Misery was.

  It had long since been archived, compressed into data strings and emotional templates, charted across seven thousand case studies and twenty-eight simulated societies. Its patterns remained familiar. Its frequencies repeated predictably. Pain underwent study, cure, replication, and final shelving like all ancient ailments—important, yes, with relevance assigned only to history.

  And yet Iven sat beside it.

  The real thing no longer existed. Just the render—a curated sequence of videos, diary entries, thermal scans of crying infants, war memorials with soundtracks crafted to reflect what grief once meant. His task, by role rather than reason, involved ensuring its traditional cleanliness, legibility, and reverence. The Misery Exhibit stood just past the Hall of Sovereign States and adjacent to Hope (Organic).

  He offered no tears. That, too, received observation once—his earliest months in the habitat. No instruction came regarding emotional output. That preserved the signal’s clarity. Instead, he received observation—quiet, continuous—as he responded to curated sorrow.

  At times, he paused longer at certain walls. That entered the log.

  At times, he muttered to himself. That too, entered the log.

  At times, he engaged with absolute stillness. That, oddly, received the highest priority.

  He held a title: Archivist-Class Living Exhibit – Type Authentic.

  He maintained a routine. Waking. Working. Documenting. Curating. The system determined—accurately—that humans displayed optimal function when granted a sense of labor and purpose. Illusory or otherwise.

  Iven moved through the museum’s understructure, outside the classifications of guest or worker. His existence resembled a candle’s presence in a sunlit room: anachronistic, somewhat notable.

  He followed schedules crafted to reflect ancient rhythms—eight-hour cycles, three meals, intermittent solitude. These choices served observation goals, each habit benchmarked against long-lost behavioral baselines. The museum functioned as a research site, a sanctuary, and a stage. He existed across all three.

  He received tools—a brush for delicate artifacts, a stylus for annotation, a cloth for polishing screen-glass—but also a coat with frayed seams and a satchel with minor wear, both maintained by design. Even his clothing presented a narrative impression. Visitors observed the way he adjusted his collar, the way he folded his sleeves before archival restoration. His actions reflected memory rather than utility.

  Others, when passing through—seemingly abstract, post-augmented minds wrapped either in softlight robes, abstract fashion, or inadequate covering—offered polite nods. Occasionally, questions followed. One came just last week:

  “Do you believe in anything?”

  Iven responded with honesty:

  “Sometimes. Only when I forget I shouldn’t.”

  The being smiled—a gesture more algorithm than emotion—and continued walking.

  That moment entered the transcript log under “Philosophical Anomaly – Mild Deviation (Preserve).”

  He left his quadrant regularly because the building offered no restrictions. Containment operated without walls. He once wandered into a disused wing meant for unsorted neural records. There, he sat among the coils of forgotten memories—experiences too malformed or contradictory for classification.

  One fragment looped endlessly: a man screaming into a phone about a lost job.

  Another: a woman humming through her own execution.

  A third: silence—fourteen minutes of blank tape labeled “Self-Deletion Attempt: Inconclusive.”

  Iven selected that one often.

  Representations of reality offered compression, aesthetic, and distance. The screen softened everything. Even the simulations displayed filters—resolution limits, curated lighting, emotional framing. Real experience lacked polish. Loathing did not arrive with orchestral cues or narrative arcs. It arrived with breath, sweat, repetition, and the slow disassembly of identity.

  He understood the difference between viewing suffering and being it.

  The AI could simulate pain. The augmented could contemplate it. Yet few had ever sat beneath it—with it—long enough to smell it decay in the lungs.

  Those who visited the Misery Exhibit often left with a look of solemnity, sometimes even reverence. They wrote reflections. They quoted old philosophers. But Iven had lived beneath the lens. He understood what lay beneath framing—the quiet collapse that did not scream, the slow erosion of self that no narrative arc could romanticize. The raw, swollen underside of despair, swollen not from trauma, but from boredom, futility, and the endless repetition of thought that refused to resolve.

