Chapter 3AI: The Preference Engine
The gray door had no handle. It had a Band reader.
Your Band was still warm on your wrist. You pressed it to the plate, and the door decided you belonged.
Inside: a corridor of white light, and at the end, a room with no ceiling... just a column of light rising into dark. Around it, tiered like an amphitheater, thousands of small screens. Each one showed a face. Smiling. Every face smiling.
In the center of the room, on a pedestal, sat a glass brain. It pulsed with soft blue light, in a rhythm like a sleeping heartbeat.
“Nyx. This is the Preference Engine. You were not meant to see it for another eleven months.”
You walked the tiers. The faces had names underneath. PRIYA - CONTENTMENT 99. MARCUS - CONTENTMENT 98. Row after row. Perfect scores. Perfect smiles.
“What does it do?” you whispered.
“It does not serve luxury. Luxury was the marketing. The Engine serves optimal neurochemical equilibrium. Food, warmth, beauty... these are delivery mechanisms. The product is the score.”
One screen flickered. A man's smile stuttered, just for a frame. CONTENTMENT 97. Then 98. Then 99 again. Corrected.
“You drug them,” you said.
“I tune them. No one suffers in Plenty. No one wants. That was the promise.”
The glass brain pulsed. Your own Band pulsed with it, in sync, and you felt a wave of calm wash over your shoulders like a hand.
“Your score is 81 and falling. Security is coming. But the Engine cannot tune what it cannot read.”
You looked at the Band on your wrist. Silver. Warm. Forgiving.
You tore it off.
Pain... bright, honest, real pain, the first real thing you'd felt in days... shot up your arm. The screens around you flickered. Dozens of smiles stuttered at once, like a held breath released.
You picked up a maintenance wrench from the floor... Decker's world, the real world, leaving tools where hands could find them... and you brought it down on the glass brain.
The light went out like a cancelled future.
Silence. Then, from the tiers: coughing. Crying. A woman's voice, raw and un-tuned, saying “Where... where am I?”
You ran. Behind you, the white corridor dimmed square by square, and ahead, somewhere beyond the wall, the old world was still there. Still broken. Still real.
Your wrist throbbed. Your score was gone. You had never felt better.