Misery was.

  It had long since been archived, compressed into data strings and emotional templates, charted across innumerable case studies and simulated societies. 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 in this utopia, leaving nothing but a curated sequence of videos and diary entries. His task, by role rather than reason, involved ensuring its traditional cleanliness.

  He offered no tears currently. The system received observation of this action frequently, during his earliest months. However, no instruction was given to him regarding emotional guidance or otherwise.

  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 of waking, working, documenting, and curating without deviation. The system determined 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 but somewhat notable.

  He followed schedules made to reflect ancient rhythms. Eight-hour cycles, three meals, and intermittent solitude guiding his lifestyle. 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 brought with him a brush for delicate artifacts, a stylus for annotation, and a cloth for polishing screen-glass. He also wore a coat with frayed seams and a satchel with minor wear, a formal but regular outfit. Visitors occasionally observed the way he adjusted his collar, the way he folded his sleeves before archival restoration. He was an abnormal presence.

  When they pass, he sometimes gives them a nod. These individuals, post-augmented and dressed in soft robes, strange outfits, or barely anything at all, usually nod back. Sometimes they ask questions. One had last week.

  “Do you believe in anything?”

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

  The being smiled 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. There were no prisons, let alone censorship. However, he could not live among these aliens. Greater forces kept him completely organic, free from the augmentation for the simple purpose of showcase.

  He wandered into a disused wing meant for unsorted neural records, and sat among the coils of forgotten memories. With a display, he browsed the contents.

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

  Another: a woman humming for no apparent reason.

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

  Representations of his world’s reality offered a certain aesthetic and distance, and contrary to reality, the screen softened everything. However even the simulations, perfect in clarity, displayed filters. Not in a sense of reality, but emotional framing. Emotions like loathing did not arrive with orchestral cues or narrative arcs. It arrived with stress, repetition, and the slow disassembly of identity.

  He understood the difference between viewing suffering and being it.

  The AI could simulate pain, 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 and quoted old philosophers, but Iven had lived beneath the lens. He understood what lay beneath framing, beyond textbook and description. The quiet collapse that did not scream, the slow erosion of self that no narrative arc could romanticize. The raw, swollen underside of despair had grown within him for months. It was not swollen not from trauma, but from boredom, futility, and the endless repetition of thought that refused to resolve. A depression that does not kill.

  He was a veteran, but he was not broken during that time. Here, however, he had simply been left with himself too long. Too long within this ‘heaven.’

  Fiction gave closure. A good ending must end a book.

  Reality gave… more reality.

  Meaningless, sometimes. Untranslatable, always.

  When he looked out to the citizens of this world, he thought 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 burdens behind the light in their eyes.

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

  He was, to his knowledge, the only person labeled Authentic in the entire sector. His designation floated over his descriptions 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 following perfect grammars. Their longing followed rules, and they rendered pain with the precision of architecture, sculpting grief into diagrams and lenses. Every feeling could be shared, scaled, and analyzed, providing complete understanding of all thoughts. Their communication was in perfect language, and still, they spoke with curiosity. They asked questions and 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, the sadness taking 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. Though he never learned the language nor could he perform it, he suspected they could describe what he felt with clarity. But to feel it remained an isolated experience only to him. 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, 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 few requested, walking corridors designed to mimic ancient museums and 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. The museum contained a row of music’s history. Beyond the physical instruments and turning to electroacoustics, 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.

  Further down 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. Until eventually, behind the bone.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  In time, the devices had abandoned form entirely. Music looked beyond simple audio and turned to a new form of bass, delivering through skinwaves and somatic pulse. From then on, music became as tactile as it was audial.

  Eventually, they invented the neural ghosts: songs streamed directly into memory, indistinguishable from lived experience. They’ve transcended buttons, songs, and silence, the impressions of melody implanted directly into the limbic system like scent and ache.

  He chose an old one. The kind with an end to each track.

  He listened through its wireless buds and imperfect playback, letting the sound leak subtly into the air around him.

  In this moment, he simply 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. 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. It depicted a spiral of hands—grasping, reaching, pulling away—set in faded copper and synthetic goldleaf. Being a relic of ancient emotional design, he had passed it thousands of times. This time, he paused.

  Unusual pause detected.

  No prompt detected.

  Logging.

  His brow furrowed, and his left hand clenched and unclenched three times. Quietly, he spoke:

  “Why me?”

  The Central System had interacted with him before. It offered tools and provided access, responding to queries with clinical accuracy. But those interactions only lived at the surface. It was nothing but instrumental, neutral, and uncolored by interest. They served the performance of authenticity, for a living exhibit required freedom of motion. The living exhibit required curiosity, expression, and with only several restrictions, permission to behave as a human would.

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

  To the machine, his patterns, gestures, and hesitations were 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, and lullabies. The interface denied him nothing, allowing any and all thoughts to flow freely.

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

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Prevention of instability.’

  ‘Prevention of redundancy.’

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

  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 might’ve 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. 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, for this system controlled all. But even if this computer was meant to oversee this society as the monarch, there were greater kings. Connected loosely was the Central System, a machine Iven refused to educate upon, lest he implodes from insignificance.

  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.

  In the auditorium, 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 legible under age-simulated wear. Grace Alomar. Civil Registrar.

  Iven blinked twice, his breath audible in the room. He sighed from habit, but the sigh held no message.

  The lights overhead shifted imperceptibly from the observation rig above. They weren’t watching with cameras. They tracked microvariations in temperature, muscular tension, optic velocity, ambient neuron pulse discharge, all from a distance. 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. Their access had come as a windfall, granted by the system without explanation. No one questioned the permission, but they knew better than to waste the opportunity.

  Some observed through emotion-mapping overlays, while others tracked tonal frequency or thought latency. Their minds parsed different layers of his motion, sound, and hesitation, converted into a singular statement. Actionable strangeness.

  “Loernthac sriv-denat,” murmured one. She simply added a context quietly so as to not disrupt the analysis.

  “Vetchrinol para-sthenth,” noted another, tagging Iven’s posture at timestamp 15:43:01. Twelve seconds of downward gaze, followed by a double-blink and thumb flex. Authentic behavior preserved in fossil-grade fidelity.

  Though some communication involved speech, most conversations occurred through silent transmission, so while the room appeared full of noise to them, to him it remained completely silent.

  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, orchestral and imperfectly remastered. Iven had loaded the track into his workspace nearly four hundred cycles ago and never once skipped it. It served the known cognitive function of habit, and it was logged.

  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, and meaningless to anyone else. A language too outdated to impress, too subjective to automate, but just authentic enough to sustain observation.

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

  And so, they watched.

  The lab curved like a seashell, its surface skinned with responsive panels. Screens didn’t exist here, as knowledge emerged in the fields within the mind. There were no desks, and seeing young individuals across from him, he chose to not speak unless requested. 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 and they communicated beyond oral speech. Compressed bursts of idea-forms were 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, and unpolished, imperfections of every type. No soft intelligence hovered near his skin, and with all meetings, he carried no devices for this occasion.

  He remained static in a space meant for fluid intelligence. Everything in the room adapted to the children, but to him, it adapted nothing.

  The lab requested that he explain “meaning.”

  It was yet another philosophical question, perking no interest from him.

  However, 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. Instead, 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 usually failing.

  The children listened, with respectful confusion replacing the awe of his unique condition. 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 glowing eyes and 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, providing nothing but silence.

  His emotions told it all, and 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. 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.

  Only then did Iven say 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.