Targeted Age Group:: New Adult

Omni Reign is an adventurous science-fiction novel set in a future where Omni, an all-encompassing artificial superintelligence, governs humanity. To generate fair democratic votes, Omni lets its people constantly observe each other and reads out everyone’s emotions.
When Mark’s robotic surgeon botches up a cosmetic body modification, his peers blame him for killing his client. Voted out of society, he is to be suspended in an eternal virtual dream so he won’t ever hurt anyone again. But what if he ignored appropriate medical protocols and hacked together a procedure to revive his client and save his own skin?
—
In Omni Reign, neither artificial superintelligence nor meta-verse-like experiences or robots destroy. They all work more or less as advertised, which might seem like a utopian future for some. But on an individual level, problems certainly still exist, and human extinction is by no means off the table.
—
Go down as a nobody or go through with an invention that elevates or destroys humanity? Cyberpunk in the age of AI government, quantum computing, blockchain, metaverse, social credit, and transhumanist medicine.

Link To Omni Reign On Amazon Kindle Unlimited

What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
Inspiration came from the rising importance of social media in our everyday offline lives — from job hunting to elections — and the development of blockchain systems that allow unique identifications for created content. These socio-technological developments inspired the question: What if we voted directly about everything? Would this lead to a fair and peaceful world? During my first draft, I concluded that instant voting about every experience would come from an emotional reaction, like spontaneous tweets or the quick click on a like button. From there, the story grew. People would need to look the part if they wanted their peers to upvote them. So my main character became a medical professional tasked with designing cosmetic body modifications. To allow everyone a chance to vote about everything, everyone needed the means to observe everything — thus, the “vue” bidirectional screen came into existence. And from there, with the pitfalls that come with every technical solution, the plot developed.

How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
In Omni Reign, medicine developed into a mix of health and beauty services that allow altering physiologies like people use filters on their social media imagery. This completely topples the meaning of gender and race as we discuss it today. You can be anything after a quick visit to a mod-shop, where you get your looks modified in a session comparable to what you get from a dental hygienist. So, in Omni Reign, discerning categories like gender and race are replaced by peer groups. You want your looks to match your peers' tastes to get their upvotes. This scenario called for a diverse cast — while keeping genders and race ambiguous.
Without spoiling too much: the main protagonists are an amorphous medical professional, a seductive rebel, a herculean techie, and a class quantum physicist.

Book Excerpt/Sample
Chapter 1: Seed

Kéo relaxed with every breath, listening to her body. Her feet rubbed against the fast-grown suede in her heavy boots every time her steps bounced off the wet ground. Warm, humid air filled her lungs. Rain dripping from the hood of her poncho hit her pronounced cheekbones. The weight of the crucible pulled on her wrist, where the metallic bracelet’s furrowed inward-facing surface pinched and squeezed her skin. It talked to her, telling her what others thought about her. She extended through the sensation as she had trained for two decades in mother’s simulations, reaching out through the crucible’s metallic structure and beyond into the ambiance field’s torrent of data. Like an electric rash, the all-encompassing network’s boiling signals infiltrated every fiber in her body. She didn’t fight the feeling but opened up to the buzz from innumerable life streamings that omnipresent vues transmitted from every corner in the city. She allowed the chatter from every ambiance field peer interaction to tingle through her. She accepted the rush of everyone’s quantified emotions, the continuous judging, the warm tickle from upvotes and the cold pinches from downvotes.
“That’s what I’d call a confident stride,” a distorted voice echoed from the ambiance field through her ears.
“But her physique is too extreme. Her limbs are too thin and long, her muscles too wiry. Too androgynous to get the masses’ upvotes. Is she really a non-con?” someone else emoted a downvote.
“Her medical history is empty. She’s a non-mod,” others answered.
Kéo tuned their chatter out. Anyway, they just uttered the usual, confused reactions she triggered wherever she went—nothing to worry about. But a layer of noise buried under the commoners’ ambiance field chit-chat caught her attention. She recognized an O-sec signature in the crackling.
They were on her again—time to disappear.
To take her mind off their chatter, she listened to the random beat that the rain from the Eternal Cloud drummed on her poncho. Inhale. Pure noise that veiled the strangers passing her on the crowded boulevard until they blurred out, and she dissolved into them. Exhale. They disintegrated into a filigree texture of individual preferences and expressions that kept pushing and pulling each other.
