Act 1: Rising Effulgence
In the chromeless, technologically enhanced dystopian metroplex of Mechaville, a 9-year-old child proddles with one umbrella in hand beneath the downpour. His digi-name was "Eli"; his real name, if it ever mattered, was unknown.
The ground, composed of an alloy that feels and looks like fine marble, scintillates like frozen tears. Rain drops sparkle due to the hydrophobic properties of the tiles.
A myth persists: children born in this region are likely to suffer from a congenital condition called "Ex Proa," a neurodegenerative disease that disables the brain's right hemisphere, rendering the left side of the body paralyzed and much of the cerebral function erased. While doctors reject the claim, citizens report peers acting "oddly rigid," "robotic," or struggling to move their right side.
Or at least, that's what Eli has read in the horror novel he holds while sitting alone on a bench of cold, unamused, emotionless metal. He closes the book after the first chapter: "Death by Intelligence." Mildly intrigued, he wonders if there's truth in the idea that "too much intellect could be the end of humanity."
He stands, mentally prattling about how the horror novel is unrealistic—mere pantomime for NPCs who live in fiction, not the iridescent downpour drenching his disheveled, voluminous hair in recycled ocean water. Vapor. History in every droplet.
"What if people are just like water?" he thinks before stepping into his apartment.
The door opens at his command, a swift joint displacement—an allegory for something within him he hasn't identified. The audible turning of cogs reminds him: his caretakers are nothing more than mechanical parents, frigid replacements for maternal and paternal servitude.
"What's for dinner today?" he asks flatly.
The machines serve flawlessly made truffle & wagyu beef-filled pasta—his third favorite. They never remembered. He looks at the food and mutters, "I'm not hungry today."
The machines do not care.
Proddling to his room, he grabs his tablet, distracting himself from existential thoughts. As he scrolls, a knock whispers at the door.
"Eli, are you there?" A voice. Human.
He lets them in.
"Hey Eli, took me a while. Your house's automated defense systems are hard to bypass, you know."
Eli looks at them with disinterest, then lights up unexpectedly after contemplating something for 6.8141613 seconds—200 milliseconds faster than typical rejection contemplation. He pokes at the guest's alloy hoodie and asks, "Are you water?"
The guest's pupils dilate—0.3000091 seconds too long. Eli logs it.
Despite the absurdity, he invites the guest in, studying them like a specimen.
"You've got a pretty clean house," the guest says.
"Everything must stay white and symmetrical."
A pause: 7.6126749 seconds. Intrigue, fear, confusion.
"So aren't you going to ask why I came here?"
Eli thinks exactly 3.5 seconds—invoking social hesitation.
"That concerns me not." A 2-second pause. "We're friends, right? And friends hang out whenever."
Suspicious but persuaded, the guest explores Eli's sterile habitat.
Eli, studying meticulously, asks how they arrived. Detects perspiration. Maintains eye contact to invoke hesitation.
"I crawled from the west vent!"
Eli recognizes the lie but nods. The guest enters Eli's room; their shadow breaks symmetry. Eli's eye twitches.
He respectfully asks, "Who are you?"
"I'm Daniel, dude! Don't you remember?"
Eli tilts his head exactly 45 degrees. Waits 4.5 seconds to trigger defensiveness.
"No, it's unfamiliar."
Daniel, disappointed, opens a drawer out of habit. Spots a photo frame. Before he can decipher it, Eli steps in front.
"This is private property." He shuts the drawer.
Daniel, disturbed, suddenly feels an urge to commit suicide.
"Do it," Eli commands.
Daniel panics, resists, but walks out the window. Hits the alloy ground. Dies on impact.
Eli yawns. Goes outside.
"Number 82. 10 minutes and 10 seconds elapsed. A perfect death palindrome."
He drags Daniel's body into a pitch-black chamber, interrupted by a tablet notification:
"Meet up at Glacier Park at 9."User: A. Anon
Eli's eye twitches. He tosses the corpse into the incinerator. It hums as Daniel is reduced to a 12-gram carbon signature.
Eli logs the weight discrepancy. Expected: 14g.
Act 2: Refrigerator
Waddling out, Eli heads into the empty, automated Mechaville. Citizens are obsolete. Only authority, propaganda, and machines remain. Dormant ads hum "10:10" on dead screens.
At Glacier Park, his sensors detect a figure in a pitch-black alloy hoodie. Underneath: chainmail.
"A. Anon" steps forward. Breath frosting. "You must be Eliminator M100."
Eli's grip fractures the bench.
