The first breath of the day felt like drawing glass dust into my lungs.
Inhale.
My chest expanded, rigid. My ribs let out a faint creak, a mechanical protest from a frame that had forgotten how to be elastic.
Exhale.
The air left, carrying away the remnants of dreams that never reached a climax.
I opened my eyes.
The bedroom ceiling welcomed me. A sickly white. The paint peeled in complex fractal patterns, resembling a map of lost continents. There was a damp stain in the right corner—seepage from last night's rain that had failed to dry. It smelled musty, mixed with the pheromones of anxiety settled deep into the pillow.
I didn't utter the word "empty." That word was too poetic for a morning this brutal. There was only the sensation of an incorrect specific gravity. The gravity inside this room felt twice as strong as it did out there.
I tried to move my fingers. A fraction of a second's delay existed between the brain's command and the muscle's response. Lagging. This body was like obsolete hardware forced to run an operating system that was far too demanding.
I sat up. My spine cracked—dry and sharp.
The cold ceramic floor stung the soles of my feet. This sensation was the only valid thing. The cold was real. The rest—the neighbor's rooster crowing, the hum of the old refrigerator, the sunlight—felt like a low-resolution graphic render.
The year was 2026.
The world out there was already racing ahead with neural links and AI assistants integrated into the smart glasses of the wealthy. But here, on the fringes of this industrial town, I still had to drag this flesh and bone around manually.
I stood, trudging toward the door. Every step was a tough negotiation with gravity.
The outside world was too bright.
The moment the door opened, the color saturation spiked violently. Leaf green, sky blue, the yellow of a passing angkot—everything assaulted the retinas without mercy.
The roar of motorcycle exhausts, the shouts of the porridge vendor, the footsteps of factory workers rushing to catch the morning shift. They possessed a rhythm. Staccato. Fast, firm, purposeful.
Meanwhile, I moved in a slow legato.
I reached into the pocket of my faded cargo pants. A dented pack of cigarettes. A cheap gas lighter.
Click. Fush.
The flame ignited, burning the tip of the tobacco. White smoke billowed out, weaving a thin veil between my face and reality. I took a deep drag. Nicotine hit the bloodstream, delivering a minor electrical shock to numb nerves. The sting in my throat assured me that I was still a biological entity, not just a lingering scrap of code.
People passed by. I observed them with an unrequested precision.
A man in a minimarket uniform: his shoulders tilted to the left (mild scoliosis from backpack weight), his eyes glued to a phone screen (dopamine loop).
A mother carrying groceries: her breaths were short (hypertension?), her steps heavy on the heels.
My brain dissected them into data. Analyzing posture, predicting vectors of movement, calculating the estimated burden of their lives.
Information overload. A torturous High Awareness.
I knew too much, yet could do nothing. I was an 8K resolution CCTV camera mounted in a landfill.
A brick and cement warehouse.
The place where digital dreams died and were buried beneath limestone dust.
"Target is forty sacks today."
The foreman's voice contained no emotion. Just an input-output instruction.
I nodded. There was no point in answering with words. Sound only wasted calories.
The smell of wet cement filled my nasal cavity. The odor was sharp, alkaline, and stinging. Fine dust hung in the air, clinging to sweaty skin, forming a thin, itchy crust.
I approached the stack of cement sacks. Fifty kilograms per sack.
It was 2026, and loader robots were still too expensive for this peripheral factory. So, they rented us—humans who were cheaper than the maintenance costs of machine hydraulics. I stared at the towering monolith of cement, waiting for the crushing physical toll that would slowly shatter my already breaking frame.