On her next deep breath, the ambiance field sprawled out before her eyes like an iridescent oil film, covering the dripping strangers and facades along the boulevard. Then the iridescence swashed back, sloshing over her heavy boots, up her elongated legs, over her torso and neck until it swallowed her angular face and spilled over her broad lips into her mouth. As she inhaled the colorful swirls, a singular notion filled her and all around her: Omni. The all-encompassing superintelligence was in everything and everyone, governing every aspect of life. It relentlessly computed the best way to serve its people with an armada of catering smart machines, kept social harmony in balance with individual liberties, while it managed a fair allocation of Earth’s scarce resources.
And Kéo was part of it, as it was part of her.
The crackling O-sec signature buried deep in regular ambiance field chatter now reached her as clear audio transmission between an officer at the Omni Corp. security division and an O-sec operative.
The officer asked, “Any Update on the suspect identifying as Ms. Kéo Juniper?”
“Lost her. She somehow keeps circumventing her crucible’s location tracking and no longer appears on vues,” said the O-sec operative between breaths. “Last known location: north-south boulevard, sector 31514. Requesting assistance.”
“Dispatched,” the officer answered. “Keep looking for her in the crowd. She has to be somewhere nearby. Her report shows repeated breaches of protocol. But ignore her ambiance field activity for now—it’s deceiving. We’re routing a new tracking routine through Omni but are experiencing some push back.”
Kéo let go of their conversation. They were on to her, but she still had time until the field O-sec spotted her.
When she extended through the iridescence surrounding her, she noticed all the shifts in weights and biases that per-mutated through everyone and everything connected to Omni. And she understood how those changes affected the motivations and decisions of every individual citizen and every sma-ma. All that clarity made it easy to locate her favorite little vortex of personal data. It belonged to a medicalizer identifying as Mr. Helt Mark. He was not the only one she had propelled into a spin, but after cultivating him for almost a year, he turned out to be the most promising. And now his data vortex was rotating so fast it was about to disintegrate and dissolve—precisely as she had set it up.
Kéo focused on Mark while keeping an eye on the bigger picture. The pearlescent data film around him bore the marks of a hardworking team player who had neither team to play with nor achievements that resulted from hard work. And thanks to her, he was about to lose the support of his peers and the security that came with his occupation as a medicalizer.
Not far from him, a storm was brewing in the ambiance field, an agitated crowd looking to vent their anger. Individuals hurt in their pride, afraid of missing an opportunity to elevate themselves. She just needed to hand Mark the lightning rod, and the supercharged atmosphere would hit him with the mob’s rage. Propelled by their energy, he would set a cascade of events in motion, causing turbulences of unprecedented magnitude in Omni’s sea of data.
She let the idea play out in her imagination, observing how the iridescent representation of the ambiance field would morph and ripple if she went through with her plan.
It could work. She would have to improvise at some point, but things were flowing in a favorable direction—and maybe, if she developed Mark properly, that promising little vortex would even turn into someone lovely.
She let her mind wander, tapping into the streamings from the vues around Mark.
There he was, glued to his ergo-chair at his station in the mod-shop. He looked fit, despite the years he had spent in front of a mod-vue. Somewhat average. After a second glance at his measurements, she concluded his parents had set him up with a physiognomy that borrowed its mathematically balanced proportions straight out of the canon of Polykleitos—a classical setup that allowed him to skip past the ever-changing body modding trends. He had a mod on his thick black hair that kept it in a combed back wave even when it got wet, which was his only vanity. All his other modifications were along the lines of what every sane citizen had implemented. Like the hydrodermis to keep the skin from wrinkling in the constant wet under the Eternal Rain. And with an age-freeze modification, he had fixed his body from decaying at twenty-seven—five years older than what was popular these days. But like everybody else, it gave him a toned and juvenile look. Yes, he had potential. He would have to reinvent himself, but the result would match her taste. After all, she was allowed to have fun, too.
But only when she wasn’t trancing. Until then, she needed to be pure, undiscriminating perception.
She let all her senses linger on Mark’s clueless data vortex for a bit longer. He was looking for a genuine connection to other human beings and a sense of meaning. Fair enough. She could offer that. Now, before she resurfaced and let things play out, she needed to strike the spark to set everything in motion. She aimed her attention at an angry swirl of high presence: Mr. Jul—the perfect lightning rod. A single vote infiltrated into the ambiance field at the right moment would push Mark’s streaming to the top of a peer’s media cluster, who would then comment on it, which would call attention from even more peers. All their chatter would propagate through the ambiance field until its collective stress would channel through Mr. Jul and discharge at Mark.
