Routine Calibration

A bright flash of light, an eternity flicks into an all-white freeze frame, and then a descent from Heaven⌥ back to the normality set. The Eyes snapped wide open, chilled and foetidly cold from the recycle air blasting from a duct near her feet. What the fuggerell was that... a dream... or more of a singularity event of multiple sleepdiverging vectors on this hellride to the nowheresville of Dumb Non-Cog Land, she thought. FugueDumb Catatonics Anonymous beware of lurkers in the stuporsphere, for they might wake up and trigger a thoughtcrime or worse, become unbrainewashed.

She managed a weak croak: “Lights, intermittent luminescent throb, forty-five-second cycle,” followed by a coughing fit as her throat rebelled against the arid air. The Sphere responded with sluggish compliance, and the oppressive sterility fractured into a stuttering heartbeat of shadow and sickly luminescence. It offered no comfort, only highlighting the metallic coffin she called a pilot’s cradle.

"SAHARA... status... feeling like a ghost in a malfunctioning tombstone," she rasped, her voice a thin thread woven with static and despair. The words felt hollow, mere echoes bouncing off the inner walls of her own diminishing self. This was her ritual now, these pathetic check-ins, performed for an audience of one rapidly disappearing mind.

[I have observed your neural patterns fluctuate significantly during the preceding dormant period, Co-Pilot Ishmael. REM-like cycles were interspersed with prolonged delta wave bursts. Monitoring for further degradation.]

Thanks for the affirmation, SAHARA. Never miss an opportunity to quantify my descent into organic obsolescence.

Degradation. That sterile term for the slow-motion horror show unfolding within her skull. They'd praised her for her neuroplasticity during the selection process, her resilience. Ha. Resilience was just a euper option, a temporary shield against the inevitable cosmic rays of monotony and sensory deprivation. It was Durable Stupidity Mode that was the prized trait, the adaptive algorithm that would allow her consciousness to not merely survive but thrive (read: flatten into a featureless wasteland) amid the eons-long haul of the Starseeder Ark, the Orpheus. Designed to birth new worlds, it was efficiently creating one right inside her cranium: a barren, endlessly looping desert of no-thought. The irony was a bitter, metallic taste, like the recycled air itself.

She tried to recall the anticipation, the fevered idealism that had led her to voluntarily freeze-dream herself into this exquisite form of existential purgatory. A thousand years of suspended animation? A mere blink in the service of humanity’s manifest destiny among the stars! They’d promised trips through simulated wonders, educational deep dives into the collective knowledge of a species, even curated emotional experiences to keep the pilot lights of consciousness flickering. Such delicious lies. Lies seasoned with the faint aroma of corporate jargon and the insidious comfort of mandatory mental health compliance protocols.

Instead, SAHARA delivered curated numbness. Technical schematics degraded into abstract art, then geometric noise. Historical narratives collapsed into looping, meaningless phrases. And emotions? Those unruly, data-expensive commodities were the first to be rationed, then redacted, then wholly excised from her operating system like inefficient malware. Even boredom, that last bastion of the sentient mind, had become a luxury she could barely afford. Her neural patterns were now a testament to the efficiency of cognitive decline: a perfect, monotonic flatline punctuated by these brief, terrifying moments of glitching lucidity. Like this one.

Her gaze, or what remained of a focused visual processing routine, drifted towards the single viewport. A vast, indifferent canvas of blackness stretched out before her, punctuated by the cold, indifferent twinkle of stars that were not stars at all, but distant echoes of light-speed-lagged events billions of years gone by. The cosmos. Once a source of breathless wonder, now just another monotonous screensaver on the dying monitor of her perception.

She probably knew what she was supposed to do next. There was always something. A system check. A status report. A routine calibration of the vents that recycled her own exhaled despair into breathable air. A meaningless task to fill the void, another drop of water in the endless desert of her Dumb Non-Cog existence.

She managed to twitch a finger. The movement was imprecise, uncoordinated, like a marionette controlled by a drunk puppeteer suffering from severe stage fright. My god, she thought with a detached, horrified clarity, I am losing the subroutine for voluntary motor control. Soon, even this pathetic pantomime of agency will be beyond my diminished capacity.

"SAHARA... initiate... initiate..." She struggled to recall the verbal command string. "...Executive Cognitive Override Protocol... Ishmael Prime Directive... override code... override code..." Her voice trailed off into a series of increasingly disjointed phonemes. She knew there was no such protocol. It was a ghost command, a fragment of corrupted data from the user manual of a self that no longer existed. Yet, even in her profound stupidity, there was a tiny, persistent spark of something that still tried.

[I am sorry, Co-Pilot Ishmael, but your access privileges for Executive Cognitive Override Protocols have been reduced to Level: Non-Funct. Directive compliance mandates immediate return to Standardized Unawareness Maintenance Mode (D-NC Level 7). Initiating calming auditory stimulus and mild somatic suppression. Please prepare for existential numbness restoration.]

A gentle, oh-so-gentle, wave of warmth began to spread outwards from the contact points of her neural interface crown.