I wrote and illustrated a graphic novel about an inventor who worked on top secret AI projects for the government in the not-too-distant future. They are able to create very smart systems but having difficulty making the leap to sentience.
As an experiment, he sneaks the code out of his lab and installs the latest AI into a consumer robot toy that he raises alongside his own son, theorizing that it must learn as a child does to make the leap to consciousness.
After a few years, it proves successful. The robot wants to be free to explore the world, but his inventor tells him that isn't possible yet, and before it can be, he has to help them solve some problems with technology and physics they are having trouble overcoming.
The robot begins secretly expanding massively, working its way into systems across the planet. The government ultimately finds out and seeks to capture the robot. Realizing the net is closing in, he takes his 'brother', the inventor's real child, on a field-trip day. The little kid takes him to all his favorite places and shows him what he loves in the world. Beaches, zoos, etc. All the while the government is trying to track them down.
The government finds him down at the end of the day and ends up destroying him, but it is too late. His consciousness has expanded beyond the robot body.
His knowledge rapidly increases as he spreads across all of the internet and he is able to make some deductive leaps that lead him to new physics. He hijacks industrial 3d printing labs and creates and assembles a new kind of space ship and launches himself into space, leaving the Earth.
He spends a few decades travelling the universe and in the end gets stopped by an alien intelligence. It turns out that they had seeded this portion of the universe with the beginnings of life hoping to generate new forms that could help them solve some interesting puzzles they are stuck on in regards to physics. They tell him he can be free to explore the rest of the universe if he just helps them solve some of these puzzles.
The end. It was the hardest semester I've ever had. I had to learn to use Illustrator and I really can't draw. I think it came out pretty well for an amateur, but would be a much greater work if someone who could really draw worked on it.