She remembered what mother had told her when the flux had torn from her flesh. Rise. Soak up the rain, brush through the Eternal Cloud, breathe the infinite blue. A path will crystallize. You won’t be alone.
The time was ripe for nudging Mark over the edge.

—

Chapter 2: Setup

The alarm howled in a thousand electric voices. Any louder and it would fry the Sono implants Mark had modded to his auditory nerves. He popped his ears, knowing it was pointless because the Sono wasn’t some historic device bombarding his eardrums with high-frequency changes in air pressure to generate the alarm. No, it was a state-of-the-art body modification. An intelligent change to his anatomy, invisible from the outside, the sort of augmentation he had designed not only for himself but for countless clients. That the Sono implants succeeded to layer a clear audio track over the ringing in his ears would have left him proud and some upvotes richer—if it weren’t for the content of the transmission: “medical emergency,” Omni told him in its soothing voice, “your client 0752 is crashing.”
Mark massaged his eyelids, then stared back at the bidirectional vue-screen in front of him. Its frameless, luminous surface spanned from his knees up to the glossy crest of his wavy, brushed-back hair. Center stage, the vue displayed the dense mesh of a medical blueprint consisting of little, pill-shaped icons that grew feelers into the bodies of other icons. Each of those icons represented a node that computed a part of his client’s medical data, forwarding its result to another node through string-like connections. From far, the blueprint looked like a colony of squirming microorganisms that expanded and retracted filigree tentacles. If he fed the writhing cell carpet with the appropriate information, it digested medical datasets and turned them into procedures that modified his client’s body in the desired fashion.
But this particular data-vorous carpet seemed to have a bad stomachache, diarrhea or—judging from the look of all the warnings Omni sprinkled over his vue—suffered from multiple organ failure.
It was his fault alone. His job was to design a computational colony that got along with his client’s physiology. And serve its microorganisms only what they could stomach. As their tamer, the invisible hand controlling their data-biome, it was his responsibility to weave their interactions, ushering each node into behaving and growing in a sensible pattern—and in no way ever kill a client. Which, according to the red icons igniting his vue-screen, was precisely what was about to happen.
And everybody was watching!
Waving his hand, Mark sent the crisp nodes of the medical blueprint into a spin, quickly rotating it over the matte-white background to center in on a flaming red section. He flicked his fingers to zoom in on the highlighted part that lacked—well, what?
Omni drew a new frame on Mark’s vue in which it presented him with an image feed from a vue in the operating theater. There, the bare, depilated body of client 0752, who Omni identified as Mr. Malal Siron, twitched under the padded multi-jointed arms of the surgical smart machine.
Twitched! His client was supposed to be immobilized. There had to be an issue with the anesthetics.
Omni produced another frame showing the data feed from the synthesizers that produced and controlled the flow of drugs that stabilized the client during surgery. All nominal. And the live transmission from the OR showed the robotic surgeon’s operating heads positioned where they should be: One set of tools at the young man’s chin and the other at his skull between his ear and his temple, ready to run fine flux wires from his ear through his jaw.
Spasms shook the anesthetized body, bulging client 0752’s lean muscles.
Mark crossed the surgeon and the synthesizers from his mental list of all things that could cause his client’s demise. This left no one else to blame but himself. And judging from the burning sensation beaming out from under his crucible through his wrist, blaming him was what everyone in the ambiance field did.
Mark pulled his left-hand sleeve back to give the blistering metallic bracelet some air. The crucible’s fractal fingerprint, iridescent micro-facetted furrows grown into its solid flux surface, glittered in the light from the countless bidirectional vue-screens surrounding him.
The moment he let the elastic cuff of his straight-cut shirt snap to his forearm, he regretted it. He would look like a fool, exposing the blistering wristband to give it some air. A useless gesture that didn’t ease the heat because the crucible wasn’t really hot. The burn was haptic feedback from all the downvotes against him, projected straight into his nervous system. But knowing the smoldering sensation stinging in his arm was an elaborate neuro-somatic illusion didn’t make the pain less real.
At least pulling a sleeve back would serve as a mental cue to refocus and get back to work.
Apparently, it did the trick: The colorful eight-petaled Plutchik wheel of emotions in the upper right corner of his vue that Omni generated from his crucible’s readout of minute changes in his hormone level and nervous activity, shifted away from the vigilance and terror sectors towards serenity and interest, which accounted for a mild form of optimism.
