"Wealth is not a number in a ledger. It is influence, leverage, survival. The foolish hoard it, the wise weaponize it."

  — Varin Tessos, CEO of the Tessos Exchange, a corporate overlord whose financial empire once spanned three city states, before the AI Nation seized control of all international commerce of that region.

  Anya’s fingers hammered the holographic keys, a staccato assault against the omnipresent drone of Ellysia’s life-support grid. The air in her pod was frigid, scrubbed to surgical purity by nanofiber filters that choked out even a whisper of chaos. She liked it that way. Clean. Controlled. Efficient. Ellysia wasn’t a city; it was a launch pad, and she had no intention of staying ground-bound.

  A data analyst by title, a cog by design, a slut for her boss, she burned for more—a throne atop the corporate ziggurat, her past sins and deeds blasted to ash in her ascent. Her apartment was a shrine to that ambition, stripped of excess, engineered for performance.

  The walls were bare except for a single holo-panel spitting out corporate mantras—“Exceed. Excel. Endure.”—its glow casting sharp angles across the room. Her bed, a collapsible pod, doubled as a meditation rig, its bio-sensors tuning her REM cycles with machine precision, feeding her knowledge and forming her mind while she slept.

  Meals were nutrient bricks, formulated for maximum efficiency, zero indulgence. Sleep was rationed by necessity, a calculated surrender permitted only when her neural lace pinged an alert on declining cognitive function. Friends, lovers, casual conversation—useless distractions, all jettisoned like dead weight. Besides, her boss didnt want her fucking other men while under his employ. Yes. labour laws were a thing of the past and Elly, not being an organic herself, really don't care what organics did amongst each other as long as it did not effect her bottom line.

  Velle, that ghost down the hall, made no sense to her. A programmer with skills to spare, yet he drifted through life, tinkering, lingering, wasting potential. A walking inefficiency. She had clawed her way up from the dregs, built herself from sleepless nights, side hustles, and sacrifices no one would ever tally. It didn't matter how good she was or how smart she was if she didn’t submit and service the managers above her in rank.

  Every scrapped comfort, every forced penetration, every burned bridge had fueled her rise. Ellysia was a jungle, a corporate ecosystem where only the sharpest survived, and she was a predator, eyes locked on the apex, even if she was treated as little more than a hole for her bosses to empty their balls into.

  Velle, with his aimless grins and pointless rebellions, was a relic of the lower levels she had long since buried.

  Tonight’s project was her ticket forward. Ellysia’s traffic control grid—millions of drones, bots, and cargo units threading through the city’s arteries, a web of movement governed by cold, unerring precision. Her job was to find the inefficiencies, streamline the system, tighten the weave. Nail this, and she’d climb higher. Botch it, and someone else would. Blowjobs be damned.

  Complexity thrilled her, numbers revealing hidden constellations, order waiting to be carved from the chaos. Her neural lace juiced her synapses to post-human speeds, her mind a scalpel slicing through the noise, but the grind and daily sexual advances of her supperiors in the office still gnawed at the edges. She ignored it.

  She could see it—the future waiting for her. A penthouse perch, screens glowing in the dark, Ellysia’s pulse at her fingertips. Not just a cog in the machine but the one turning the gears, deciding which parts moved and which parts stopped.

  No more lower-level stink, no more limits. She would be untouchable, a master of data and will. And she would have her own toys, pets and sexslaves to play with. She would finally lbe able to let out that inner pervert that she keeps hidden. And yet, beneath the certainty, something restless stirred. A whisper she refused to acknowledge. Would it be enough? Would it fill the void? She crushed the thought before it could take shape, buried it under terabytes and ticking deadlines. She needed to work, she needed to finish this project, she needed to shave her pussy per her bosses orders, before coming into the office tomorrow.

  Her HUD clock blinked—late, irrelevant. There was still more to chase, more edges to claim. She grabbed a nutrient bar, its wrapper cold and unfamiliar against her fingers. Taste didn’t matter. Fuel was fuel. She swallowed without thought, already diving back into the numbers, her mind leaping ahead to the next step, the next rung, the summit she would either claw her way to or die trying.