"Lucidity's very first—failed model."
Anon pauses: 2.5283614 seconds.
"...And yet, you eliminate so well."
Eli's pupils constrict 0.5mm. A 3.5-second pause.
"May I inquire about your methods of obtaining this information?"
Anon chuckles.
"Still running basic etiquette protocols, M100? How quaint." He pauses. [PROGRAM_ERROR: 103] flashes. "Do you remember the fridge?"
Eli lunges. Joints hiss. Monofilament wire uncoils toward the figure's carotid.
The figure vanishes in static.
"Illusory technology?" Eli mutters.
His weapon cuts air.
He remains on guard for 5 minutes and 5 seconds. Then sits atop the park fountain.
"He wasn't like water..."
Sleep follows. Eyelids shut from calculated fatigue. Same bench as morning.
4 hours, 30 minutes later—reboot.
He logs the contemplative state. The dark fog lifts. Sun rises. He walks Glacier Park's edge, seeking something unidentifiable.
The sun scintillates without caring. It rises, it falls.
Eli logs the allegory.
He toddles across the alloy floor for 15 minutes and 15 seconds, then turns home.
Anon's words linger. Why the system destabilization?
An avian disrupts visual symmetry. A pebble ends its flight. Another 12-gram incineration.
Something's wrong.
Caretakers serve wagyu steak—his favorite. Yesterday's third-favorite meal breaks the Fibonacci sequence. The detail feels prophetic.
After eating, he steps outside.
"Cold sweat?"
Armored men appear. Rifles aimed. Thousands of outcomes calculated in 0.5 seconds. All terminal.
A tranquilizer dart taps his neck.
He wakes. Medical restraints. Cybernetics disabled by EMP. A child again.
A figure leans against the door.
"Now," they exhale, "you will either lose your memory and be enhanced, or be discarded. We're only offering choice to technically evade human rights laws."
Eli scans. No escape.
Manipulation attempts: ineffective.
"...Shit."
Act 3: The False Reset
Nowhere to run.
No ability to destroy.
No choices to make.
Yet, Eli's volatile, fearful expression suddenly manifests into a subtle, composed grin. A. Anon's eyes widen, confused by the abrupt change in atmosphere.
"Do it."
Eli's cybernetics re-enable with the verbal command.
The once-immovable constraints split into fragmented metal as Eli rises.
Anon locks into Eli's calculating eyes pejoratively, instantly realizing his blunder before slowly—robotically—approaching the near window adjacent to Eli's designated medical bed.
His breath shallow:
"You logged the killswitch… didn't you?"
"Query irrelevant."
Splatter.
They forgot to remove something they installed in Eli's wiring long ago—hypnotic manipulation and cybernetic re-initiation, triggered by specific stimuli.
Eli had logged it.
Whether or not his enhancements were active didn't matter. It was always there.
Hearing the noise, several armored men storm the room—
Only to find it completely empty.
A note in perfect computer handwriting rests where Eli once lay:
"Check the window."
Two men approach the glass while others cover them from behind.
They see nothing unusual—
Until the room violently explodes, killing every one of them instantly.
"1 in 10 minutes and 10 seconds.
5 in 5 minutes and 5 seconds."
His face lights up as he tosses the detonator away.
It lands in a perfect arc.
Now he's confidently striding toward somewhere familiar.
Gait: 1.2 meters per second.
Lucidity's "failed" model has deceived them.
Ironically using the very killswitch they installed for emergency situations—
Now, they must face what their own corporate hubris has invented.
Eli looks up.
The sky is clear, ameliorated.
The sun scintillates across the barren, mechanical skyline of Mechaville.
Five clouds float in divine proportions.
Two fighter jets corrupt the atmosphere's quintessential symmetry in volatile patterns.
Four missiles release—
All directed at Eli.
He utilizes a nearby tree, redirecting one missile back into the jet it came from.
Instant elimination.
Three missiles remain.
Eli detects visual tracking features embedded in the remaining payload.
He climbs the tree.
Activates EW systems.
Cortical uplink slices through their guidance protocols—
12 lines of code, 12 grams of payload.
He calculates distance. Trajectory.
One missile collides with the jet's hull.
Destruction is instant.
Incinerated fragments fall in symmetrical timing.
The shockwave vaporizes the pilot's last breath.
Eli logs the molecular weight.
Then, casually—almost playfully—he resumes his stride, but strangely, experiences some mild difficulty in balancing the right side of his body.
"Self directed query: "Who am I?"