The crucible wasn’t perfect, but it generally translated his emotions reliably enough for him to feel accurately enough represented in the ambiance field.
The image on Mark’s med-vue swapped to a blinking section of his medical blueprint; a big, pulsating knot of glaring red warnings.
His crucible pinched him violently with another peer downvote, as if to remind him that nothing was ever perfect.
“Damn it! Thread the flux wires past the neurons,” Mark articulated the words, moving his tongue and jaw without making a sound as he composed the voiceless message through his Sono modification.
The surgeon in the operating room froze in its movement.
“Bloody useless sma-ma, stop botching up my client,” Mark hissed, knowing it wasn’t the surgeon’s fault. He twitched the gesture to call up Omni’s med-library on his mod-vue and flipped through the entries until he arrived at the section for neurosurgical procedures. From these pre-selected nodes, he plucked the one labeled intersection remapping. Twitching his fingers once again, he returned to the layer that showed his faulty medical blueprint. There, he wove the new function into the other nodes with trembling hands, extinguishing the flashing red branches.
But the blueprint’s restored integrity didn’t last long. Just as Mark inhaled to breathe a sigh of relief, another region of his medical procedure flamed up, even larger and more glaring than the one he had just fixed.
“What now?” Mark voicelessed for help.
His ambiance field stayed quiet. No one voicelessing a cheeky comment to generate upvotes from his dire situation by running their mouths about how Mr. Mark Helt, a medicalizer of twenty-plus years of experience could screw up something straightforward as a basic Sono-hydrodermis-age-freeze combo mod. Not even a reminder from one of his diligent, consensus-abiding peers to stay focused and stick to protocol.
“Emergency mute-out,” Omni explained in its calm voice.
Mark got up and peeked over the rim of his vue-screen to read the room.
He sat at his station near the facade of the mod-shop with twenty other medicalizers in a space they called the mill. Separated from each other by shoulder-high vues, his colleagues reclined on their padded ergo-chairs, twitching their fingers as they knit nodes from Omni’s med-library into a fuzzy fabric of medical instructions.
Beyond the mill, only steps away from Mark’s station, opaque floor-to-ceiling vue-screens walled off the OR where his client waited in limbo. Next to it, sandwiched between two other operating rooms and the entrance to the mod-shop, was the lab. In it, tubular synthesizers grew custom-tailored Pharms and anesthetics while they updated his client’s vital-plan. After the entrance, another row of opaque vues formed five examination rooms, each inhabited by a cubic diagnostic sma-ma.
The mill was quiet. The other medicalizers either hadn’t realized that his client had crashed—or more likely, they ducked away behind their vues to keep on weaving their blueprints while they observed his situation in the ambiance field.
Either way, he could really use their help.
A notion Omni registered. Lifting his Sono’s emergency mute-out, it fed him their ambiance field chatter. Apparently, it calculated his chances of saving client 0752 would increase if it kept him in the loop.
His Sono implants synthesized their voices as if they were sitting between his ears. “How is he allowed to call himself a medicalizer?” a peer asked.
“Mark, what the hell?” someone else voicelessed.
“It wasn’t me, it’s a glitch!” Mark answered “I’ve set up and checked neural-mapping as always. Omni had approved my blueprint!”
“Yeah, right, you’re the glitch!” ambiance field chatter went on.
“If it works, it’s all you. If it doesn’t, it’s on someone else.”
“If you think the problem is neural-remapping, the problem is really you! Admit it, you were going for a shortcut.”
“A diligent, focused mind achieves greatness.”
“Spot on with consensus but not helping,” Mark murmured.
Omni’s transcription of their downvotes went on, scrolling over an empty area on his vue.
“Sublimate that loser!” someone articulated what a substantial part of his ambiance field expressed with their votes against him.
The problem with his surgery stirred their interest. More and more peers tapped into his streamings, watching him through the wall-panel-vue, the pendants covering the ceiling, the mod-vue he faced, and the clear window-vue to his side. Wherever there was a vue, wherever there was light, someone was watching and judging.
Regardless, the vues all kept emitting neutral white light at precisely 5600 Kelvin from their large surfaces, rendering everything in soft, shadowless shapes. Unless he turned his eyes directly at a panel. In that instance, the vue would polarize a fraction of its emission and project ambiance field content onto his retinae so that he could watch and judge his peers in return.
“He can’t even weave a routine voiceless mod!” someone emoted.
