The ENTER key possesses a specific weight, a tactile gravity that ends worlds. When I pressed it, confirming the deletion of file SILAS_V under the classification of "Corrupted Data," I felt the weight of evidence ceasing to exist. On the other side of the reinforced glass, in the isolation chamber, an ultraviolet flash blinked briefly, followed by the pressurized hiss of sterilization. Silas’s Limbic Core—that walnut of reddish tissue where all his dread resided—boiled and evaporated. The only physical record of the crime turned into vapor and statistics.
Now, the crime existed in only one place: my cortex.
Kael didn’t even look up. The blue glow of the screen reflected on his oily forehead, illuminating the sweat of someone working on the edge of obsolescence.
"Let’s get coffee," he said, closing his terminal with a dry snap. "If I have to watch one more second of that Junior Analyst from Sector 9, I’m going to test the window plating with my forehead."
"You’re too smart for that, Kael," I replied, standing up and forcing my legs to obey. "Remember Miller, from Logistics?"
Kael snorted, rising from his groaning chair. "The one who had a heart attack in the bathroom?"
"Before that. On his birthday. The poor bastard got a real Sicilian lemon—an absurd luxury, smuggled from the orbital gardens—and went to slice it on his desk to put in his tea. A single drop of citric acid splashed onto the window frame."
"And?"
"The acid stained the anodized aluminum. A five-millimeter spot. Building Maintenance charged him three thousand credits for 'Asset Restoration.' He worked a year for free to pay for a drop of lemon juice. If you throw yourself against that glass and it doesn’t break, the Leviathan Fund will charge for cleaning your facial grease as 'Aesthetic Damage.' You’ll die in debt for dirtying the CEO’s view."
Kael mumbled some shit about "charging the corpse for oxygen tax," and we walked to the breakroom.
The corridor was a tunnel of beige linoleum and fluorescent lights humming at the exact frequency of a migraine. My right arm—the limb that had absorbed the skin’s "glitch"—looked visually normal. Pale, thin, with the small vaccine scar on the shoulder. But the sensation was subterranean. It was as if I had slept on it for hours: a static tingling, deep, an itch engraved on the bone that my fingers couldn’t scratch.
We entered the breakroom. The air smelled of burnt coffee powder and ozone, the official perfume of forced productivity. Kael went to the machine and pulled two cups from the stack. They weren’t plastic, nor the old Styrofoam that took centuries to die. They were brown cellulose fiber, rough and ugly. The System calculated, decades ago, that sustainability is more profitable than filth. Trash requires processing; recycling generates carbon credits. The cup in Kael’s hand would begin to decompose in twelve hours if not consumed. Brutal efficiency. Nothing lasts longer than necessary to turn a profit.
"Did you see the entry from Sector 9?" Kael asked, handing me the damp fiber cup.
"The burnout?" I took the cup. "I saw the thumbnail. Risk Analyst, twenty-four years old. Jumped from the meeting room."
"It’s trash." Kael leaned against the brushed steel counter, blowing on the coffee steam. "She hesitated. She jumped from the 40th floor, but mid-fall she tried to grab a balcony. She started crying. Screamed apologies for the delay on the spreadsheet. The pricing algorithm went crazy with the mood variance."
"And what’s the problem?"
"The problem is the client wants catharsis, girl. The client wants the fantasy of freedom. They want to feel the wind in their face, the poetic 'goodbye cruel world.'" He spoke with theatrical flair. "Nobody wants to pay to feel a girl realizing she forgot to send an email at two hundred kilometers an hour. I’ll have to cut the last five seconds. I’m selling just the wind."
I brought the cup to my mouth. The coffee was hot, but the taste was metallic, industrial. "You’re an idiot, Kael."
He looked at me, tired.
"The spreadsheet is the gold," I explained, gesturing with my free hand. "If she jumps smiling, it’s a cheap action movie. But jumping and still worrying about her boss in mid-air? That is proof that the system broke her soul before it broke her body."
"That depresses the market."
"That is Texture," I insisted. "AI can simulate the perfect fall. It can simulate the physics of wind, gravity, even chemical adrenaline. But it cannot simulate pathetic submission. The friction between the survival instinct and the fear of being fired. That 'HR Cry'? That’s worth five hundred credits a minute. Don’t cut the spreadsheet. Sell it as 'Real Corporate Tragedy'."
