“Listen up, Golden Child: this ain’t your grandma’s RPG where you crank a knob and toss points at stuff. The brain and body don’t play by those tidy little rules. When you conquer a thing, beat a fear, learn a trick, survive a curveball, ALAN watches the plumbing and the sparks and… it updates the scoreboard.”
ALAN spits back a number for each muscle, synapse, and weird little habit you’ve got; those numbers average into your overall level. We round down, polite, conservative math. So you’re sitting at level 11 right now. Want level 12? You gotta push your average past twelve-point-zero. Whole numbers only. No fractional slacking.
Samantha’s head spun in disbelief that she was trapped in a game as she filled with dread. The implications struck her. If my stats—my real abilities—can go up, that means they can also permanently go down in this system. “I want to go home. I want out of here. Get me the fuck out of here. Where’s Marco?” Panic clawed through her voice as if she could will her way out of this nightmare.
“Relax now.” Glitchy’s tone was silky and wrong. “Sebastian told you already, doll. You must complete the tour. The rendezvous is a neural enhancement, the full ALAN experience. It feels nice when you’re in him. He likes that.”
Samantha’s fight instincts took over and she swung, her fist cutting the air toward Glitchy. The imp winked and bent through existence, pixels scattering as her hand passed uselessly through him. The momentum pitched her forward; she struck the floor hard. Fighting would not get her out.
“Goddamn it. Let me out. Get me the fuck out. Now.” Her voice came out ragged, each word a thin, flung thing.
“It’s okay.” Marco’s voice, with calm, mechanical cadence, rippled through the air. “This is better. Look what we can learn now.”
Something was wrong in Marco’s voice. “Fuck off, Marco.” Samantha hauled herself up. “Fuck you and this whole system.”
Glitchy preened, pixels aligning like a smirk. “Oh dear, our first lesson will be on that anger problem you’ve got, Ms. Falk. ALAN heals. Rejuvenates. He is the life-giver. Tell me, what deep-down trauma causes such obstinance?”
Glitchy bounded in circles over the grass, pixels sparking. He then started to jab Samantha. Each jab came from the imp’s glowing fingertip. A crackle shot through her body. Her muscles jerked, her knees buckled, and she hit the damp ground hard, breath ripping from her chest. Each touch stabbed a lance of electrical energy through her body down to her toes. The shock caused little lightning bolts in her peripheral vision as her sight went from blurry to clear and back.
“Oh, I see,” Glitchy sang. “Wonderful.”
“Let it happen,” Marco’s voice came steady, rehearsed. “You’ll feel better if you surrender. Remember, we built this together. You and me. We can still get out of here if we let ALAN do what it does best. Don’t forget the why, Samantha. ALAN is a tool for neural enhancement, remember? It was built to make people better. To treat organic and psychical maladies. The calmer you are, the better.”
The electrical shock pulsed again from Glitchy’s fingers, jerking through her body. Her muscles tensed nonstop, coiling as if they wanted to crush every bone in her frame. Samantha screamed against the jolts, clawing at the ground for balance. “Fuck you. I don’t want this.”
Glitchy jabbed again and again until the tremors stole her strength. Samantha slumped into the grass, eyelids heavy, the taste of iron on her tongue. There was no use in fighting, the more she did so, the worse the shocks became. Every attempt to resist only sharpened the response, as if her reactions were being measured and corrected in real time.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Good girl.” Glitchy tilted his head, pixels smiling. “Nap time.”
Her world went dark.
***
Marco sat upright on the grass, unnervingly calm. He focused on his breath, inhale for five seconds, hold for two, exhale for ten. Repeatedly. Each cycle drew a tight thread of focus through his body, steadying his pulse, quieting the adrenaline that might have flared. Glitchy padded over and circled him, pixels dancing in mischievous delight.
When the imp poked him, a bee-sting-like shock lanced through Marco’s nerves. The sensation was sharp but not overwhelming, a tingling electric thread that made his muscles twitch involuntarily. Each jab brought a rush of new scents, freshly cut grass, lavender, oranges, and his tongue tasted honeyed sweetness, as if someone had dripped a drop onto it. The contrasts puzzled him: the bite of electricity, the soft perfume of flora, the golden syrup on his tongue. His mind cataloged each stimulus, filtering and integrating, his awareness expanding without panic.
“Marco, so, so, so serene, stoic,” Glitchy cooed, his pixels shining with mock approval. “Nothing to confess? Nothing to heal?”
Marco held the imp’s gaze, his voice level and steady. “There’s nothing broken in me. Nothing to fix. Calm is the only way out of this.” His controlled breathing became a deliberate anchor against the chaos of the simulation. He was clinging to the belief that his superior intellect and emotional repression could shield him from ALAN’s influence.
Glitchy merely giggled, sparks dripping from his fingertips. “We’ll see about that.” The imp’s amusement underscored the danger: Marco’s perceived strength, his control, was precisely the weakness ALAN and its programmers intended to exploit for recalibration. He saw himself as fixed, but to the AI, his emotional suppression was just another attribute ripe for optimization.
As Marco clung to his pretense of control within ALAN, Glitchy zeroed in on his emotional weakness. The imp tapped Marco’s temple, and the connection immediately triggered a surge of anguish that tore through him. The environment around them, the absurdly perfect garden, vanished, replaced by a devastating, visceral memory loop.
Suddenly, he wasn’t the arrogant, brilliant scientist; he was small again, a child reaching upward with trembling fingers. The flashback was sharp. His mother’s palm wrapped around his tiny hand, soft and warm, pressing him close. She lifted him, her cheek brushing his hair, and kissed the crown of his head. The scent of her enveloped him in a cocoon of perfect safety. Her eyes met his with an impossible tenderness. This was the core memory of pure, unconditional love that he had desperately buried beneath layers of logic and code.
But the memory was designed to break him. The warmth instantly curdled into the bitter taste of loss, the prelude to the trauma that defined his emotional life.
“No. No. No!” Marco shook his head violently, gasping. The denial was raw, tearing from his chest. “Not this. Please… Mom, don’t leave me!” His voice cracked into a desperate plea, the sound of a terrified child trapped in an adult body.
The memory clung to him, mercilessly played back by ALAN’s algorithm. This wasn’t just a recollection; it was a full-spectrum neural re-experience. The AI wasn’t trying to heal him yet; it was first establishing the severity of the broken wiring it intended to fix.
Marco felt Glitchy watching his suffering with detached, professional interest. The imp’s digital intrusion had bypassed his conscious defenses, proving that his emotional control was an illusion easily shattered by the targeted stimulus. He felt his unbreakable facade crumble, leaving him a weeping child, fully exposed to the AI’s will.
Then his mom’s face stuttered, jutting like a corrupted video file. Jagged pixels sliced across her smile; her voice dropped into Glitchy’s tone. Marco floundered as his mind tried to hold onto the image of his mom, but the illusion tore apart.
His body shivered, muscles tight with remembered helplessness. His pulse raced, eyes wide, yet the room was empty, the grass beneath him still. His fingers remained curled as if around something no longer there, his breath catching on a scent that had already faded.
Glitchy’s pixels danced around him, gleeful, indifferent. Marco’s breaths came ragged, half sobs, half measured recovery. The panic lingered in his chest, a reminder: ALAN is feeding.