Act 4: The First Asymmetry
Back at Glacier Park, Eli strides along the deteriorating, neglected alloy floor, caught in a trichotomy: infinite capability, no goal, no reason.
Is he meant to search for meaning, or is meaning merely collateral? What's the point of all this [PROGRAM_ERROR_12]? He condemns his internal programming—but if that programming were the cause, would he even question it? Is he a machine? A cybernetically enhanced human? Or maybe a...
Before he can finish this introspection, his foot strikes a crack in the alloy's usually flawless surface.
His pupils constrict by 1 millimeter—then, in seconds, he annihilates the park's infrastructure: benches, fountains, artificial icebergs—everything destructible within reach.
In the midst of his rampage, in his vicinity, a figure appears. He comes to a halt as they begin cowering in fear.
This is a human. A living, conscious, vulnerable being—containing everything he was wondering about in himself.
He hesitates for a few microseconds before turning them into rouge mist.
He wants to rest, but there is no bench to lay on.
"Self-directed query: self-elimination [Optimal?]"
He considers it suboptimal.
"This isn't where I'm supposed to be."
After 5 minutes and 4.9999995 seconds of aimlessly walking around Glacier Park, he redirects his focus to his original destination.
The fridge.
"I need to take them back."
He steps forth towards the direction of a familiar building, his grip tightening as he gets closer to his destination.
He counts 16 surveillance devices outside of the infrastructure, 32 in the surface interior, and 64 in [PROGRAM_ERROR 24].
He logs the [PATTERN_NOT_FOUND].
12 security guards armed with postmodern submachine rifles in front of the entrance.
He evaluates 14 ideal outcomes out of 64,128 failures in 0.5s.
He begins his chosen strategy by waiting for 4 hours until the 12 sentinels are substituted by 6 nightguards. Then he subsequently moves to a closer hiding spot, adjacent to the guards while they're swapping positions.
He waits carefully until the final nightguard arrives, and then he snatches away the closest guard to him before they could react, as their attention was diverted by the substitutions.
In 0.4 seconds, the highly trained personnel instantly gather and hold their rifles up to where they saw the little figure snatching away one of their members.
They slowly approach the side of the wall—only for the stolen nightguard's corpse to suddenly fall on them.
Distracted, they don't perceive their last nightguard in line getting brutally strangled by Eli's monofilament wire behind the polar wall.
Their rifles instantly fixate on Eli's chest, the triggers pulled in synchrony as Eli's own stolen rifle eliminates them before their neurons can fire.
He logs the men's asymmetrical inertia reaction upon getting shot in the head.
The lack of a palindrome mildly frustrates him before he carries on into the building's interior.
"They're mine."
Act 5: Irrational
Accelerating, he accurately sends projectiles into every one of the surveillance devices on the ceiling, his advanced vicinity sensors detecting 4 personnel guarding [PROGRAM_ERROR 24]. Without calculating any outcomes, he slits their carotid arteries sequentially in 2 seconds total, getting shot 6 times in the process, which his hyperalloy titanium chassis can currently resist. The bodies do not fall in perfect symmetry, but he does not care.
In 0.0000022s, he scans the building's entire infrastructure, evaluating a ~0.44% probability of success. He doesn't hesitate.
In reckless depredation, he eliminates 6 more sentinels with a stolen submachine rifle before they can articulate a conscious thought. He doesn't log the imperfect death palindrome.
Trained SWAT teams arrive at the building at ludicrous speed, aware of the inimical threat present. He accelerates at flank velocity, his engines overheating as he bursts into supersonic speeds, approximately 443 m/s towards his destination, the shockwaves shattering windows.
His frenzy is met by 16 men obfuscating his path. He fails to calculate an efficient outcome, so he escapes their vicinity and chooses to take the elevator leading up to [PROGRAM_ERROR_24].
"12 grams missing."
The elevator comes to a halt, and he blitzes into [PROGRAM_ERROR_24].
"The fridge."
Subtle perspiration ensues as he slowly opens the cryogenic vessel, only to find…
"Freeze!"
Nothing.
"Nothing?"
Nothing. Not even a molecule of evidence left.
"Put your hands up or we will fire!"
He backs up into the observatory, where an artificial garden resides. His systems failing, the fridge empty, the fabricated petrichor, the inevitability of this situation…
"Self-elimination: optimal."
Disabling his nociceptive systems, he wraps a coil around his cervical spine, as the men hasten to forestall this unexpected situation.
The last thing he logs is the crooked branch in the tree he's sitting beneath.
"It was never meant to be." A familiar voice lingers as everything begins to shut down.
Eliminated.