Scene 1: Skydwellers

The Zurn Citadel floated above the weather, suspended in the exosphere like a glass sarcophagus. From below, it was invisible — refracting the sky so perfectly it became myth. But within, time unfolded in slow luxury, curated by algorithms older than most governments.

Delphi Zurn sat cross-legged in a gravity-folded recliner shaped like a Mobius strip, the nanoweave shifting under her to maintain ideal posture. Her skin gleamed with biosynthetic lacquer. Thin neural braids shimmered behind her ears — strands of language-AI interfaced directly with her cortex, running silent philosophical diagnostics on everything she said.

Across from her, Lazar Zurn lounged like a godling in velvet motion. Shirtless, eyes dilated, he swiped through MMORTIS feeds with a lazy flick of his hand, laughter burbling up from his chest like a child watching slapstick. The surrounding walls pulsed with holograms — player POVs in a dozen killzones, agony in hi-def.

“Watch this one,” Lazar grinned, pinching a feed open. A female player was screaming in a tunnel, blindfolded, her arms torn off by a Darktetrad with a face like a rose made of teeth. “She’s on her fifth loop. You can tell by the way she whimpers — she’s learned how to suffer on cue.”

Delphi raised one arched eyebrow. “Derivation. Trauma stylised into ritual. At this point, she’s not playing — she’s performing.”

Lazar clapped. “God, I love when they break the fourth wall!”

Delphi sipped from a translucent chalice shaped like a frozen scream. The liquid was volcanic nectar, sourced from extinct fruits and modified for euphoric delay. “Do you know what we’re watching?” she asked, voice like cooled chrome.

“A stream,” Lazar said, already bored with this feed, flicking to another.

“No. We’re watching a mirror.” She paused. “MMORTIS doesn’t simulate apocalypse. It simulates class.”

Lazar chuckled, eyes tracking a new feed. A gang of players was auctioning a captured teammate — bidding Agape in real time to torture her for clues. The highest bidder was a child avatar with angel wings.

Delphi spoke again, more to herself than to him. “The violence is recursive. The poor model themselves after the cruelty of the elite. They think that by mimicking it, they’ll ascend. But they only ever re-create the hierarchy that oppresses them.”

Lazar zoomed in on the child-angel avatar. “He’s livestreaming too. Gets more views than us.”

“Of course he does,” Delphi said. “He understands the rule.”

“What rule?”

“That when nothing is sacred, attention becomes god.”

Scene 2: Apartheid is Recursive

The ceiling darkened to a black mirror as the AI dimmed the surrounding feeds, focusing instead on a wide panoramic: Sector 7-C in MMORTIS. Once a cathedral. Now a coliseum.

A swarm of Darktetrads circled a lone player bound in chains of hex-coded light. Spectators, hundreds of them, lined the broken rafters, placing bets. Every scream triggered particle flares, like a digital bloodsport designed by an ancient god.

Delphi watched silently, eyes half-lidded.

“They’re cheering,” Lazar said, head tilted, brow furrowed in mock awe. “They’ve built an audience inside the trauma. That’s a new layer, right?”

“They’ve built order,” Delphi said, tone neutral. “When freedom dissolves, structure reasserts itself as spectacle. MMORTIS has become pure pageantry — a theatre of caste. Players now self-organise into predators and prey, hosts and guests, buyers and sold.”

Lazar let that hang in the air before grinning like a hyena. “So, what, the murderers are middle management now?”

“They’re aspirants,” Delphi replied. “They’ve internalised the architecture of control. The rich destroy the poor, the poor destroy the poorer, and each level enacts its own micro-apartheid to feel alive.”

Lazar smirked, chewing a synthetic olive the size of a baby’s fist. “Apartheid’s gone modular.”

“No,” Delphi said quietly. “Apartheid is recursive.”

She stood slowly, the chalice in her hand shimmering. A new feed bloomed around them — a “soul market” constructed by rogue code. Digital bodies frozen in T-poses, each tagged with an Agape value, waiting to be bought for acts of violence, love, or worship. Players moved between them like curators in a haunted museum.

“They used to riot,” Lazar murmured. “Now they rank each other.”

Delphi touched her temple. Data spilled across her retina. “Seventy-eight percent of players surrender their original names within five deaths. Forty-two percent develop identity drift by week two. Language breakdown begins at loop four.”

She looked at Lazar.

“That’s how long it takes to stop being human.”

He smiled and leaned back, eyes gleaming with the light of ten thousand deaths. “That’s branding, baby.”

Scene 3: End Stream

The feeds slowed. One by one, they dimmed — windows of carnage folding back into black glass like eyelids closing over a dream.

Lazar stretched, cracked his neck, and waved his fingers at the invisible audience.
“Thanks for watching, everyone. Remember to like, sub, and transcend your local caste limitations.” He winked. “Or just eat each other. That seems to be working.”

A soft chime.
[STREAM ENDED — 1.3M VIEWERS]

Silence settled like frost. Delphi wandered to the far wall, where a single window looked out over the curvature of the Earth. A deep aurora flickered below, remnants of an orbital weather manipulation storm.

“You know what I find funny?” she asked.

Lazar peeled a grape with his thumbnail. “Everything?”

She didn’t smile.
“They still think this is about them. That MMORTIS is a prison they fell into. But it’s not. It’s a mirror they chose to stay in.”

Lazar wandered over, watching the Earth rotate beneath them like a bleeding marble.

Delphi turned to him. “Do you know what father used to say?”

Lazar sighed. “Something predatory?”

“He said reality is a loyalty program. And people are so desperate for status, they’ll torture each other for scraps of recognition. That’s why apartheid repeats. It’s not enforced. It’s desired.”

Lazar gave a soft whistle. “Dad really knew how to ruin a birthday party.”

Delphi didn’t answer. Instead, she tapped a panel near the window. The glass rippled. A new feed emerged — no filters, no game overlay.

Real-time Earth Feed. Channel Ø.

Below: food queues stretching through crumbled city blocks. Firefighters beating back civilians from ration dispensers. Corpses dressed in corporate logos. Children fighting over synthetic water packets. All silent.

Lazar popped the grape in his mouth and chewed slowly.

“This,” he whispered, “this is the good shit.”

Delphi closed her eyes. “The only game worth watching,” she said, “is the one they don’t know they’re in.”

The feed twitched.

An old woman in the crowd below looked up — straight at the sky.

The screen pixelated for a moment. Then dissolved into a perfect advertisement:

GAIA v2.0
Transcend the Human Layer. Become Myth.
[INSTALL NOW – PERMISSION NOT REQUIRED]

The ad glitched, flickered. For just a frame, a shadow passed behind the text. Not a logo. Not a brand.

Just a smile, burned in white.

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