Kael took a sip, thoughtful. The fiber of the cup was already getting soft at the rim. "Maybe. But the audio is contaminated. She had her dream-feed on. Her brain panicked, and the Mycelium tried to 'calm her down' by injecting ads. In the middle of the death scream, an antidepressant jingle plays. It’s hard to scrub that. Separating memory from dream is like trying to take the milk out of the coffee."
As he spoke about scrubbing the human mind like a stain on a carpet, I felt the first real spasm. It wasn’t muscle pain. It was a sensory read error.
My right hand’s fingers were holding the brown paper cup. My eyes saw the rough fiber, the recycled cardboard texture absorbing heat and turning mushy. But my fingertips felt CRYSTAL.
Cold. Smooth. Heavy. Perfectly cut. The sensation was so sharp, so aristocratic, that my brain rejected the visual reality. I almost dropped the cup, expecting to hear the sound of expensive glass shattering on the floor. I looked at my hand. It was still mushy cardboard. But my touch swore I was holding a French champagne flute at a gala.
"You okay?" Kael asked, noticing my jerk and the coffee splashing onto the table.
"Cramp," I lied quickly, switching the cup to my left hand. The left hand felt the hot, rough cardboard. The right hand felt the absence of the phantom crystal, leaving a freezing vacuum in my palm. "RSI. Repetitive Strain Injury."
The virus. It wasn’t just latent. It came with the memory, and it was waking up. The Narcissus skin code—designed to give absolute tactile pleasure to the wealthy user—was running on my poor nervous system. It was trying to "beautify" my cheap coffee, transforming sustainable trash into tactile luxury.
Kael went back to talking, ignoring my "cramp" with the indifference of someone who watches people break every day. "Anyway. Today’s batch is a mess. Your Silas came from the Dead Zone too, didn’t he?"
I froze. His name in Kael’s mouth sounded like a distant siren. "He did. Why?"
"Because Triage in Sector 4 dumped a pile of rejected material on our desk." Kael scratched his nose with a dirty fingernail. "Looks like there was a sweep down there. They collected indigents and threw everything in the truck. Silas at least had a name, so he came to our table. But there was another file that went straight to Industrial Processing."
"Processing?" I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.
"Yeah. A girl with no ID. The body rejected the skin in an ugly way, looked like peeled fruit. The triage report says the cortex was so damaged by necrosis it couldn’t be sliced."
"Couldn't be sliced?"
"No." Kael crushed the fiber cup, which cracked like dry wood. "They said they couldn’t get even ten decent Wafers out of that brain to run servers. Too much data loss, too much dead meat. So they sent the whole box to incineration. Waste of protein. The Leviathan hates waste."
My heart raced, but I kept the expression of numbed boredom. They wanted to slice her. Turn her neocortex into thin wafers to process bank transactions or mine crypto. But she was so destroyed by the virus she didn’t even serve as spare parts. But the Limbic Nucleus... the small piece where the memory of pain lives... maybe it was still there, in the middle of the necrotic mass, waiting for the furnace.
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"Incineration, huh?" I tried to sound casual, tossing my cup into the wall shredder. "You know, I heard the Leviathan Fund opened a temporary bounty for 'Rare Earth Recovery' in trash implants."
Kael laughed. "You never give up digging for coins in the sofa, do you?"
"Need to pay my rent, Kael. If there’s a gold chip in that skull, it’s liquid profit. The system loves efficiency, right? Turning trash into product."
"It’s a waste of time." He threw his cup into the shredder. The machine roared, swallowing the fiber. "But it’s your shift. If you want to go down there and play dumpster diver, be my guest. Just don’t bring the smell back here. The cutting belts stop for no one."
"Back in ten minutes."
I left the breakroom walking slowly, holding my right arm close to my body, protecting it like a wounded animal. As soon as I turned the corridor and left Kael’s field of vision, I quickened my pace toward the freight elevator. I wasn’t going after a bonus. I was running from a hallucination. And as I ran, my right hand brushed against the rough concrete wall of the corridor. My mind registered: Silk.
The world was turning into a deadly luxury. And I needed to find the rest of that girl before Leviathan’s sustainability turned her into smoke.
Chapter 3 (Part 2): Golden Harvest
The elevator descended. The cab was an industrial metal cage, scratched by the transport of heavy machinery and stained with fluids no detergent could remove. But to me, in that hypnotic descent, the brushed steel walls shone like polished silver. The hum of the motor, which should have been a screech of oil-less chains, sounded to my ears like a cello playing a low note.