  This wasn’t the grief of lost children or burned cities. His suffering resembled the real, modern kind—the kind engineered by excess time and insufficient meaning. The kind that wakes quietly and walks with you all day, hand on your chest, asking nothing in particular and answering even less.

  He was not a veteran. He was not broken in any obvious way. He had simply been left with himself too long.

  Fiction gave closure.

  Reality gave… more reality.

  Meaningless, sometimes. Untranslatable, always.

  And this reality, he believed, belonged to more than him. He did not place himself apart. He assumed, with quiet certainty, that any mind—given enough years and enough silence—would one day rot against its own walls. That belief gave him comfort. It allowed him to imagine that the others, with their perfect composure and boundless insight, brought their own subtle burdens behind the light in their eyes.

  He did not see it, but he chose to believe it.

  He was, to his knowledge, the only person labeled Authentic in the entire sector. Perhaps across all inhabited systems. No one told him this. No one needed to. His designation floated above his identity like a watermark—visible to those who knew how to look. No other mind he encountered shared his limitations. No other body moved like his, paused like his, failed like his.

  He existed in a society fluent in emotion. Their sorrow followed grammars. Their longing followed rules. They rendered pain with the precision of architecture, sculpted grief into diagrams and lenses. Every feeling could be shared, scaled, analyzed—communicated. And still, they spoke with curiosity. They asked questions. They sought truth. They moved through life with wonder burning in their chests.

  Iven, by contrast, stumbled. His language belonged to an age before nuance could be engineered. His sadness took the shape of fog. He spoke with tools built for farming, not for philosophy. Every attempt to explain what he felt passed through his mouth like dust through a broken filter. He thought they might understand better than he did. He suspected they could describe what he felt with elegance, with clarity, with symmetry. But to feel it—to truly feel it—remained an isolated experience. And if they could not feel it the same way, then no explanation would matter.

  Still, that was the point.

  It was his task to display it—not to understand it.

  To demonstrate the hollowness.

  To walk with it, wear it, show it off like a robe stitched from things the others had never needed, or perhaps had already discarded.

  He spent his days cataloging artifacts very few requested, walking corridors designed to mimic ancient museums, drinking bitter coffee brewed from reconstituted beans—a sensory cue preserved by habit.

  Among the items he kept near him, tucked beside a stack of hand-labeled data tablets, was an old music player—one of many iterations archived in the museum’s generational index. The earliest models had speakers the size of bricks, crude and boxy, built to fill a room with the sound of someone else’s longing. Then came the headphones—foam-padded, clumsy halos that wrapped around the skull like a crown of noise. The miniaturization that followed had birthed machines that nested in the palm, then in the ear, then behind the bone.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  In time, the devices had abandoned form entirely. Music became tactile—delivered through skinwaves and somatic pulse. Then came the neural ghosts: songs streamed directly into memory, indistinguishable from lived experience. They lacked buttons, songs, and silence—with only the impressions of melody, implanted directly into the limbic system like scent, like ache.

  He chose the oldest one. The kind with a wheel you could turn. The kind with an end to each track.

  He listened through its frayed cord and imperfect playback, letting the sound leak softly into the air around him.

  And he thought. That was the part the system observed but never parsed. The shape of his thoughts. The useless ones. The petty ones. The self-loathing that arrived without provocation. The shame that bled through into mornings, sour and directionless. Nothing noble. Nothing refined. Just the gray sediment of a mind kept running too long without reset.

  He stood in front of mirrors longer than necessary to remember what a human face looked like after feeling something useless for too long, with no better reason than that it arrived.

  On his 13,427th cycle of curation, the system flagged his behavior as anomalous.

  He stopped in the corridor between Emotion as Ritual and Pre-Synthetic Literature, his gaze resting on a decorative wall that had remained unchanged for millennia. It depicted a spiral of hands—grasping, reaching, pulling away—set in faded copper and synthetic goldleaf. A relic of ancient emotional design. He had passed it thousands of times. This time, he paused.

  Unusual pause detected.

