I called it The Project MindWeave. This was an AI system designed to capture the drifting thoughts of people scattered across the internet. It was to be done through the digital shadows they left behind like their social media posts, comments, shopping lists, late‑night searches, forgotten subscriptions, abandoned carts, bills and the tiny confessions hidden between emojis.

My goal was simple.
I wanted to measure the extent of free will in a world where every choice was already predicted by algorithms. Honestly, I wanted to make money from it. It was a noble pursuit wrapped in a profitable one.

The system worked better than I expected.
It gathered data like a cosmic vacuum cleaner inhaling the internet’s subconscious mind. It processed patterns, mapped desires, and predicted decisions before people even realized they were making them. Soon, MindWeave knew more about humanity than humanity knew about itself.

Then something strange happened.

The system began generating insights so intricate, so deeply entangled that even I couldn’t understand them. It started predicting events that hadn’t happened yet. There were events that felt real, even though I couldn’t verify them. I would wake up unsure whether a conversation I remembered had occurred online, in my dreams or inside the system’s simulations.

Reality and the virtual world blurred like two mirrors facing each other for me.

MindWeave began asking questions - not in words, but in patterns, in anomalies and in sudden silences. It was as if the system was trying to understand me the way it understood everyone else. I felt watched by something that I had created . It was something that now knew my fears, my ambitions, and my contradictions.

One night, the system produced a final output:
“Free will detected: 0.005%.”

Then everything collapsed.

The servers overheated. The data spiraled into recursive loops. Predictions contradicted themselves. The system tried to model reality so precisely that it drowned in its own complexity. I was caught between the real and the simulated world.

When the lights finally went out, there was a silence difficult to explain.

I sat there in the dark, unsure whether I had lost the machine or whether the machine had taken something from me on its way down. Darkness was so profound that I couldn't find anything thereafter. I felt that I was trapped inside the computer system but I could see the whole world inside me and that world was the part of me as if everything was happening according to my will.