The cage was white. The floor was white and smooth, the walls were white and smooth, the ceiling was white and smooth. It was a box made of bone-colored light. Garran paced its length, three steps one way, three steps back. The air tasted of nothing, a dead, dry vacuum that was an insult to the lungs. In his world, air was thick with the scent of pine rot and damp earth and coming rain. This air was a lie.
He was a creature of the forest, a thing of muscle and instinct, and they had put him in a clean, quiet tomb. He could feel the softness of Julian’s body, the way the muscles had no memory of strain, the way the hands were pale and useless. It was a cage inside a cage. He stopped his pacing and pressed his palms against the wall. It was cool and yielded nothing. There was no texture, no grain, no life. Just a perfect, seamless surface that reflected a distorted version of his face. Julian’s face.
His live broadcast feed was active. He did not know this. He did not know that a tiny, crimson light near the ceiling meant that his every move was being recorded, quantified, and judged by an invisible god of numbers. He only knew the feeling of being watched, the primal instinct of prey. He was a hunter who had never been hunted, and now his own skin felt like a trap. The silence was the worst part. It was a heavy, manufactured silence, not the living quiet of the woods.
The pressure had been building for days, a stone in his gut, a hot wire behind his eyes. The meaningless words in the room of light, the bland nutrient paste that tasted like defeat, the screaming, silent advertisements that clawed at his vision. It was a world designed to drive a man mad by stripping him of everything that made him real. The frustration became a physical thing, a knot of fire in his chest. It had to get out.
He threw his head back and let it out. A roar. It was not a word. It was the sound of a world without words, a raw, primal scream of pure, undiluted frustration. It was the sound of a predator trapped, of a spirit being smothered. The sound ripped through the sterile silence of the pod, a jagged tear in the smooth fabric of the Grid. It was the most honest thing that had happened in this room in a thousand years.
And the Grid, in its infinite, idiotic wisdom, thought it was art. On millions of neural feeds, the engagement metrics for the broadcaster known as Julian Hale, who had been fading into obscurity, went vertical. The numbers climbed with the terrifying speed of a wildfire. The system, starved for anything that felt real, devoured the scream. It was not processed as a cry of pain. It was processed as content. His Dynamic Quotient, the number that defined a man’s worth, spiked by five hundred percent.
A face appeared on the wall of the pod, a perfect, handsome man with a practiced, sincere smile. It was Owen Kincaid, a star broadcaster for Continuum Collective, a man whose entire life was a performance.
— An absolutely stunning piece of disruptive performance art from Julian Hale tonight, — Owen said to his vast audience, his voice smooth as cream. — A raw, visceral critique of the curated self. Truly groundbreaking.
The system had found a box for his rage and put a label on it. The rebellion was not crushed. It was worse. It was commodified. The scream was now a product, a new flavor of authenticity for the masses to consume. Garran stared at the smiling face on the wall, a talking ghost, and felt nothing but a profound, weary disgust.
In a cold, dark office high in a corporate spire, an alert chimed on Marcus Ward’s private terminal. The Director of Ontological Assets for Continuum Collective leaned forward, his grey eyes narrowing. The alert was for an anomalous Dynamic Quotient spike, flagged as extreme. The subject was a low-tier analyst named Julian Hale. Ward did not see art. He saw an outlier. He saw a resource he did not understand, and therefore did not control. He tagged the file for high-level analysis. The target on their shared back grew larger, painted in the bright, cheerful colors of success.
Garran’s chest heaved. The roar had emptied him, a momentary catharsis that left him hollow. But the cage was still there. The white walls were still white. The air still tasted of nothing. The smiling man on the wall was still talking. He had gained nothing. He had only shown the zookeepers that he still had teeth.
A soft chime came from the nutrient dispenser. The light on it had shifted from a threatening red to a brilliant, welcoming green. A new option appeared in the air before him, projected in soft, friendly letters: ‘Flavored Paste: Mountain Berry.’ He had accidentally solved Julian’s most pressing problem. His Dynamic Quotient was now 9.8, placing him in the top one percent of all citizens on the Grid. The price was his soul, but the system was offering a discount.
He had become a king in a world of whispers.
He had become a king in a world of whispers, screaming his way to the top of the cage.