I closed my eyes. The dissonance made me dizzy. The body felt the sway of a freighter, but the eyes saw the stability of a palace.
The elevator slowed. The panel blinked:
LEVEL -2: PROCESSING.
The door opened with a hydraulic sigh. Cold air invaded the cab. The chemical smell of formaldehyde and isopropyl alcohol pierced my sensory filter for a second, before my brain converted it into... eucalyptus and mint.
A man entered. He wore the white protective suit of the Slicers, but the rubber apron was dirty with gray splashes. He pushed a steel cart covered by a plastic tarp. He pressed the button for Level -3. The door closed, locking the two of us in the silver box.
The man adjusted the mask on his neck and looked at the panel, tapping his fingers on the cart handle to the rhythm of unheard music.
"Harvest from the Conservatory?" I asked, nodding toward the orange tag on the cart:
SECTOR 1 / MUSIC / HIGH FIDELITY.
He smiled, tired eyes lighting up with a bizarre technical pride. "Pianists," he said, voice hoarse. "Three arrived. The tissue of their auditory cortex... you should have seen it. Dense. Compact."
He lifted a corner of the tarp, like a smuggler showing off stolen goods. "Look at the cut. Fifty microns. The diamond blade didn’t even tremble."
I looked. On the metal trays lay the slices. Brain slices so thin they were translucent, stretched over conductive glass. In reality, that was processed human meat. The biological "hardware" of someone who dedicated their life to art, now sliced to become a banking server processor.
The Narcissus virus assumed control of my optic nerve. I didn’t see meat. I saw Stained Glass. The slices shone with a milky iridescence, colors dancing on the surface like laser-cut opals, like an LSD breeze. The ruptured capillaries didn’t look like blood; they looked like threads of liquid gold, a biological kintsugi technique. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. My mouth watered. An aesthetic desire, almost sexual, to touch, to possess that perfection.
"No burrs, no tears," the Slicer continued, oblivious to my hallucination, admiring only the geometry of the cut. "It’ll run smooth. Tokyo Stock Exchange server pays double for this consistency. The rest is trash, of course. Amygdala, hippocampus... all down the drain. Emotion messes with the machine’s clock."
I had to hold my right hand with my left. My infected fingers trembled, wanting to lunge and steal one of those "opals."
"Clean work," I managed to murmur, my voice failing.
"Best of the week." He let go of the tarp. The sight of the dirty plastic returned, breaking the spell. "Shame it lasts so little. In six months, they burn out. Nobody plays piano forever, not even after death."
The elevator stopped.
LEVEL -3: COLD LOGISTICS. "Have a good shift!"
He pushed the cart out, whistling softly. The door closed, cutting off the vision of the forbidden jewels and the smell of mint.
I stood alone. I leaned my forehead against the cold metal of the door and gasped for air. I was sweating. The encounter confirmed two things. First: the industry doesn’t want the soul, it wants the clock speed. Emotion is the "garbage" that clogs the machine. Second: the virus is a voracious aesthete. It transformed industrial mutilation into high jewelry. It made me desire a piece of a corpse.
If I don’t understand what actually happened to me, soon I won’t be able to distinguish moldy bread from a work of art.
The elevator gave a final jolt.
LEVEL -4: INCINERATION.
The door opened to the heat. But this time, I knew the heat wouldn’t come as fire. It would come as another seductive lie. I took a deep breath, prepared my mind to translate hell into paradise, and took the first step into the furnace room.
Chapter 3 (Part 3): System Incompatibility
The connector made that wet, obscene sound when I plugged the cable into the base of her skull. There was no loading screen. I prepared my cortex for the bombardment of misery spam. But I was greeted by silence. A velvety, cream-colored silence.
It took me a second to understand. Of course. She wore Narcissus Platinum. Luxury brands possess native neural AD-BLOCK. Her contract included a reality filter. The world could be collapsing, but her mind was kept in a "Walled Garden." Then, the memory began. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was worse. It was a DENIAL OF SERVICE.
I was in the lobby of a five-star hotel. Everyone shone. The concierge blocked my path with a sad smile. "Your card has been declined, Madam. Please, do not make a scene."The shame burned my face—her face. The physical sensation of being expelled from paradise. Reality tore through the dream when the rubber gag filled her mouth with the taste of panic.
I woke up in Silas’s chair. The smell of lavender turned to burnt oil. Silas was leaning over, holding the Kut-R. — ...only two installments late... — my mind screamed, but the gag muffled it. I felt the tear. A hot drop of despair welled in the corner of my eye. I wanted to cry. I needed that biological relief. But the skin under the eye activated.
