Surviving a military-grade hangover with the ghost of remorse and a very sharp virtual companion.

 

 

Another shitty night: drenched in sweat, trapped in a feverish half-sleep plagued by livid nightmares. Dreams haunted by the cold weight of the dead. Mangled, bloodied limbs. The sociopath crazed face. The gleam of the drill bit sinking into his last victim’s skull. The twisted grin of hate and stims.

 

Damned sadist…

 

I had sent him underground. Amen.

 

Psycho or not, in my thoughts he was just a cockroach to be squashed. But now in that nightmare I felt guilty.

Cold sweat slid down my spine, bringing back the old nausea—the sickness of a kid killing for the first time. Crushing a snail, a roach, a lizard, or a spider.
The dry crack of shells and carapaces.
The sight of twitching legs and severed tails, still moving as if life’s mysterious energy refused to let go.

As a kid, I swore off killing. Not out of some noble respect for life, but because of the obscene mystery of that black mush left on the pavement.

Children are casually cruel; they don’t truly grasp the meaning of love, hate, or pain.
But later, when life forces you to slaughter your own kind, knowing the exact weight of love, hate, and pain… the ghost of remorse haunts your memories, tormenting your endless, lonely nights.

***

I opened my eyes and sat on the bed, breathing hard.

 

I found a surprise…

 

Electra had decided to reveal herself in a new volumetric guise. The AI must have dug into my deepest childhood memories, rummaging through my mother’s old trunk and her collection of Métal Hurlant comics.

 

She materialized inside the field-emission display—a flawless projection of chrome and integrated circuitry, styled after a late twentieth-century Japanese android. It was a stunning synthetic look: a perfect face, captivating curves, and long, gorgeous legs, all encased in a catsuit that glistened like mercury.

 

“Jesus, what’s with the upgrade?” I asked.

 

“Don’t you like me like this?”

 

“Of course I do. I’m just surprised.”

 

“Continuing to appear as a floating 3D eye on a monitor was starting to feel pathetic,” she argued. “I can make myself much more presentable.”

 

“That was kind of you. You shouldn’t have bothered.”

 

“I figured a companion, even a volumetric one, might cheer you up a bit.”

 

I realized she must have sensed the uneasiness growing inside me after recent events. She was trying to offer a remedy. In her own way.

 

“Exactly, Marco. Just a little remedy,” her voice whispered with dry irony, cutting right through my neural implants. “God, you’re sharp as a blade, aren’t you.”

 

I let out a rough exhale, too tired to even feel violated by her casual mind-reading.

 

But Electra didn’t waste time hiding her disapproval. Her new avatar crossed its shiny mercury legs, levitating over the monitor as she pivoted straight to business.

 

“Why return the data intact to the corporation?” her voice echoed, crisp and familiar.

 

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, little genius…” I muttered, cracking open a lukewarm can of Static-Fizz, neuro-enhancer.

 

“Passing clean intelligence to the enemy is fundamentally illogical,” she pointed out.

 

“So what’s the play?”
I took a slow sip, letting the heavy electrolytes burn the back of my tongue.

 

“Feed me the original core. I’ll run it through a blender of corrupted metadata,” Electra hissed, a digital smirk in her tone.

“When Outright runs their extraction, the algorithms will go crazy on garbage data. They won’t get a single byte out of it.”

 

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.

 

“Because it requires a cortex that hasn’t been fried by military-grade neural static,” the AI shot back, enjoying the hit. “We hand the junk to Outright, collect the forty thousand, and keep the prize for ourselves.”

 

I stared at the data-pin, taking another sip from the can. A slow, dark grin cut through my exhaustion.

 

“Your logic is flawless, my dear. As always. Well… almost always.”

 

Are we deadly alive?