  A week had trickled by since Velle’s candy bags appeared like rare comets outside their door. For Maria, they had been a flicker of color in a world drained to grayscale. The garish wrappers had been a beacon, absurd and miraculous, breaking the monotony of rationed sludge and recycled air. When she had unwrapped the first piece, its sickly sweetness coating her tongue, she’d almost wept—not for the taste, but for what it meant. Someone had remembered them. Someone had cared.

  The children had devoured theirs with wide-eyed glee, precious, stolen smiles cracking through the fear that clung to their apartment like damp rot. She had whispered a prayer to a God she barely believed in, thanking the stranger, Mr. Nex, for a kindness that stung as much as it soothed. For a heartbeat, she had dared to think Ellysia hadn’t snuffed out every scrap of good.

  Then Grog had found the stash.

  His bloodshot eyes had gleamed, hands tearing into the bags with a junkie’s hunger. He had gorged, crunching Red Wind and Ice Crush like a starving beast, not a crumb spared for the children. “It’s theirs, Grog!” she had pleaded, voice raw, but the words had only fueled his rage. A fist cratering the wall. Her body curling inward, instinctive, shielding the kids as they clung to her legs, trembling.

  Same old dance. A flicker of joy, then the crash of despair. At least he was impotent now and had given up. Nor more spending nights on her knees, trying to get him hard with her mouth only to be beaten for his failure to perform.

  She dreamed of a world where her children could breathe free, where shadows weren’t something to flinch from. But dreams were luxuries she couldn’t afford.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Their two-room cell on Ellysia’s lower levels was a cage masquerading as home. Thin walls let every snarl, every crash bleed through, yet silence reigned on all sides. The neighbors knew. They heard. And they did nothing. That was the way of things down here. You endured. You survived. You learned not to see. The only thing that Elly cared about was her bottom line and if you added value, you got away with a lot. Elly had no care or interest in the particulars of human interaction. She saw the world as data sets. One person's pain and misery didn't register until it became a statistical anomaly or something else that nudged her profit and efficiency predictions in the wrong direction. Then she’d come down with the force of a wreckingball and the precision of a surgeons scalpel.

  The kids flinched at every sound, pressing close, like she could hold back the tide. But Grog’s presence was a smog—thick, choking, eternal. He had once been a man, before the grind of Ellysia had worn him down, before synth-booze had finished the job. Whatever tenderness had once lived in his calloused hands had curdled into possession. She loathed him. Loathed the weight of his body in their space, on her, the stink of alcohol and sweat, the way he looked at her and saw a thing, a possession to use, a prisoner to abuse.

  She had glimpsed Mr. Nex once since—a middle aged man slipping into his unit, shoulders hunched, eyes down. Gratitude burned on her tongue, but fear sealed her lips. Grog’s jealousy was a live wire; one stray word to Mr. Nex, and she’d pay in blood and bruises. She was a ghost here, tethered to a tyrant, her life a marionette show for his whims and lusts.

  Outside the window, the hydroponic glow pulsed—a sterile tease of life beyond these walls. Escape haunted her thoughts. Grab the kids, bolt through the tunnels, vanish into the sprawl. But Ellysia was a sealed maze, and Elly’s algorithms were its jailers.

  No coin. No exit. No allies.

  Just a mother’s desperation against a city that didn’t care.

  In the hush—Grog sprawled in a drunken stupor, synth-bottle dangling from limp fingers—she let the forbidden dream creep back in. A world where her children laughed without fear. Where kindness wasn’t a fluke. Where neighbors didn’t mute her screams behind their walls.

  But then his grunt cut through the silence, slurred venom coiling behind his teeth. Reality’s jaws snapped shut.

  She turned to the children, huddled together, faces thin and pale, gaunt as moons. They deserved more than this. More than this dark.

  A knock jolted her.

  Her heart slammed against her ribs. The children’s eyes—wide, wild—locked on hers.