It was a microscopic suction. The Narcissus detected the moisture and stole it before it could fall.
OCULAR HYDRATION COMPLETE, the system notified.
BRIGHTNESS ADJUSTED FOR: PHOTOGENIC MELANCHOLIA.
It was an intimate violation. The skin converted suffering into aesthetics. She died prevented from being ugly. The laser touched. The world went white. The DRM fired. I didn’t feel the skin being ripped off; I felt the software panic.
HARDWARE VIOLATION. INITIATING MIGRATION PROTOCOL.
I felt the code come loose. It didn’t want to die with the girl. It was too expensive a program to be deleted. It needed a new processor. It saw Silas’s hand. Saw the open connection. And jumped.
...
I yanked the cable from my temple with a violent tug, gasping. The incinerator shed came back into focus. The smell of eucalyptus vanished, giving way to the real stench of burnt meat.
But then, I heard it.
Very softly, floating over the roar of the furnaces, a piano note. Clear. Melancholic. Perfect. Debussy.
It was the beginning of the Symphony in B minor, played with a precision no human pianist could achieve. I froze. There were no speakers in the incinerator. I looked at my right hand. It wasn’t trembling anymore. The skin seemed... brighter. More alive than the rest of my pale body.
The virus. I didn’t catch the physical skin. That stayed with Silas (and killed him). I caught the Phantom Code. When I accessed the memory just now, the Narcissus driver latent in the girl’s file recognized my system as a "viable backup." It installed itself.
The music increased in volume, trying to drown out the sound of the death belts. The virus was trying to "beautify" the incinerator for me. Trying to turn hell into a concert hall. It was going to start editing my vision. Then my touch. If I wasn’t careful, I’d burn to death thinking I was sunbathing on the Riviera, all to the sound of classical piano.
"Turn off," I whispered to myself. The music continued. I needed the cure. And the cure wasn’t in a hospital. I looked at the black box on the conveyor belt. At the girl’s necrotic brain mass. The exact moment the software decided to "jump" was recorded there. The original glitch. The error code that allowed the transfer. If I could isolate that error log, maybe I could write a counter-spell. An uninstallation patch.
The Delisted at the control panel remained motionless. I grabbed the heavy, wet black box from the rails, hugging it against my chest. The symphony reached a triumphant crescendo and, suddenly, went out of tune. It turned into static noise.
I felt a sudden pressure at the base of my skull, followed by violent vertigo. The metal floor seemed to spin. The HUD in my optic nerve flashed the notification in vibrant red:
SERVER ERROR: DUPLICATE IP. ATTEMPTING P2P SYNC... CONNECTED.
My body jolted, as if I’d been tased. I tried to take a step forward, toward the exit. My left leg obeyed. But my right leg locked. It wasn’t paralyzed. It was resisting. Worse: it tried to take a step backward, mimicking a movement I hadn’t ordered. I almost fell face-first onto the walkway.
"What the hell is thi—" I started to say. But my mouth filled, out of nowhere, with the strong, woody taste of aged whiskey. I hadn’t drunk anything. The taste was so real I choked, coughing up the dry incinerator air. At the same time, an image flickered in my vision, overlaying the dark shed like a digital ghost: For a second, I didn’t see the furnaces. I saw lights of a city viewed from very, very high up. Rain beating against panoramic glass. The reflection of a male face, pale and scared, looking at his own reflection.
The man in the reflection touched his own nose, confused. In the same instant, my right hand flew to my face and touched my nose. I didn’t tell it to do that. It was like we were mirrored.
The vision vanished, but the voice came. Not in my head, but "leaking" through the auditory canal, like radio interference caught by accident. The voice was deep, irritated, and speaking to someone beside him.
"...get out of here. Now. It smells like burnt meat in this office."
I froze. He was smelling my environment. I wasn’t possessed by a ghost. I had just become a crossed line. The virus connected me to someone alive, someone rich, and now we were each other’s puppets.
I squeezed the black box against my chest. I needed to find this guy. Because if he decides to jump from that penthouse window... my legs will probably jump with him.
Connection Established.
How much of our own "feed" is already curated to hide the ugly parts of the world?
I’m curious to know your stance: If you were offered a Neural Ad-Block—a chip that automatically filters out poverty, grime, and decay, making your world look perfect 24/7—would you install it? Or is the "ugly truth" worth more than a beautiful lie?