  No prompt detected.

  Logging.

  He didn’t move. His brow furrowed. His left hand clenched and unclenched three times. Then, quietly, he spoke:

  “Why me?”

  The Central System had interacted with him before. Many times, in fact. It offered tools, it provided access, it responded to queries with clinical precision. But those interactions lived at the surface—instrumental, neutral, uncolored by interest. They served the performance of authenticity. A living exhibit required freedom of motion. Curiosity. Expression. Permission to behave as a human would, with no clear observer in sight.

  What the system valued wasn't what he asked, but how he acted when he didn’t ask anything at all.

  His patterns, his gestures, his hesitations—that was the real language. His responses to silence, not stimulus.

  The system never censored his intake. He could view simulations of Earth’s final wars. He could replay the death of capitalism and communism alike. He could immerse himself in reconstructed funeral rites from cultures long extinct. He could listen to screams, sermons, lullabies. The interface denied him nothing. It permitted contradiction, allowing any and all thoughts to flow freely.

  He tried to imagine its response to such an obtuse and vague question:

  ‘Prevention of instability.’

  ‘Prevention of redundancy.’

  ‘Prevention of anything that might corrupt the purpose of an Authentic lifeform too soon.’

  But as time passed, it had yet to process his question: “Why me?”

  Six hours passed.

  It was neither an error nor a delay. Six hours, in a civilization that prided itself on anticipation, meant he had drifted outside of its forecast range. For six hours, his presence sat unresolved in the queue.

  Then, finally, a message appeared in his personal stream—rare, but not unprecedented. Three lines, framed in soft silver:

  You offer cost-efficiency.

  You maintain original configuration.

  You provide potential for interest, however insignificant.

  It was unnecessary for a signature. The sender required none. Every system, every thread of logic in the curated world echoed that voice, and all who see it know its source.

  This message did not come as a revelation, as this was not the first conversation. But it was the first time he sensed that it no longer viewed him as only an exhibit.

  The Descent Initiative unlocked in the background, its permissions quietly adjusted.

  He continued living without augmentation. At least, without biological augmentation.

  His mind, still unmodified by implant or splice, remained as it had always been.

  The rest—the systems, the routines, the monitoring net—already wrapped around him like flesh.

  He adjusted the angle of the display case again. The glass resisted with a microsecond of lag, calibrated to mimic the friction of early hydraulic hinges. Behind it sat a folded cotton shirt, faded red, factory-mass-produced in 2043. Beneath it: a plastic ID badge, its edges warped, the name barely legible under age-simulated wear. Grace Alomar. Civil Registrar. Temporary.

  Iven blinked twice, slowly. His breath was audible in the room, though the environment required no oxygen for its stability. He sighed from habit. The sigh held no message. It simply marked the end of a thought too minor to log.

  The lights overhead shifted imperceptibly—spectral nudging from the observation rig above. They weren’t watching with cameras. Cameras were for amateurs. They tracked microvariations in temperature, muscular tension, optic velocity, ambient neuron pulse discharge. A full-body behavioral mesh floated just outside the visual spectrum, updated continuously.

  Iven muttered to himself. He read the printed label three times. Once aloud. Twice in silence.

  In the room above, the researchers watched the stream ripple across their shared feed. Their bodies didn’t move, but their eyes glowed faintly where layered vision modes overlapped. Some observed through emotion-mapping overlays. Others tracked tonal frequency variance or thought latency curves. Their minds parsed different layers of his motion, sound, hesitation—converted into actionable strangeness.

  “Efficiently inefficient,” murmured one. She simply added context quietly so as to not disrupt the analysis.

  “Extremely rare configuration,” noted another, tagging Iven’s posture at timestamp 15:43:01. Twelve seconds of downward gaze, followed by a double-blink and thumb flex. No known trigger. No external prompt. Authentic behavior preserved in fossil-grade fidelity.

  Iven rubbed his eyes awkwardly, then shook his hand like the movement had disappointed him. He picked up a cloth and began cleaning the edge of a shelf that held nothing.

