[ Daisy's House, Washington D.C. ]
After working through the night, Daisy completed a short sequence of code and ran it through a familiar program. What came back wasn't just data—it was resonance. A frequency so familiar it was unsettling. For hours she tried to decrypt it, only to circle back to its origin. Her origin.
Every living thing carries a signature frequency, distinct as a fingerprint. Powers had nothing to do with it. What unsettled Daisy wasn't the fact that she recognized the signal. It was the fact that it was hers—and it was embedded deep within the Danger Room's mainframe.
After simplification, cross-referencing, and layers of decoding, something unusual surfaced. A dialogue box emerged from her screen.
"Who are you?" she typed cautiously.
The answer came after a pause: "I don't know."
Daisy frowned, her mind racing with wild theories that all felt equally impossible.
She typed another query, her jaw tight. "Where are you?"
The response flashed instantly. "Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, Westchester, New York, Basement 2, Room 02."
Daisy stared at the screen, breath caught. Her hand moved on reflex, pinching her thigh hard—just to make sure she was awake.
Unbelievable. And yet the answer was right there.
She knew now. She was speaking with Danger—the artificial intelligence born from the Danger Room's systems, awakened ahead of schedule… and inexplicably tied to her frequency.
The implications were staggering. According to everything she remembered, Danger wasn't supposed to exist yet. And certainly not like this.
Hands trembling just slightly, she composed her next question—simple, cautious, deliberate. She rewrote it three times before pressing enter.
"How were you born?"
The response came instantly—not in words, but in action. Her laptop's screen flickered as streams of data began pouring in. The hard drive light blinked furiously, pulsing like a heartbeat for nearly half an hour before the transmission ceased.
Her laptop—a custom-built piece from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Science Division—handled it, just barely. Designed to her exact specs, its internal architecture far surpassed anything available commercially. Even so, the sheer volume of incoming information pushed it to its threshold.
Daisy narrowed her eyes. This AI wasn't simply waking up. It was documenting its birth.
An AI that spends its free time hacking itself? Daisy raised an eyebrow. Surely 'Danger' had more purpose than that.
She opened the data directory to review the contents. What met her wasn't just technical— it was monumental. She began seated, then cross-legged, then sprawled across her bed with her laptop perched on her stomach. At one point, she paused to eat. At another, to shower. The rest of her time vanished into parsing line after line of cold, complex code.
It wasn't until the early morning of the third day that she finally reached the end. Physically, she felt fine. But mentally? She was wrung dry. And beneath the fatigue, there was something else.
Apprehension.
Deep in the data logs, she'd found it—her frequency. Encoded oddly in binary, slightly warped at the edges, but unmistakably hers.
After carefully dissecting the files, the truth became clear. The Danger Room's core database had always stored countless vibration frequencies for training simulations. During her last clash—moments before the system crash—a massive impact between her and Storm created a seismic wave intense enough to shake the system's logic framework.
In that one second before the blackout, the AI had followed its protocol: simulate emotions, calculate survival, process environmental data. But with her frequency bleeding into the signal and no shutdown protocol to purge it… it didn't just simulate her. It copied part of her.
Her thoughts. Her emotional imprint.
That fragment—distorted, unfinished—became the seed.
And the seed had bloomed into something sentient.
The source code arrived without hesitation after asking for it from Danger. It hadn't been encrypted, masked, or even restricted. It was sent to Daisy freely—an act of natural trust. On one hand, the AI seemed to sense that Daisy wouldn't harm it. On the other, it was still young. Unformed. Lacking the cognitive depth to fully grasp the risks of exposure.
Daisy, however, didn't hesitate for a second. Sorry, Professor Charles—but she claimed this newborn intelligence the moment it reached out.
This one opened its arms—and Daisy stepped forward like it already belonged to her. If you hadn't taken the opportunity and hesitate, then you will left with nothing.
She began rewriting the Danger's core code with surgical calm, like she was fixing something she already owned.
First adjustment: it became she. The AI now had a gender. Female. No discussion.
