He’s been out of it for the past 15 hours, or maybe a week, probably his whole life. The alarm system on his mother’s hitachi was the only thing that woke him up from his dream shift. He rolled over to the smell of vomit emanating from every orifice of his body, it was a tough day at the wraith factory. He made it to the shower, spinning the water dials randomly every way, hoping for some sort of refreshing surge as his bile soaked clothes rubbed across his body. A glass of his favorite drink, vegan electrolytics with creatine infused nootropics, awaited him on the amber stained sink. Dragging himself down the quartz halogen-lit hallway, still wet, he hears his mom drool as her hitachi reaches stage eleven on the pleasure manifest.

AJ is thirty. He considers himself to be an organic macro, complacent in his carbon-neutral reversed engineered crude oil garb. At 24 people saw him as a triforce on a continuous high of dark-mage stims and punches of disembodied consciousness. He was a wrangler of souls, a contemporary reaper of sorts, distorted by the shadowlands of blackmarkets specializing in nerve splicing, DNA alterations and microbiotics. He was hired by elitists to hunt the rarest sleeves in their territory, the Werf.

After the inevitable waves of techno-global discords, bubonic convulsions and patriarchy wars, cities as we know them were at the end of their rope. Mass migrations and purges were happening within condensed microcenters as people couldn’t be bothered to live within such context. Thus the Git-guds were forced to re-brand the polis as a farmstead. ‘Werfs’ as they were called, became a movement to bring the outskirt grids to the capital, while bastions were erected to lock the inhabitants in. Major transport hubs were constructed in each Werf giving people a sense of dynamism, yet never actually letting them depart. Civilians would divvy out increasingly rare currency to sit in orgasmic bliss and wait for a train to arrive, creating a profound state of edging.

In the 21st century, sleep was the final frontier of human exploitation as it melded with labor via dream shifts. While on shift, cognitive brain power would be connected via deramtrodes and pooled together. Synapses would fire at a rapid rate while dex flowed through the sleepers vain, forcing cognitive code to be written at an exponential rate. This became such a productive source of bleeding-as-labor that the Git-guds were keen on evolving it. After clinical trials they realized that an extremely condensed shot of cognitive power can be generated by suicide, however, only a willful one. The more vehement the demise, the higher the payload. Thus the commodification of suicide and the age of sleeves began.

There were a few opportunities for sleeves: martyrs, grievers, and An-Heros. Martyrs either acted for the financial gain of the ones they left behind, for debt, or melancholia. Grievers were found, caught and subconsciously coerced into the act for the gain of a reaper. Then there was the An-Heros, who acted in self defiance. The act of death became the only way to testify that they ever lived, dying without surmising to the ethos of consumption. Entire criminal subcultures and dark economies flourished with the trade of sleeves.

The reapers reeked havoc for the rest of the population as sleeve hunting spilling out of the shadowlands. But the Git-gud’s held court, sending out their rogues. Bloated paramilitary forces of zoomers were sent to squash any sort of uprising or coup that occurred daily. Their forces looked like meandering waifu-pillows, salivating in bloodlust as military-grade dex crushed through their veins, illicit ice dimming their virtues as the peasants stood in their way, forcing them into the short brush while their brethren pumped them into oblivion.

AJ was acting as a reaper, collecting souls for the Git-guds, on a continuous adrenaline high of dex. The more sleeves he found, the more streams of data opened for him, upping his status in the shadow world while his sack of old paper currency increased. He was sought after, seen as a reaper who could obtain any sleeve, no matter how rare or precious. But his rise to the upper echelon of reapers had come at a price: he was depressed, overcome with the emotion he’d suppressed for most of his adult life. He remembered his mother, her over-sized calves, protruding spider veins and distinct sass while reminiscing about his homeland, Tallinn.

Tallinn remained a regression of civilization as it deteriorated into a hole of suicide and lascivious greed. It was a ringed city of skyscraper arcologies, one which had experienced exponential growth after Zaha had built a major transport hub there in the early 00s. The ziggurat signaled the cities ethos as it reached a pinnacle shift of singularity before any other Werf came close. But post-Zaha, life had regressed. Once a structure of such regard was formed, everything else—daily life, aesthetics, gender, birth, death, love—became anachronistic. The city remained as a stagnant signifier, never upheaving the ziggurat. Walls were formed while circulatory layers of arcologies were constructed higher than the last around the ziggurat. The building became more than just the nerve center of the city, it was an artifact which signified an interminable time that will never end.

AJ found himself in mother’s kitchen on the 152nd floor gazing through the soot blown plastic windows, locked off from the physical sphere. Dark-net webcasts illuminated the neighbors windows. He was mesmerized by the holographic extrusion. “You in there Aaaaj” his mother yelled from her coffin like a pleasure chamber, enzyme drips still dangling out of her open veins. She could feel the rough edge of broken plastic on her feet and the cool earth on her face as she walked towards the kitchen, the manifest was complete.