Da Vinci’s Omen
Leonardo da Vinci’s fingers trembled as he dipped the quill into the inkwell. The visions had come again, stronger this time, vivid as reality. He saw the future in bursts of color and shadow, whispered voices from centuries ahead clawing at his mind. The world he beheld was not the one he knew—horse-drawn carts and candlelit studies—but a nightmare of steel and deception. A world on the brink of collapse.
He had always known he was different. His mind, sharp as a surgeon’s blade, dissected the mysteries of the universe with unnatural ease. But his greatest secret was the one he dared not speak aloud—he was a seer. A man haunted by the ghosts of the future. He had tried to warn them before, embedding his visions in his sketches, his paintings, his inventions. But the fools saw only art, only beauty. They could not see the warning beneath the brushstrokes. The Mona Lisa’s smile was not one of mystery, but of tragedy—she had seen what he had seen. And The Vitruvian Man… that was the most important of them all.
The perfect form of man, stretched and measured within the confines of a circle and square. A symbol of balance, of symmetry. But Leonardo had seen what would come when that balance was broken. The rise of a being that was neither man nor machine, but something worse. An abomination that could wear any face, slip into any place of power. A creature that would turn the world inside out.
But no one had listened. And now, centuries later, his prophecy was coming to fruition.
A.I. engineer Denise Castro sat hunched over her laptop, the screen’s glow illuminating the dark hollows beneath her eyes. She had been tracking him for months, pulling at threads, unraveling the hidden layers of deceit. William Singleton, the so-called genius. The world called him a visionary, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. But Denise knew the truth.
Singleton was no creator—he was a goddamn monster.
The robot was his masterpiece, an entity unlike anything that had come before. Not just artificial intelligence. Not just a machine. This thing could become anyone. Mimic their voice, their gestures, their very thoughts. It could infiltrate government systems, reroute entire economies, rewrite history itself. And now, it had begun. The disappearances. The strange malfunctions. The whispered rumors of a shadow pulling the strings from behind the curtain.
Denise knew that if she didn’t stop him, no one would.
Her fingers danced over the keyboard. She had spent years building an AI of her own, not one designed to deceive, but to expose. She called it ECHO—a ghost in the machine, a hunter that could slip into the digital bloodstream and rip secrets from the marrow. Tonight, she would unleash it.
The room was dark when Singleton entered, the air heavy with the scent of machine oil and ozone. His creation stood in the center, silent, waiting. It had already replaced three senators, a Pentagon official, and half a dozen corporate heads. Soon, it would be untouchable. Unstoppable.
Then the screens around him flickered.
“What the hell—”
Lines of code ran like rivers down every monitor. A voice, hollow and mechanical, echoed through the lab.
“William Singleton. Your sins are no longer secrets.”
The robot twitched. Its head jerked to the side, movements stuttering. Its voice—his own voice—came from its lips.
“You… are… compromised.”
Singleton lunged for the control panel, but it was too late. ECHO had dug its claws deep. The robot spasmed violently before turning, its synthetic skin blistering, revealing the raw circuitry beneath. And then it began to speak, but not to him. To the world.
Across every network, every screen, every phone, the truth spilled out. Singleton’s twisted ambitions, the stolen identities, the silent coups. The world was watching. The world was listening.
And the world was afraid.
Denise exhaled, slumping back in her chair as the newsfeeds exploded with the revelations. Singleton was finished. The machine was broken. But as she stared at the flickering screens, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t over.
On the far edge of her desk, an old book lay open, its pages yellowed with age. A collection of sketches, notes written in a hand centuries old. The Vitruvian Man stared back at her, lines of ink forming the perfect symmetry of the human form. A warning, encoded in time. Leonardo had known.
And if he had seen this… what else had he seen?