“You ready to learn something, or are you going to keep pitying yourself? Trust me, this is the better way.” Glitchy’s pixels twitched with mock solemnity. “Once your treatment finishes, you won’t just be fixed. You’ll be upgraded.” He leaned closer, the proximity jarring. “This is cutting-edge tech, razor-sharp, ready-to-dissect-a-goat-eyeball sharp, and uncompromising. But I digress.”
Samantha stared, stunned. The garden around her was absurdly perfect: velvety grass underfoot, a sun that warmed without burning, a breeze scented faintly with citrus. White blooms bowed toward her like patient faces. The environment was a beautiful, calculated lie. She remembered the reality: the lab, the IVs, the cold light, the tubes snaking into the unconscious subjects. Was this a dream? Or was she truly inside ALAN? It felt real. She could smell the sweet tang of flowers, feel the grass under her feet, taste the breeze on her tongue. Whatever this was, it surpassed any dream she had ever known, too vivid, too deliberate, too alive.
“Okay, dazed and confused, let’s begin,” Glitchy went on. “You’ll notice your flesh-and-bone attributes have been numeritized. I could bore you with algorithms, but why ruin the magic? Just accept this: welcome to your new reality.”
“What?” Samantha managed, the simplicity of the statement failing to match the gravity of the meaning.
The imp was oddly cheerful, yet beneath the mockery, there was a prickling menace. Something about him didn’t sit right. If she was trapped in a simulation, if this garden was a mere projection, then the imp’s presence made sense. But why was he so… alive? Was he just a reflection of ALAN’s programming, or something more, something that could think, observe, and act autonomously?
“It’s basically an RPG under the hood,” Glitchy chirped. “Attributes built from sub-attributes, measured by very expensive math that looks at your musculature, neural throughput, and skeletal metrics. ALAN can modulate those metrics. He learns, he tweaks, he optimizes. A little squirt in you here, a prodding over there, and the body rewires. Improvements follow. Let’s pull up your stats, shall we?”
“Okay, sure…” Samantha hesitantly agreed. To figure out how to break out, she needed to understand the system’s operation from the position of being hooked in. “What do I do now?”
“Focus. Focus. Focus, like you just took a hit of sativa and are playing Tetris on level 30. Feel the rainbow in your mind. Lick the rainbow with neurons. Feeling it?” Glitchy’s metaphors made no literal sense, but they were a direct command to concentrate.
Samantha obeyed the first command: focus. She inhaled, narrowed her attention until the edges of the garden softened, and thought of the character information Sebastian had shown her in the lab applied to herself. A light blue, semi-transparent window instantly popped up in front of her face. The moment it appeared, she intuitively knew how to navigate the menu.
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The statistics felt cold, clinical, yet uncannily precise. If she were honest, these were exactly how she would have rated her own attributes, down to the nuanced interplay of strength, dexterity, and cognition. The implication sent a shiver down her spine: ALAN had probed her body with microscopic precision. It could measure not just muscles and bones, but neurons firing in patterns, translating thoughts, tendencies, and habits into numerical form. She was no longer just a person; she was data, parsed, quantified, and observed. ALAN saw her down to the cellular level and even further, mapping mind to matter, revealing traits she hadn’t consciously acknowledged.
“See, babe, not so bad. You just had to conjure it up. Your display is customized to you. While everyone’s mechanics are the same, ALAN renders what appears in a way you understand best. Same for your comrades, too. So, what do you have?”
Glitchy whistled, his pixels flickering with an unnerving mixture of approval and mockery as he scanned the transparent stat sheet floating before Samantha. “Not bad, Golden Child. Most unaugmented meatbags float around five to ten, maybe fifteen, and you’re already skirting some high numbers, elite-level. That’s top-20%-material. No wonder ALAN’s got a crush on you.”
Samantha stared at the glowing numbers. They looked clinical and objective, yet the implication was chilling: she was data now. Her potential, her skills, and her very self had been reduced and quantified by the system she helped build. She was no longer a person; she was a dataset, immediately ranked against the baseline of all other “meatbags.”
Glitchy leaned in close, his pixel-smile crooked and disturbing. “And this is just the baseline. ALAN hasn’t even started playing dress-up with your neurons yet.”