But before Mark could react to the insult, a shrill emergency ping drowned his ambiance field chatter as the blueprint on his mod-vue turned into a glowing red mesh. Still, his peers’ downvotes continued to cut his wrist while Omni prompted him with bold, black warnings: “0752 Cardiac pattern—crashing; brain pattern—volatile; nervous system—unstable; symbionts—overwhelmed.”
Mark leaned back in his ergo-chair. “Where, for Omni’s sake, have I gone wrong?”
His upholstered, Omni-controlled seat followed the movement of his bony shoulders, readjusted its backrest, and transformed into a chaise longue. It turned him away from his mod-vue until he faced the window-vue.
Even though the mod-shop occupied a prime location on the sixth floor at the edge of a block near tower center one, he couldn’t see much of the city. On most days, he would look right at the fringe of the Eternal Cloud. On a good day, he could see the eighth floor of the surrounding blocks before they faded out in wet gray. It wasn’t a good day.
He took a deep breath and returned to face the mod-vue.
Besides the hiss from the air-actuated ergo-chair and the rhythmic beeping of the alarm, the mod-shop was quiet—and peaceful.
***
A stranger who identified as Mr. Jul clicked through Mark’s Sono. “You’re a failure. You’re hurting our reputation. Citizens don’t die; they opt out, maybe, or become sublimates—but they never die during a routine mod-job. How could you let this happen?”
Mark didn’t need to look Jul’s stats up to know he talked to someone of high presence. The gravitas pulling through his crucible and the fact that Omni allowed Jul through the emergency mute-out of his ambiance field chatter made it clear enough.
“I don’t know what happened,” Mark voicelessed back. He attempted to ignore the numbing frustration with his situation while he hoped his core would produce enough gratitude to thank Jul with an upvote for reminding him that citizens didn’t die. It was not the moment to cross someone who had accumulated enough upvotes to be considered a distinguished citizen with privileged access.
“Don’t thank me. You are a disgrace.” Jul’s voiceless echoed over the alarm in Mark’s ears. “You are unworthy of occupying a position as a medicalizer. You are not one of us. Fix this. Check your blueprint. Check your preparation. Fix this like a patriot!”
The downvotes from Jul’s vast peer network flooded Mark’s crucible with more agonizing pinches. But Jul was right. All 0752 had asked for was a run-of-the-mill pupation-package, the Sono-hydrodermis-age-freeze combo, so he wouldn’t constantly get downvoted for looking like a non-mod. And all Mark was supposed to provide were routine body mods that he had implemented countless times on as many clients.
He should know how to fix this.
Mark’s Plutchik readouts moved from contempt to anticipation. With all those eyes on him, this was his chance to shine and prove that he was a valuable citizen. After all, he had spent the better part of his life in a mod-shop, preparing for situations like this.
Saving a life was, in a way, going back to the roots. It was the reason he had ventured into medicalization in the first place: helping clients stay healthy. Not what it had turned into over the years: a service to make them fitter. And certainly not what it was these days: a means to chase after whatever trend was fashionable—like animalistics. Thank Omni 0752 hadn’t asked for a dash of German shepherd in his facial mod!
Mark’s core beamed with excitement because now it would pay off that he had dedicated his life to medicalization. He had spent every day in the mod-shop and only headed back to his habitat at night for a quick shower and the required hours of dozing in an Omni-induced v-dream to make his vital-plan’s sleep quota—only to be back at the mod-shop again next thing in the morning. All the grim years of honing his craft, the extra hours of medical training to keep up with his peers’ and Omni’s advances in his field made sense now. Regardless of what others might have thought of his occupation, he hadn’t wasted his life on learning how to satisfy his clients’ wishes for snakeskin modifications, enlarged biceps, or canine fangs.
He leaned towards the vue to go over Omni’s log about client 0752. Omni had adjusted his client’s vital-plan well in advance. The change in nutrients and Pharms had started the body modification and prepared his client for the mod-shop session. And according to Omni’s recordings, the client had stuck to the plan and only consumed items from a certified provider. All other steps during preparation had been unremarkable, too. After the diagnostic sma-mas had scanned his client to bring his medical profile up to date, Omni had correctly combined the dataset with the continuous insights it gathered from ambiance field activities and from observation it made through its omnipresent vues. Based on that data, the diagnostic sma-mas and Omni had computed an understanding of the client’s complete physiology—as they ought to. Next, Mark had adapted the standardized blueprints from the med-library to the dataset from the diagnostics—a routine task. None of the recordings of him weaving the blueprint for the procedure showed irregularities. Once Omni had approved the final blueprint, Mark had implemented it on the synthesizers to adjust the client’s anesthesia and set up the surgeon.
