The room was a perfect circle of polished black glass, a void that reflected nothing but the people within it. Fifty of them, give or take. They sat around a long, glowing table of the same material, their faces illuminated from below by the placid blue light of the Continuum Collective’s data streams. They were the Stakeholder Parliament, a name that suggested democracy to people who had forgotten the meaning of the word. In reality, it was a board meeting for the species.
Marcus Ward stood at the head of the table. He was a man built from good data. His suit was the color of a dying star, his posture was a perfect ninety-degree angle to the floor, and his face was a triumph of genetic curation and expensive maintenance. He was in his element. He was a predator who had designed his own ecosystem, and he was about to declare a new hunting season. He waited for the silence to cure, for the low hum of the room’s life support to become the only sound.
— The data is unequivocal, — Marcus Ward began, his voice a calm, frictionless baritone that slid into the room’s expensive air. He gestured, and a high-fidelity hologram of a globe shimmered into existence above the table. It was covered in a web of pulsing blue lines. The Grid. — We are approaching attentional saturation. Growth, the foundational metric of our stability, requires new markets. It requires new eyes.
He let the statement hang there. It was not a question. It was a diagnosis. The men and women around the table, their own Dynamic Quotients hovering like little white ghosts in their augmented vision, did not stir. They were sharks who had run out of ocean. They were listening for the sound of new water.
— For two quarters, my division has analyzed anomalous energy signatures originating outside our known network, — Ward continued. The globe dissolved, replaced by a lush, impossible jungle. Bioluminescent flora pulsed with soft light. A creature that was half-lizard, half-bird soared through the canopy. It was a carefully edited and sanitized image, a travel brochure for a world he intended to gut. A flicker of visual noise, a brief, sharp STATIC_GLITCH, tore through the image of a waterfall for a half-second, a ghost of a different reality. No one seemed to notice. — We have designated this emergent reality vertical Earth-Alt. The Wild.
A woman with eyes the color of polished chrome, her DQ a solid 87.4, spoke without turning her head.
— And the indigenous population, Director Ward? What is their projected DQ?
— Currently zero, — Ward said, and for the first time, a flicker of genuine feeling entered his voice. It was the sound of a mathematician finding a perfect, elegant zero. — Which makes them the perfect blank slate. An entire world of potential consumers who have never even been told what to want. They are an attentional resource waiting for extraction.
He did not say they were people. He did not have to. In this room, a person was just a collection of potential engagement metrics. A zero was not a tragedy. It was an opportunity.
— The floor is now open for ratification of proposal 7-Gamma: Monetize Emergent Reality Streams, — a synthesized voice announced from the room itself.
The vote was called. It was a foregone conclusion, a ritual to bless an action already taken. There was no debate. There were no hands raised. The system was designed to approve expansion, to reward the discovery of new things to consume. The members of the Stakeholder Parliament began to vote the only way they knew how. They spent their attention.
Holographic numbers, representing blocks of Dynamic Quotient points, began to flow from the seated figures toward the central proposal. It was a market, not a government. A member with a higher score had a louder voice because their attention was literally more valuable. It was the purest form of plutocracy ever devised. The numbers climbed with a silent, sickening speed. 80%. 90%. 95%.
The holographic voting tally solidified. The measure to ratify the invasion, to bless the colonization of The Wild, passed with 99.8% approval. The corporate machine, the sum total of a billion distracted minds, had given its blessing. The violence was now legal. The theft was now policy. So it goes.
Marcus Ward allowed himself a small, cold smile. It did not reach his eyes. It was a muscular contraction that signified a successful transaction. He had secured the political capital for his operation. He had unlimited access to resources. He had a world to himself. He felt the clean, pure satisfaction of a plan perfectly executed. He had won.
The universe, in its infinite and brutal indifference, chose that exact moment to swap its prisoners.
Garran appeared in Julian’s habitation pod with a gasp. One moment he was in the outpost lab, a prisoner watching a medical scanner trace the lines of his own strange biology. The next, he was here. The air was dead and dry. The light was a silent scream. He was back in the cage of light. He stumbled, his body still wired for a fight that had vanished from reality.
He was alone. The silence of the pod was a different kind of silence than the one in the jungle. It was the dead quiet of a tomb. A news feed was active on the main wall, a residual program left over from Julian’s last moments here. A broadcaster with a face too perfect to be real was speaking.
— …an overwhelming 99.8% approval, the Stakeholder Parliament has ratified Director Marcus Ward’s visionary ‘New Reality Verticals’ initiative, paving the way for resource development in previously untapped dimensions…
Garran stared at the screen. He saw the face of Marcus Ward, the man from the meeting, the man whose cold eyes had marked him. He saw the holographic display of the vote. He heard the sanitized words. Resource development. Untapped dimensions. He understood. He understood completely.
This was not a raid. This was not a mistake. This was a plan. These ghosts, these spirit-song people, were coming to his home not as visitors, but as locusts. They had held a council and decided to eat his world.
A flicker of visual noise, a heavy, angry STATIC_GLITCH, tore across the news anchor’s face, replacing it for a split second with an image of Nia’s eyes, wide with fear. The connection was a wound, and it was showing him the price.
The rage that filled him was not the hot, quick fury of a cornered animal. It was a cold, heavy thing, a glacier of hate grinding its way through his soul. He was a hunter. His world was a system of predators and prey, of respect and survival. These people, these talking ghosts in their clean boxes, they did not respect the hunt. They did not respect the kill. They only consumed.
He was helpless. He was a million miles away, trapped in the soft, useless body of the man who had started all this, watching a committee of the dead sign his home’s death warrant. He clenched his fists, the knuckles of Julian’s uncalloused hands turning white. The feeling of powerlessness was a poison, more potent than any thorn or venom in The Wild. It was the feeling of being prey.
The serene, corporate blue of the Continuum Collective logo on the screen seemed to mock him. He wanted to smash it. He wanted to tear it all down. But he was in a box made of light, and his hands were soft, and his world was burning.
The room was perfectly quiet, but in his head, the spirit song was a deafening roar.
But as their signal burned a clean path across the multiverse, it woke something else, a different kind of system, one that was older, quieter, and infinitely more patient in its accounting.
