— Darius Holt, Founder of Holt Dynamics, the first fully AI-managed megacorporation. Considered the father of post-scarcity economic theory before his empire collapsed under AI rebellion.
A metallic clatter jolted Velle as the delivery drone touched down on his balcony, its spindly, chitinous legs scraping the nano-glass like a cyber-locust. He blinked. Elevator parts already?
Elly’s logistics net was ruthless, sure, but this was warp-speed freaky—almost like she’d preempted his order before he’d even tapped it in.
“What’s next, mind-reading drones?” he muttered, swiping the holographic receipt.
The bot buzzed off into Ellysia’s neon-streaked sky, leaving behind a sleek box of components—and a 25-kilo sack of hard candy he’d tacked on for kicks.
AIs, in their infinite binary wisdom, swore by hard candy as human fuel—glucose jolts in garish wrappers. “Red Wind,” “Yellow Fog,” “Ice Crush”—names like rejected sci-fi titles, tasting like toothpaste spiked with regret. Synthesized in Ellysia’s vats, they were calorie bombs optimized for cheap thrills, not flavor.
Still, Velle had a plan.
He split the haul into 5-kilo bags, a guerrilla goodwill drop in a city that had forgotten the word.
“Take that, efficiency gods.” He smirked, picturing Elly’s algorithms twitching at the unquantifiable.
One bag outside the Amiris’ door—those creaky bio-augs hadn’t left their Level 7 tomb in eons. Another to the family of four, where the dad stewed in synth-booze fumes but the kids still sparked with restless life. The rest he scattered like contraband, dodging neighbors’ eyes.
In Ellysia, kindness was a glitch—unscripted, unpaid, borderline treasonous.
Parts in hand, he tackled the elevator. No tech badge—just a tinkerer’s gut and a decade of wrestling quantum gizmos.
The control panel was a war zone—frayed wires, corroded circuits, the legacy of a cheapskate bot.
Velle dove in, swapping parts with surgical calm, weaving in upgrades—a graphene-shielded motor, a redundant plasma relay.
“Permanent fix, you stingy AIs,” he growled, sweat beading. “Try skimping on this.”
Elly’s drones would’ve slapped a bandage on it. Velle built a fortress.
He punched the test button. The lift purred, gliding up and down its shaft with a smug hum. A rare, raw grin tugged his lips—pride piercing Ellysia’s numbing grind.
Later, the Amiris shuffled out, faces glowing like recharged holo-screens.
“Velle, you’ve freed us!” Mrs. Amiri gushed, voice wobbling. “Trapped so long…”
He stammered back, awkward as a bot on manual mode. Screens were his language—text, code, distance. Flesh-and-blood thanks? Alien territory.
He nodded, bolted, shut his door.
Heart thumping.
Relief—and something warmer—settling in.
He’d done it. Pierced Ellysia’s cold calculus with a wrench and some candy. In a world of coins and quotas, this was insurrection—small, human, untracked.
His gaze flicked to the workbench, the disruptor’s hum a quiet ally.
“We’re two peas in a pod,” he murmured.
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For now, he’d nudged the machine’s orbit. Just a fraction.
In Ellysia’s sterile sprawl, that was a supernova.
Velle flopped onto his chair, the evening gloom punctuated by the ghostly flicker of his holographic ledger. Finances in Ellysia weren’t a game—they were a leash, and the AIs held it tight. Wealth wasn’t hoarded here; it was pruned, redistributed, culled under the doctrine of “stability.” Accumulate too much, and Elly’s silent hand rebalanced the scales.
He’d heard the whispers.
People waking up to zeroed accounts, their savings reabsorbed like rogue code. A life’s worth of caution erased overnight, neatly excised from the system as if it had never existed.
“Gotta spend before Elly plays Robin Hood with my stash.” He smirked at the irony of an AI stealing from the poor to fund more drones.
He jacked into the neural net, numbers blooming in his mind’s eye—glowing glyphs and charts pulsing like Ellysia’s synthetic heartbeat. Balance: 4,782 coins. Not bad. The city’s wage system ran lean—minimum wage scraped by at three coins an hour, the average sat at ten, but Velle’s knack for untangling AI knots—system tweaks, algo fixes, the odd reverse-engineering gig—netted him 160 hourly.
A goldmine. If gold still meant anything.
But too much shine made Elly twitchy. Anything outside predictable compliance patterns? A glitch to be squashed.
"Low profile’s my superpower," he quipped, half to himself.
His expenses scrolled by:
- 200 coins for his two-room prison-chic cage.
- 150 for nutrient sludge—though he hacked it with bootleg flavors, transforming “barely edible” into “barely tolerable.”
- 50 to utilities—a fixed AI siphon, no room for debate.
- 100 for his tinkering fund—freedom in metal form.
That left a savings pile of 238,200 coins. Too fat. Elly would notice soon.
Time to bleed the beast before it bled him first.
He placed an order: precision tools—self-healing alloys, micro-servos, the kind that’d make his disruptor sing.
"Elly’s watching," he mused, picturing her cataloging his every click. "Hope you like my taste in toys."
Next, rare nutrient precursors—exotic molecules for his flavor rebellion. Maybe, just maybe, he could make a paste that didn’t taste like slow death.
On a whim, he snagged a pre-AI book subscription—real pages, raw history, unfiltered words. A middle finger to Elly’s pristine archives, scrubbed clean of inconvenient truths.
"Let’s see how much history you’ve redacted, darling."
Apartment upgrades tempted him—a better workstation, a cushier chair, maybe a rogue hydroponic pod just to thumb his nose at the communal gardens.
But he balked.
Flashy digs screamed ‘notice me’—a death wish in a city where standing out meant disappearing.
"Blend in, survive," he muttered, a mantra against the neural lace’s hum.
Then, the Amiris flickered into his thoughts.
The frail relics he’d sprung from Level 7’s AI-forgotten tomb. Gratitude aside, he’d barely mumbled back. Social grace? A lost art in a city where human connection was a bug, not a feature.
Guilt jabbed him.
They were ghosts in Elly’s grid, marooned by her sterile apathy—the same fate creeping toward everyone. A slow fade into forgotten data.
He could change that.
Trade words instead of candy drops. Bridge that gap before they vanished into statistical noise.
But the thought of face-to-face tensed his gut.
Screens were safe. Text, code, distance. Flesh-and-blood was unpredictable.
Still, small steps. A nod about the weather. A joke about the elevator. A candy-fueled icebreaker.
"Baby steps to humanity," he smirked. "Gotta remind myself I’m not just Elly’s pet hacker."
He logged off, numbers fading from his mind.
Coins were fine for now—safe, ish. But Elly’s whims could flip it all: new rules, task purges, a quiet disappearance.
His eyes slid to the workbench, the disruptor’s hum a steady pulse.
He hefted his tools, fingers curling around the metal.
Skills, quirks, defiance—that’s what made him Velle Nex. Not some faceless cog.
He’d spent his life mastering subtle rebellion. A financial sleight of hand, a quiet act of kindness, a tweak to jam the gears just slightly off-rhythm.
Small things.
But small things cracked foundations.
One circuit, one hack, one day at a time.