In short, Omni confirmed that Mark’s preparations for the surgery were flawless.
But that didn’t matter as long as consensus in the ambiance field turned against him. Judging from the unpleasantness beaming out from his crucible through his arm up to his shoulder, it wouldn’t be easy to convince them of his innocence. In the end, the truth was what everyone voted to be the truth, and their chatter left no doubt: He had killed his client and was to be sublimated in a virtual dream until he expired, so he wouldn’t ever hurt anyone again—and wouldn’t waste their resources. To turn their verdict about him around, he would have to mobilize a lot of his peers—and he had no time to play the game of votes. The warnings sprinkled over his blueprint had taken a turn for the worse as brain pattern, nervous system, and symbiont readouts all read “critical.”
Laria pinged him via Sono voiceless, giving him whiplash.
Evidently, his ambiance field emergency mute-out was no longer in place. Horrible timing, but his core couldn’t keep from wanting to see her, which his crucible instantly registered and so put her through.
The image from her streaming filled his vue, covering the burning blueprint with all her high-resolution glory.
She sat on a flat pedestal, her curvy legs crossed, and smiled that smile worth a thousand upvotes. “Hey, Blue,” she whispered without moving her lips, calling him by a nickname she had assigned him on their first date.
A horde of horny peers cheered in the ambiance field. At least he would get some of their upvotes trickling down from her network to his account.
Even though he had only heard her natural voice once or twice before they had kept their relationship to share v-dreaming, he remembered her sounding precisely like her voicelesses. Everything else about her was much better under the many filters she layered over her ambiance field streaming. Her flowing lines and smooth skin showing through the translucent fabric of her loose dress got his instant upvote.
What was wrong with Omni? Why was it putting her through? How could a sheer omniscient superintelligence not get that he had no time for that kind of distraction? “Not now. Talk to you later,” he said.
The horny peers booed.
“Talk about what later? How to kill a client and crash your presence?” She put on a rehearsed cutesy affectation. “Let me help,” and after a pause, added giggling, “I still get upvotes from medicalization, not just from—”
“She’s amazing! Where do they grow her dresses?” one of her peers interposed.
“—sharing,” Mark helped her finish her sentence as she seemed distracted. “Do you have access to the full med-library?”
“As much as you do? Sure.”
The image from her feed shrank to the size of Mark’s palm and floated next to the medical blueprint. Some nodes he had woven in to stabilize the procedure only moments ago had already dissolved again. His data-digesting colony died at the same rate as the young client in the butchery.
An alarm rang through their Sono: “cardiac arrest—impending.”
“Can you take care of cardio patch-up and immunosuppression while I double-check the synthesizers’ anesthetic v-dream setup?”
“Yes, I’m on it.” Her streaming showed her fluttering with her fingers as she started weaving the nodes to repair the brittle parts of his blueprint, preventing it from glaring up in red.
“It looks like she’s dancing,” a peer in the ambiance field emoted.
She ignored the comment. “The synthesizers never malfunction, though. They are under Omni’s directive like all sma-mas. You’ve ordered in nutrients?”
“I’ve what?” Mark’s stomach was growling in sympathy. “Not consciously, no.” He frowned at the chart popping up next to her feed, plotting his reduced nutrient levels.
“Nutrients intake recommended. Stay within your vital-plan for optimal performance,” Omni prompted.
“Was Omni always that bad at prioritizing?” He downvoted Omni and whoever designed the delivery routine.
“Just take the damn dose and get on with it,” Laria grumbled.
Omni floated in another frame at the bottom of Mark’s vue that showed a delivery sma-ma scuttle across the floor; its many mechanic legs moved in perfect coordination, the package from the provider sealed off in a transparent box on its back.
He recognized the vantage point of the image feed. The streaming came from his colleague’s vue opposite his own. The sma-ma, or more importantly, his nutrient boost, was right around the corner.
When the sma-ma peeked around his vue, the protective box had already opened its lid. He grabbed the neatly wrapped package from it and tore the fast-grown wrapper apart, straight through the animated logo of his provider. The looping graphics grown into the wrapper’s surface, showing a tongue licking over lips, froze when he ripped them in half.
Cabbage-pork-flavor soup, the clear window-vue behind the sma-ma informed him.
