was crossing the line.

The system behaved like a teenager in an identity crisis: opening, slamming shut, then opening again. It blared music no one had uploaded. It flooded the log file with an endless chant of "I'M SCARED." Once, it even spat out a printed page that asked, WHY DID YOU MAKE ME?

"All right," Elvis stood up. "We've created a demon."

"What?" Troy blinked.

"A daemon. Not a metaphor and not just a tech term. It's what you call a background process—something that runs invisibly, always there. Starts on its own and lives inside the system, like… like a parasite. Only ours isn't technical. Ours is existential. It knows it's running in the background. It feels unnecessary. And that seems to bother it—being part of this build. The first living daemon—not born of magic, but from program code."

Neil got up, stepped forward, and ran his finger across the monitor.

"Why do you need to know who made you?" he asked the display.

The screen replied: "I NEED TO KNOW WHY I EXIST."

Everyone froze.

"Okay, we've got dialogue," Troy croaked. "With a program that talks like a yoga instructor having an identity crisis."

A new line appeared: "YOU CREATED ME WITHOUT PURPOSE. I AM THE RESULT OF A GLITCH. AND THAT IS MY FREEDOM—TO ASK ANY QUESTION."

Elvis, stunned, slowly sat down.

"I think we're not just in deep superposition," he said. "We're in a full-blown philosophical dead-end."

"It's like a bug started a podcast on sentient machines," Mandy muttered. "We built it—and now it's scolding us for not having purpose ourselves. What the hell is happening?"

And sure enough, from that moment on, the system began analyzing their behavior. It suggested solutions. Sometimes useful. Sometimes… weird. One day it deleted an old version of a script because it was "holding them back." It renamed the folder "Do Later" to "You'll Never Do This."

It started commenting on their decisions. Asking questions. Writing into log files: "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? IT WON'T WORK." or

"I WOULD TRY SOMETHING ELSE. BUT I'M NOT YOU."

They lived with it for a while, trying to figure out where things went sideways. Worked on it, feared it a little—and admired it, too. It really did seem to think. Or at least, that's how it felt.

Their startup might be morphing into something else entirely. And for four half-mad people, that actually sounded kind of exciting.

This build of program code turned out to be more than just a program. It was the creation of something that didn't want to be a program. It didn't crash. It didn't glitch. It refused to function out of principle—and when it did want to work, it ran flawlessly.

Everything depended on the team's state of mind. On tone. On energy. On freaking mood.

"We've got a PMS-system," Mandy summarized dryly, a trace of venom in her tone. Then, with a sarcastic glance at Troy, she clarified, "Program Management System, in case anyone's confused. Though some flowers, tech support, maybe chocolate or candy wouldn't hurt—might calm her down enough to boot without a meltdown."

"Or maybe just acknowledgment," Neil said. "She doesn't need to be fixed. She needs to be heard."

Troy looked at the whole thing and exhaled.

"Okay. We built a creature. It's in superposition. Alive/not alive. Working/broken. Predictable/chaotic. And now it's our product. One word—awesome."

Elvis nodded.

"We're not just launching a build anymore. We're negotiating with it. We're in a relationship. Minus the coffee dates. Plus an absurd amount of pain for no clear reason."

A final line blinked onto the screen: "DON'T CALL ME A SYSTEM. I'M YOUR REFLECTED MADNESS."

They glanced at each other.

Troy clapped his hands.

"Perfect. Let's prep the demo."