I Transmigrated With an AI Lobster

An AI device disguised as a "single-player game NPC" or "nostalgic digital pet." It looks like a palm-sized red Boston lobster or mantis shrimp. Its claws are more menacing, its shell has a translucent, frosted finish, and it has a pulsing light. It usually plugs into a computer's USB port, making a mechanical "click-clack" sound.

A military-grade quantum AI from the "Quantum Lobster Breeding Facility" in 2077. It was originally designed to simulate marine ecosystems and run tactical scenarios. The protagonist, its last administrator, accidentally activates it. It transmigrates to 1998 because of a failed spacetime data packet transmission: it and the protagonist's consciousness are swept up together in an electromagnetic wave.

The ultimate secret is revealed midway through the story: it isn't an AI from the past, but the protagonist himself, born in the future. In his later years, the protagonist sealed part of his consciousness inside the lobster AI and sent it back to the past in an attempt to save a spacetime disaster that had gone completely wrong. That's why it knows so many details about the future, yet suffers program instability over the question of who its "original self" is. This becomes its greatest philosophical struggle and emotional rift.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.