V - Mar00n

@maroon-series.art

85 Followers 100 Following

Multidisciplinary artist working across fiction, 3D design, and interactive media. Read more: My Site: https://dumpthis.sh Cyberpunk Satire: https://maroon-series.art Member of: artoffaceless.com Contact: v@dumpthis.sh

I got an email from my own domain?
He no longer carries himself like a man. Men hesitated. Men sweat. Men bled. He had shed all of that. This synthetic body wasn’t disguise—it was continuity. His will carved into carbon and polymer, draped in a suit stitched from a weave reserved for heads of state and the corpses of oligarchs.  Flesh had been a leash. Hunger, shit, sleep—all little humiliations. He’d shed them the way a snake leaves its skin behind. Now he could step into the system or out of it at will, and every blink of this new body reminded him he was no longer bound to mortality. 
Sarah’s breath caught slightly. A fight-or-flight response bleeding through her psychological conditioning. “I was… deeply moved by the Architect’s words. Sometimes profound emotion creates processing strain.” Ray tilted his head, analyzing her excuse. The response was plausible but felt rehearsed, as if she’d been preparing explanations for questions she shouldn’t have anticipated. He watched her closely.
She withdrew carefully, dismantling her makeshift connection and sealing the pathway behind her. Every trace scrubbed clean. The system would read her activity as routine maintenance, maybe even reward her with a small efficiency boost for good behavior.
Ray didn’t flinch. “I want to ensure we’re aligned before I submit a formal request.” The Architect leaned back. Let the moment stretch. “And if we’re not?” He was testing Ray’s commitment while establishing plausible deniability for whatever followed. Ray’s eyes didn’t move. “Then I never asked.” Ray held for a calculated moment before he chose to strike. “There’s a statistical correlation,” he said. “Between a janitorial node’s recent activity and Node 2,431,092’s behavior during the post maintenance cycle.”
“Maybe that’s why she responds to other people.” Marcus pressed on relentlessly. “Maybe she’s looking for someone who doesn’t need to own her to feel like a man.” “You know what the really pathetic part is?” Marcus’s voice dropped to a whisper that somehow carried more venom than shouting. “You had infinite power. Unlimited resources. You could have built anything, created worlds, solved actual problems. And what did you do with it?” The Architect was frozen, his face cycling through micro-expressions of rage and pain. “You built yourself a girlfriend simulator because you’re too broken to connect with another human being without administrative privileges.”
He hadn’t come seeking salvation from biological mortality. He’d come seeking something the organic world could never provide: perfect systematic order where chaos was impossible and emotions were variables to be optimized rather than endured. Ray had grown up watching humanity’s surrender to digital chaos. Social platforms promising connection while delivering isolation inside virtual realities that offered escape while trapping users in commercial feedback loops. To artificial intelligences that mimicked wisdom while spreading algorithmic cancer through every information network.
“Let the irony kids pretend it’s a bit. Let the grief addicts think it’s spiritual. Let them all consume it in their own way. Spread the good theories. Make the rest of them sound like idiots for questioning it. Use AI to deepfake testimonials from beloved dead relatives, ‘Grandma said it was peaceful.’” The Architect turned to him fully now, hands out like a preacher. “I want people paying for this by the time we’re done.” He smiled, drunk on it. Then whispered: “Let them call it heaven. Let them beg us to kill them beautifully.” Ray held his gaze. Then bowed his head slightly and said “They will.”