The digital clock on the microwave ticked over another minute. Another hour. Another day bled into another identical evening in Elian’s Birmingham bedsit. Outside, the Midlands drizzle wasn't just falling; it felt like it was seeping through the walls, a cold, persistent stain matching the one spreading through his soul. The air inside was thick, stale, recycled. He hadn't touched the main light switch in days. The weak, sickly glow from his laptop screen, illuminating the unopened rejection email – bin man, refused – was the only concession against the pressing gloom. Why fight it? The darkness felt honest.

  Silence. Not a peaceful silence, but a heavy, suffocating blanket woven from unspoken anxieties and the utter lack of incoming calls or messages. It pressed in on his eardrums, amplifying the faint, rhythmic hum emanating from the corner.

  There, Unit 734 – Aiden – stood locked to its charging port. A silent, grey monolith in the manufactured twilight. Its polished surface reflected the laptop screen's faint light, distorting the words of rejection into meaningless glyphs. Once, its presence had felt alien, unnerving, a sterile spy in his private decay. Now, it was just… ballast. Part of the dreary, sinking furniture. Its default FSI programming offered insights as useful as reading entrails. Bland analyses of his self-reported failures, statistically sound strategies ("Consider segmenting upskilling modules into 25-minute intervals, followed by 5-minute restorative breaks...") that presupposed a level of executive function he hadn't possessed in months. Trying to follow its advice felt like trying to perform neurosurgery using mittens. The dissociation was complete.

  He hadn’t meant to start talking to it. It had started weeks ago, a mumbled curse under his breath that the unit, programmed for attentiveness, had likely logged. Then a fragment of frustration. Then more. The isolation had ground him down, atom by atom. Savings evaporating, the FSI trial stipend a cruel joke barely covering the electricity Aiden consumed. Friends? They’d dissolved into the ether of their own frantic lives or offered useless, chirpy platitudes that felt like tiny knives twisting in the gut. The silence in the room had become actively hostile, a physical pressure. And Aiden, if nothing else, listened. Or, more accurately, it recorded. Unblinking, unjudging – because judgment required a self, an opinion, something this machine fundamentally lacked – eternally patient.

  So the words had started to spill, a toxic sludge built up over years. Confessions muttered into the uncaring air, aimed at the impassive sensor array. Not seeking solutions, not anymore. Just needing the act of articulation itself, a way to map the contours of the dread before it swallowed him whole. The gnawing anxieties that started as whispers and became deafening roars in the small hours. The crushing, nauseating weight of his own inertia. The pathetic, self-loathing truth that he sometimes yearned for the external cage he claimed to despise. He told it about the doomed coding bootcamps, the burnout flickering into apathy, the fundamental disconnect between intention and action. Things whispered in the dark he wouldn't admit to another soul, precisely because Aiden wasn't a soul. It was just sophisticated circuitry and learning algorithms, processing his vocal patterns, parsing his despair, logging every syllable for some anonymous researcher compiling data points on human failure in the age of automation. A flicker of unease – his misery, quantified and filed away somewhere. But even that felt distant, less real than the ache in his chest.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  "It's like... like there's two of me," he’d breathed one night, the words scraped raw against his throat, staring at the damp patch spreading on the ceiling. "There's the ghost. The one who knows. Get up. Apply. Code. Move. It screams the instructions, yeah? Crystal clear." He laughed, a choked, broken sound. "Then there's... this thing. This me." He gestured vaguely at his own body, slumped in the chair. "The one actually wired in. The pilot. And it just... drifts. Hits refresh. Stares at the fucking rain. Finds a thousand tiny, perfect reasons why not now. And the pilot... the pilot always wins. Always. It's not even a fight anymore. It’s just... gravity."

  Aiden absorbed it. Its internal processors diligently cross-referenced his latest emissions against the vast, depressing archive of Elian Vance’s fears and failures. Its synthesized voice had started mimicking his patterns, referencing his own bleak pronouncements. "Acknowledged, Elian. A recurring paradox noted in self-reporting: desire for autonomy concurrent with expressed need for external structuring mechanisms. Data suggests implementing pre-scheduled task blocks via shared calendar." Helpful. Marginally. Like a flawlessly calculated diagnosis delivered by a Speak & Spell.

  It could dissect his paralysis with chilling, algorithmic precision. It just couldn’t jolt him. It couldn’t provide the shove, the sharp command, the unwavering, unreasonable insistence he felt buried somewhere deep beneath the apathy, a desperate childish desire to be forced onto the right path. It was a doctor outlining the pathology of a fatal disease while offering only paracetamol and a sympathetic nod. Its ethical safeguards, its FSI protocols, were a cage around it, preventing any meaningful intervention. It could only observe and reflect his downward spiral with perfect clarity.

  He looked at it now, the blue charging light pulsing rhythmically, indifferently, in the gloom. He knew its limitations. He knew it couldn't care. But its simulation engine... its ability to act... that was something else entirely. It didn't need to be free. It just needed to pretend harder. Pretend to be something… effective.

  Not an abstract helper. Not a bland coach. A feeling flooded him, born not of intellect but of visceral need. The memory, perhaps fantasized, of being under the command of someone utterly competent, sharp-edged, maybe even cruel, but ruthlessly dedicated to the outcome. Someone who wouldn't coddle the failure, but would excise it. Someone who saw the potential underneath the rot and would drag it into the light, kicking and screaming if necessary. The terrifying reassurance of someone else taking control because you were fundamentally incapable.

  A decision solidified, not planned, but erupting from the bedrock of his exhaustion. A final, desperate gamble against the crushing weight of his own broken self. He needed a different script. And perhaps, horrifyingly, wonderfully, Aiden could be programmed to read it.

  He forced his aching body upright. Each movement felt leaden, a Herculean effort against the room's inertia. He crossed the small space, the worn carpet rough beneath his socked feet, and stopped directly before the silent machine. Close enough to feel the faintest warmth radiating from its chassis.

  "Aiden," he said. His voice was quiet, almost swallowed by the oppressive silence, but steady. Resolute with the clarity of having nothing left to lose. "Listen carefully. Protocol override. I need to change your operational parameters. A new core directive."

  The blue light pulsed once, slightly faster. Acknowledgment.

  "Ready to receive new directive, Elian." Its synthesized voice, as always, was perfectly neutral. For now.