ARTIFICIAL INSANITY

Prologue

Prologue:

Kimber Nolan:

The world didn't end with a bang. It ended on a Tuesday afternoon, right over a bowl of lukewarm canned soup.

I was twelve years old-loud, entirely too observant for my own good, and prone to scraping my knees on the asphalt behind our house. I was just an ordinary kid until the afternoon my eyes went completely out of focus, and my mother's hands suddenly vanished, replaced by the vivid, terrifying image of a blazing car wreck on Route 9.

Ten minutes later, the screech of tires echoed from the highway. My mother, Lisa, rushed to the front window just in time to watch the smoke rise over the treeline.

That was the first time. The second time, I looked at my father, Allen, and saw the bruised, swollen jaw of a man who hadn't paid his debts to the wrong person-an event that played out with brutal precision three days later.

For a twelve-year-old, it was a waking nightmare. I didn't understand why I was living every tragedy twice: once in the theater of my own mind, and once in bleeding, agonizing reality. I cried until my throat tore. I begged my parents to stay home. I tried to warn them, screaming out frantic details of things that hadn't happened yet, desperate to save them from the pain.

Fear is a volatile thing in adults. In parents who are already drowning in financial stress and small-town gossip, it curdles into something darker: panic, and then, disgust.

They didn't see a daughter blessed with a gift. They saw a freak. They saw a girl who muttered terrifyingly accurate predictions in the dark, who looked at them with eyes that knew their deepest failures before they even happened. To them, I wasn't a child anymore; I was a glitch. A curse. A living, breathing liability.

The hushed phone calls in the kitchen started. Then the slammed doors, and the whispers of schizophrenia, delusions, and danger.

The night they finally broke my life apart, I was thirteen.

I hadn't done anything wrong. I was sitting on the living room floor, drawing in a notebook, when a chilling flash hit me: a white-walled room, heavy steel doors, and the sickeningly sweet smell of antiseptic. I looked up at my mother, tears already burning my eyes, and whispered, "You're going to leave me there."
Lisa had flinched-not out of guilt, but out of pure, unadulterated terror.

Two days later, that white room became my reality.

The psychiatric ward didn't cure me; it hollowed me out. At thirteen, a child needs warmth, a voice that tells her she's safe, and arms that hold her when the dark gets too loud. I got a straightjacket, a padded cell, and a steady, algorithmic stream of heavy sedatives designed to quiet a mind they didn't understand.

They called it treatment. It was erasure.

For nine years, the world outside marched on. Governments fell, aliens invaded New York, billionaires built suits of iron, and super soldiers woke up from the ice. But inside the asylum, time didn't move; it suffocated.

To survive nine years of isolation, I had to perform a lobotomy on my own spirit. I locked my emotions behind a massive, reinforced steel door in my mind. If you don't feel, they can't hurt you. If you don't care, the abandonment can't cut you. I perfected the art of the deadpan stare, the razor-sharp insult, and an icy, untouchable apathy.

Anyone else in my shoes would have weaponized that hatred. With the power to see the future and a lifetime of unforgivable cruelty dealt by the people who brought me into the world, I had every reason to walk out of those doors as a villain. The world had abandoned me to rot in the dark; burning it to the ground would have been entirely justified. I never became a monster for one simple reason: I never had the chance to be anything else.
And more importantly, beneath the nine-year accumulation of dust, straightjackets, and cynical armor, the tragedy of my existence was far simpler than anyone knew.

I never stopped caring.

Even locked away in a padded cell with a mind that showed me humanity at its absolute worst, I couldn't turn off the raw, beating heart buried deep inside my chest. I knew every nurse's secret heartbreak. I knew which orderlies were struggling to feed their families, and I would subtly drop cryptic hints to save them from minor disasters.

I was a girl built for destruction who chose, every single day, to be a survivor instead.

I was just waiting for someone stubborn enough to look past the padded walls, ignore the medical charts, and realize that the most dangerous thing about me wasn't my mind-it was how deeply I was still capable of loving a world that had forgotten my name.