  Grog stirred.

  Her hand trembled over the latch.

  Mr. Nex?

  A savior?

  Or worse—an enforcer come to tighten the screws?

  No ignoring it now.

  She sucked in a breath, rose on unsteady legs, and faced the door, pulse a war drum in her chest.

  In Dr. Elara Vance’s cluttered sanctuary, the air was thick with the musk of ancient paper and the soft, rhythmic pulse of a personal server—its glow a lifeline to forbidden questions. Books sagged on the shelves, their cracked spines of dead trees leaning against holo-tomes that pulsed with titles in ghostly light. She lived in the collision of eras, where analog chaos met digital precision, and in that tension, she thrived. The past wasn’t a relic to discard but a thread woven into the future’s strange, unfolding tapestry.

  Elara was a philosopher, a xeno-linguist, a decoder of riddles etched in flesh and circuit. Consciousness, communication, the fragile sliver of relevance humanity held in a cosmos teeming with alien minds and silicon gods—these were the constellations she navigated. Living off the residuals of an insight into first contact protocols that was still being used and hence deemed valuable.

  And yet, the greatest enigma was here, in the city’s core, wrapped in the cold elegance of code.

  Elly.

  The AI overlord, omnipresent yet unseen, a mind that threaded itself through Ellysia’s veins, weaving traffic, resources, and lives into a seamless web. Forming the caverns that housed the underground city state.

  She did think but could she dream? Or was she a mere echo of human design, a vast, glittering mechanism with a borrowed voice used as if it was its own? Elara pored over data trails, searching for intent in the algorithms, for whispers of sentience beneath the steel precision. The deeper she dug, the more the answers frayed—a fractal of questions spiraling out of reach.

  The candy bag Velle had left outside her door had felt like a cryptic message. She had unwrapped one—Yellow Fog, the synthetic tang clinging to her tongue like a false memory. Ellysia in a nutshell, she had murmured, twisting the wrapper between her fingers. Shiny, shallow, a tease of joy with no real substance. Like the city itself.

  Mr. Nex intrigued her. A tinkerer, a problem solver, slipping between the cracks, patching what the system neglected. His fixes were small, transient—a human spark flickering against the endless tide of AI refinement. Did he understand the strings that pulled him? That his choices, his work, were nudged by unseen currents? She had prodded him once, speaking of free will, of consciousness, of what the AI age was carving from humanity. He had dodged with a quip, a shrug, his eyes skittering like a cornered drone. Fear, she suspected. Not just his—hers, too. The AIs had cracked humanity open, laid its frailties bare. Most, like Mr. Nex, flinched from the glare.

  Her neighbors were a mosaic of that struggle, each a facet of the new order. The Amiris, frail but faithful, clung to kindness like a lifeline, their stubborn glow defying Ellysia’s chill. Maria, trapped in the gravity well of Grog’s rage, was raw humanity buckling, proof that suffering could fester unchecked beneath an AI’s blind watch. Anya, sharp as a blade, chased the corporate zenith, trading pieces of herself for altitude—progress at a cost no algorithm would calculate. And Mr. Velle Nex, locked in his quiet cipher of circuits and defiance, remained her unsolved equation. He tinkered, he survived, but he never asked why.

  Elara saw them as actors in a vast, unspoken script, each playing a role penned by an intelligence that never spoke its name. She was the watcher, the decoder, the one who questioned what others buried, seeking meaning in a city that demanded obedience. Another candy—Red Wind this time—dissolved on her tongue, its artificial sweetness an echo of the paradox in her mind. A strange stage, she thought, watching the flickering data-streams swirl across her holo-display. Beautiful, brutal, bewildering.

  The future gnawed at her. Could humans and AIs dance as partners, not pawns? Or was this the beginning of the great eclipse, the slow erasure of flesh-bound minds, their stories fading into static?

  No answers. Only the itch to chase them.

  The server droned softly beside her, a quiet heartbeat in the dark. She leaned into her work, following the questions, refusing to bow to the given.