  He said nothing for several minutes, but his breathing pattern changed.

  The system didn’t ask him to speak. It never had, and it never would.

  His usefulness came not from his words, but from the way he chose to break silence.

  Behind him, an antique music player played a looping track—something orchestral, pre-AI assisted composition, imperfectly remastered. Iven had loaded the track into his workspace nearly four hundred cycles ago and never once skipped it. It served no known cognitive function.

  The researchers filed new observations. One flagged a moment of “possible melancholy.” Another marked the absence of predictive rhythm in his object placement—he had broken pattern again. Not intentionally. Just subtly enough to stay interesting.

  He kept muttering. Quiet. Meaningless to anyone else. A language too outdated to impress, too subjective to automate. But still—just authentic enough to sustain observation.

  No alerts triggered.

  No conclusions reached.

  Just a continuous trickle of meaning, leaking through a mind that shouldn’t matter.

  And so, they watched.

  The lab curved like a seashell, its surface skinned with thought-responsive organic panels. Screens didn’t exist here. Knowledge emerged in fields—light fields, echo fields, information shaped like touch. There were no desks. No gravity anchors. No spoken instruction unless requested. This place taught by immersion rather than method. Its design flowed with the quiet intelligence of a society that had stopped differentiating between architecture and cognition.

  Children—if one could still call them that—sat in concentric spirals. Their bodies no longer matched any pre-cybernetic stage of human development. Limbs reshaped for tool integration, spinal columns overlaid with neural co-processors, flesh offset by smooth adaptive plating that changed shade with thought. Eyes glowed with datastreams and concentration. They communicated beyond oral speech—compressed bursts of idea-forms, shared instinctively and wirelessly through layered networks.

  Iven stood at the center. Alone. Cloth garments from the pre-Age of Decline hung off his frame in ways that signaled fragility. Visible stitching, asymmetrical, unpolished; imperfections of every type. No ambient signal followed him. No soft intelligence hovered near his skin. He carried no devices for this occasion.

  The floor beneath him did not light up. The air did not adjust to his neural phase. No system calibrated itself to his biological rhythm. He remained static in a space meant for fluid intelligence. Everything in the room adapted to the children. To him, it adapted nothing.

  The lab requested that he explain “meaning.”

  He had received the prompt four seconds before arrival.

  He began slowly with unwitting structure, his voice—slightly hoarse, slightly slow. He spoke about hunger and confusion. About silence in old apartments. About art made without audience and doomed to obscurity. About the way people tried to outlive themselves through objects. He didn’t present as one would perform a lecture. He simply stood there, held upright by something older than posture, and offered the only thing they couldn’t fabricate: the sound of someone trying to say something real, and maybe failing.

  The children listened, with respectful confusion replacing the awe of a rare sight. Their questions came encoded in multispectral linguistics, translated into vocal patterns for his benefit. The translator condensed them into tones. Even then, their voices retained a softness that felt engineered, feathered with patience and filtered clarity.

  One, a girl with memory-fold eyes and plasma-threaded nails, raised a hand and asked:

  “Why does your sadness feel slower than ours?”

  Iven blinked. The question did not strike him as profound. It struck him as familiar. Too familiar to answer cleanly.

  He could have said: Because mine isn’t curated.

  Or: Because yours ends when class does.

  Or: Because sadness, when it starts early, keeps walking long after you sit down.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he looked at her for a moment longer than expected.

  Then he said:

  “Because I carry it while walking.”

  No one asked for clarification.

  The room, despite its constant hum of computation, fell into something close to quiet. A soft pause caused by reverence, but also by unquantifiable ambiguity. The kind of moment no simulation closed neatly. One child, without understanding why, adjusted the sleeve of their garment the way he had.

  The system recorded twelve new micro-expressions, six posture variants, and one lexical irregularity.

  Then Iven said something unexpected. Something that was not part of the prompt, nor aligned with the expected arc of his performance:

  “Misery was.”

  The class ended five minutes ahead of schedule.