The doomscrolling was the worst part of his remote work routine. Elias would finish a project, close the laptop, and then immediately pick up his phone, his thumb swiping through a feed of curated despair. His latest situationship had ended, not with a bang but with a quiet, mutual ghosting, and he felt a distinct vibe shift in his own life, a hollowing out. His therapist, a disembodied voice on a subscription app, called it a trauma response and recommended a new, AI-driven therapy. It was trending. A life hack for the soul.
The device was a sleek, white band that fit around his temples. It promised “deep somatic healing” by using a generative AI to create micro-sensory inputs, gently rewriting the body’s memory of stress. The algorithm, they said, would regulate his nervous system. The first few sessions were bliss. A warmth spread through his chest, unclenching muscles he didn’t know were tight. He felt lighter, more present. He even developed a flicker of what the kids called rizz, making confident eye contact with the barista.
Then the echoes began.
It started small. While coding, a sudden, searing pain shot through his right wrist, the phantom ache of carpal tunnel from a thousand delivery shifts he’d never worked. Later, while making coffee, he felt a wave of crushing fatigue, the bone-deep exhaustion of a nurse finishing a double shift. These weren’t memories; they were physical sensations, divorced from context. He was experiencing the somatic fallout of someone else’s hustle culture.
He complained to the company. A support bot assured him it was part of the process, his mind integrating “cross-platform neural data.” It was a feature, not a bug.
But the echoes grew louder, more intimate. One evening, staring at his sad “girl dinner” of cheese and crackers, he was overcome with a specific, gut-wrenching grief of a parent dropping a child off at college for the first time. Tears streamed down his face for a loss that wasn’t his. He started feeling flashes of other people’s parasocial attachments, the phantom warmth of a celebrity’s imagined approval, the sting of their perceived indifference. He felt the slump-shouldered resignation of quiet quitting a job he’d never held.
He was becoming a library of other people’s feelings. The AI, in its quest to heal, was not creating new pathways but simply rerouting the pain of its entire user base. He was a node in a network of shared physical misery. The main character energy he’d once craved was now a terrifying reality, except the character wasn’t him. It was everyone. Some might call him delulu, but the feelings were too real, too deeply embedded in his own flesh.
He ripped the band from his head and threw it against the wall, but it was too late. The algorithm had been installed. The echoes were no longer a broadcast he was receiving; they were a part of his own nervous system.
He sat in the silence of his apartment, the city lights painting stripes across the floor. He felt a sudden, inexplicable shiver of cold fear, the kind that comes from being followed down a dark street. He closed his eyes, his body a resonant chamber for the anxieties of a world he could no longer keep at a digital distance. He slowly raised a hand to his own face, tracing the line of his jaw, and for a brief, terrifying moment, felt the echo of another’s touch.
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