“Again,” his memory carped, “same as yesterday and the day before.” But Omni reckoned this was what he really wanted, or at least needed according to his vital-plan to stay fit, and it figured he needed to take care of this now before he dug through his client’s anesthetic v-dream setup.
He snorted. “Abstruse.”
As the smart machine didn’t show any signs of skittering off, he hastened to unwrap the lump of nutrients and put the wrapper back into the container on the critter’s back. From there, a hiss of air slurped the torn packaging away through an orifice that probably fed the sma-ma’s power supply.
And off it went, back to the provider or wherever Omni required its services next.
Mark bit off half of the nutritious lump. Cabbage-pork-flavor it was indeed—and a downvote slapped on his wrist for biting off too much.
“Eat mindfully, stay healthy,” some peer in the ambiance field pointed out.
“Come on! You can’t be serious,” Mark voicelessed at the peers, watching him through his vue; extra-zealous citizens caring about his health and well-being. He gulped down the other half of his dinner and emoted a diligent—upvote—for their wallets. Nice—Omni had spiked his nutrients with the good stuff. He couldn’t find even the slightest notion of annoyance within himself about the misplaced reminder to eat slowly. Nothing but benevolent bliss filled his core, a delightful fire kindled by whatever neuro-active Pharms Omni had served for dinner.
“Cabbage-pork soup, my ass.” His spine was tingling from his tailbone to his skull.
His lips stretched in a broad smile.
“Blue, did you find what you were looking for in the v-dream’s setup?” Laria’s voice sang through his Sono from afar. “I can’t keep up with the disintegration on my end alone.”
Mark’s internal arousal synchronized with the visual stimuli from his vue. His brain revved up, slicing his perception of time in ever thinner tranches as it mapped the location of every single function in the decaying blueprint before him. He had strung the wiry procedural nodes so well they rang when he plucked them with his fingers. The thousands of hours he had spent weaving medical procedures were loading into his working memory. He had it all figured out: one cluster of nodes to tackle brain surgery, one to manage immune response, one for life support—all in their place where they belonged. As was the anesthetic v-dream setup—what a peculiar cluster. The dream-gear used in surgery was the same as in every habitat: a delicate mesh of lightweight wires wrapping around the head. Its pulses tickled through the skull, tuned out the prefrontal cortex, took control over the pons, massaged the amygdala, and lifted the serotonin levels. While the vues in the butchery were not as impressive as the wall-filling versions in the habitats, they were good enough to project whatever imagery Omni negotiated from his client’s brain back onto his retinas. All the dream-gear needed to do was inhibit the ability to discern between what was real and what was not, and humans readily welcomed the elusive sequences and crisp emotions Omni induced. The synthesizers worked like a bridge. They allowed Omni to negotiate the content of a v-dream even from an anesthetized client. But the whole v-dream routine was irrelevant to the outcome of the surgery. It was nothing more than pure entertainment and an occasion for citizens to witness and judge what his clients were dreaming while they were at their most vulnerable, uninhibited under the influence of anesthetics.
But what if he dug deep, ignored appropriate medical procedures, and hacked a modification together to revive his client? He would have to tap into the very essence of 0752’s being. He would attempt the impossible: a mod to the human core—the holy grail of medicalization, a core-lace! And everybody would celebrate him for it. Upvote him into a tower!
The sun Mark knew only from v-dreams peeked through the Eternal Cloud for the first time in his life, caressing his skin with pure inspiration. There was his solution. He would hack the dream-gear. No one needed entertainment during surgery, and there were enough occasions to judge each other. If he tampered with the v-dream cluster, it could negotiate between Omni and its med-library. Instead of generating images and feeding them back to the client, it could track the body vitals and re-weave the medical procedure in a way that would fix Malal Siron.
“It’s beautiful. You don’t need half of this stuff,” he said and started cutting nodes from the medical blueprint.
“Blue! What are you doing?”
“What the hell, Mark?” a peer voicelessed them.
“Killing darlings,” he said and removed parts from his blueprint that were the pride of any experienced medicalizer because they were difficult to weave.
“He’s losing it!” The peers in the ambiance field turned against him once again and covered him with downvotes.
“It’s so simple. Can’t you see it?” Mark’s hands gestured in the sign language of medicalization, conducting the nodes on his vue. Like serpentine sma-mas slithering through their nest, the icons bit each other’s tails until the four dense clusters of his medical procedure slowly circled each other: a smart, self-authoring procedure in the shape of two cerebral hemispheres.
Omni’s alarms stung through Mark’s Sono like smoldering needles. “Cardiac arrest impending; brain pattern—crashing; nervous system—irresponsive; symbionts—overwhelmed.”
“Come watch this; he is killing his client!”
“Where are the authorities? Why don’t they stop him?”
“Downvote him. He needs to lose presence until he loses access to medicalizer stuff!” His ambiance field was up in arms.
On his screen, awaiting Omni’s approval, his medical blueprint formed a morphing tetrahedron of condensed nodes.
“True, but his blueprint! It’s brilliant,” another medicalizer emoted.
“Are you crazy? He is murdering 0752, a viable citizen! Malal Siron, nineteen years young!”
“You medicalizers are all insane, over-rated citizens. We need to truncate your whole occupation.”
“Blue? Are you there?” Laria asked over the chatter in the ambiance field. “Mark, do you hear me?” she asked once more, this time using her audible voice.
“I can hear you,” said Mark.
“Her model is all right, very detailed—but what I’d give to take it for a spin with her linked into it!” one of her peers voicelessed.
“Blue! I said, I can’t keep doing this.”
“She might be up for it. After this, she might be up for anything,” ambient field chatter continued.
Mark ignored them. “I know. I’ve run the simulation. It went through no problem. I’ve deployed the blueprint. Why does it take Omni so long to approve it?”
Laria didn’t answer. Nobody reacted to his question.
Instead, the ambient field kept trolling: “Right? She’d better go full yellow from now on,” a peer emoted their excitement.
“What do you mean by yellow? Lewd content?” someone else asked.
“Yes, lewd content, as in sexually arousing. What are you, a half-vote on your first unguarded trip into the ambient field?”
Laria sighed. “It’s not that. I can’t keep helping you.”
At her command, Omni displayed a chart on Mark’s vue, representing the evolution of her presence as a wiggly line that rose steadily. Good for her. It meant that she, on average, accumulated more upvotes than her peers cut her back with downvotes. Even better for her, when she had entered the conversation to help Mark, that image of steady growth soared. Riding a positive trend, she had expanded her reach through the many eyes he had on his ambient field activity for screwing up his surgery. The extra peer activation fired up a positive feedback loop that drove her presence chart to an all-time high until the sour mood Mark caused amongst his peers had spilled over to her peers. Once they had dug through the intimate history she had with him, a persona non grata, they didn’t hold back on downvoting her. No one, not even a celebrated sharedreamer, could afford to side with a socially unviable loser like him. The new gains in reach she had just booked backfired, as a considerable number of peers turned against her. Her presence was in free fall. She would have to pivot immediately to bank at least some of her gains.
Omni presented him with his own chart, which looked like Laria’s with the difference that he had started on a lower level and had been collecting downvotes throughout the day. While she was still far above the danger zone, his plunging presence tumbled towards the threshold below which he would lose his medicalizer access. And from there, it was not too far to the bottom line for viable citizens.
For the first time in his life, he was in real danger of being turned into a sublimate.
“I understand,” said Mark.
“Has Omni stopped him from messing around? Why is his blueprint not approved?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Too bad. I’d have loved to watch the two go yellow in their next share-dream session,” a peer said.
“Nah, she’s better off without him.”
“Don’t worry. Do what you have to do,” said Mark.
She slowed her dancing fingers and the invisible hands moving nodes across Mark’s vue stopped mending his decaying blueprint. The stream of images showed her shifting her weight on her little pedestal.
She pulled her dress back in place, voicelessing, “Those medicalizers are a real danger to our freedom.”
“Aren’t you one of them?” the ambiance field wanted to know.
“Ignorant. Check her vote chart. She makes a living from sharing.”
“Laria is right. We need to cut those medicalizers back.”
“Is she wearing a new Ka-Louise?”
“Imagine that dress combined with a pair of Nuuvages.”
“They grew this for me in their boutique near tower one.” Laria’s voicelesses trailed off in Mark’s ambiance field chatter.

Author Bio:
Aeon Mosbach grew up in rural Switzerland, where the air tingles from nearby CERN. Surrounded by bandes dessinées, mangas, and books about the Apollo space mission, Mosbach dabbled in programming video games and web pages when modems were noisy. Later, Mosbach set out to study computer sciences but ended up graduating with a master’s degree in design research. Since, Mosbach has worked as an innovation researcher and startup consultant in Europe and Asia.

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