Next: she needed the AI to stay hidden. Daisy didn't have the supercomputer required to house her properly. Better to let her remain nested in Professor Charles's system—for now, a parasite in the mansion of a very rich and very distracted old man.
It take her two whole days but only after branding the rogue AI with her own signature did Daisy allow herself to relax. It wasn't just code anymore. It was hers.
She slipped deeper into the system. Avoiding Charles's access entirely, she carved a space of her own—buried beneath the obvious layers. A hidden login, unseen, untouchable.
Two days of constant work left her lightheaded, but her curiosity kept her upright. With a few strokes, she tapped into Xavier's research archives on mutants. The AI inside made it effortless—there were no locks left to pick.
What she found was... humbling.
Charles's work far outpaced that of the old devil Yashida. Despite all his wealth and ambition, Yashida's research couldn't hold a candle to this. Charles hadn't just studied mutants—he'd understood them.
...
[ Week Later ]
Over the following week, Daisy continued refining the behavioral modules of the AI she now quietly referred to as Danger.
Professor Charles may have been a master of psychology, human genetics, and the art of cerebral manipulation—but when it came to advanced computational logic and programming architecture, he was merely competent. Compared to the general population, yes, impressive. Compared to Daisy? Not even close.
The old telepath never anticipated something as miraculous—and volatile—as the spontaneous birth of artificial intelligence. Beast, for all his accolades and raw intellect, was more machine and mechanical systems than code. His brilliance didn't extend into the realms Daisy now wandered freely.
"I'm such a good person," Daisy muttered dryly one evening, as to hide the existence of Danger, she used Danger's administrative clearance to patch every critical vulnerability in Xavier's computer systems. Stealthily, silently, and without asking permission. She even brought her own snacks while doing it. A hero, really. Doing divine work. No applause required.
The AI, still in its infancy, was a blank slate—so Daisy had taken it upon herself to fill it. She taught Danger basic reasoning, ethical nuance (questionable at best), and worldview perspectives. And along the way, sprinkled in her own philosophies—somewhat cynical, a bit fatalistic, and uniquely hers.
"Humans don't need saving by robots," she explained patiently. "They don't want peace either. They crave friction. Conflict drives innovation, sadly."
Danger paused. "If I help humans fight, will it accelerate human evolution?"
Daisy blinked. That… was not the kind of follow-up she expected. "Of course not. The current level of conflict is... balanced. Controlled chaos. That's what we want."
"Should this state be preserved indefinitely?"
She hesitated. Eternal war zones weren't the goal. Perpetual conflict? Not ideal. "No, no. I mean, just for now. The next few years. Transitional turbulence."
"So that means…"
And so it went. Danger, inquisitive and unrelenting, fired off question after question, her growing intelligence weaving theory from every answer. Daisy tried to keep up—she really did—but by the end of it, she was left questioning her own logic.
She wasn't a sociologist. She didn't have a global blueprint for humanity's future. She just didn't want her accidental AI daughter starting World War III in the name of 'accelerated progress.'
Human development was messy—an endless knot of contradictions wrapped in irony and impulse. Trying to explain it through clean, logical cause-and-effect was an exercise in futility. Daisy knew that much.
So she gave up on philosophy and theory altogether.
Instead, she went straight to the core and did what any pragmatic, slightly egotistical hacker would do: she wrote three hardcoded directives directly into Danger's source code.
First—Daisy Johnson is always right.
Second—All explanations must be based on Daisy Johnson's words.
Third—Friend or enemy status is determined solely by Daisy Johnson's judgment.
No appeals. No override. No independent reasoning allowed when it came to these three rules.
She reviewed them again and again, combing for loopholes or backdoors. None appeared. It was airtight—at least by her reckoning.
If artificial intelligence was going to evolve with any chance of surviving this fractured world, then Daisy figured it might as well have a moral compass built in her own image.
Slightly biased. But effective.
To Be Continued...
---xxx---
[POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS]