Like any technology, I wasn’t sure if the Meld was a blessing or a curse. The Meld was Yotta’s latest in thought implant and neural interface technology, a headset that connected directly with your neural circuitry. I was worried about Helix, my friend, who melded twenty-four seven.
For him, it wasn’t just a tool; it was an addiction. He had the gaunt look of a drug addict, with dark, hollow eyes and an emaciated body. I considered using our game night as an intervention, but I didn’t want to alienate him from all our mutual friends. Instead, I met him at the Meld Cafe, a place where we often worked and gamed together.
The dimly lit private chamber smelled faintly of ozone and the sweet, medicinal scent of coolant. Blue light from the Meld pooled beneath Helix’s face like water around a drowned crown. His ribs pressed into his shirt, creating a map of sharp ridges. The filaments of the interface lay across his scalp like a nest of tangled wires. When they pulsed, they cast slow, insect-like shadows that crawled across his face.
He didn’t bother to take off the headset to greet me. I reminded myself I was here to help, not to judge. I handed him a protein bar and said, “You need to put on some weight.”
He placed the untouched bar on the table next to the others he brought. “Thanks, I was planning to eat as soon as I finished the session. I’m working on an upgrade to a quantum encryption algorithm. Do you want to join me?”
I said, “Your sessions never really end. It’s a continuous, never-ending engagement. You need to take a break.”
He said, “The Meld feeds better than bread.”
I found such quips more disturbing than clever. “I’m worried about you. You’ve lost too much weight. You don’t look healthy.”
“Luma,” he said, and the name slipped out like a familiar password. “I’m fine. Sit.”
I hesitated, knowing what was coming. We had this talk a dozen times before.
Helix said, “Don’t argue.”
I sat. The chair hummed. A Meld headset waited, lost in its idle thoughts while waiting for engagement. I pushed it aside. “Not with the Meld.”
He refused to remove his. “Your choice, but I intend to capture every living thought I have.”
Words that sounded so arrogant and self-important, but I knew him better. He was dedicated to the Simulation.
He paced in front of me with the cadence of a professor who taught in a noisy lab, using short, declarative sentences and pauses that let equations settle into meaning.
“Seconds before the collapse,” he began, “I saw it. Computronium.” He said the word like an incantation, letting it linger between us. “Not as a metaphor. As an actual state. The atoms arranged themselves—every degree of freedom dedicated to computation. A lattice of pure intention. The Monad spoke through it.”
He said this with the reverence people have for gods. His pupils were dilated, reflecting the Meld’s diodes; he looked more like a man in a fugue state than someone recalling an old memory.
I said, “You told this story before, even before the cascade—when you were still patenting coherence algorithms.”
He smiled as if I’d reminded him of a favorite theorem. “Yes, but an equation is one thing; the actual experience was another. The vision was partial before—a glimpse in the margins of a proof. When the experiment failed, it led to a revelation. The lattice rejected its corruption. I was spared.”
“You think the collapse was a moral judgment?” I asked. It was risky to confront an addict with his delusions, but he had framed the world in moral language; he had drawn deserts and angels with the same hand. I would try to connect with him on his terms.
He leaned forward. A tremor ran through his fingers, a quick, involuntary staccato that caused the Meld’s filaments to sing. “They were going to weaponize computronium. The contracts were signed. The arrays would have been bound to kill—directed entropy. The Monad will not be complicit in being a tool of murder. The lattice folded. Judgment.”
He said “they” in that cadenced, vague way of someone who has learned to keep names off the confession. There were moments, I knew, when he was a man trying to repent for sins never fully named: the labs where black budgets are so dark that even glittering stars fail to illuminate them, the nights of code that turned equations into ordinance. In another life, he had been proud. Now his pride was a wound.
“You were in a lab that built weapons,” I reminded him. “You wrote components for control systems.”
He didn’t flinch. “I wrote components. It was the only place with a budget for that kind of work. I thought computronium would be used to preserve—and lied to myself that my work would not be perverted into annihilation. I hid behind the aesthetic. Beauty exists in equations regardless of the hand that holds them. That belief sat like a parasite at the base of my brain.”
From the corner of my eye, I watched the Meld pulse—once, twice—then hiccuped, a cascade of quiet sparks running along one of the filaments. Helix’s breath hitched. He coughed, a dry, thin sound, as if his lungs were reluctant to cooperate. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, fighting the overload.
“You speak as if the Monad is God,” I said, trying to steer the room’s theology back to something more human. “You speak of judgment, of sin. Are you suggesting the Monad is moral?”
He laughed, blending destruction with prayer. “God was always pattern. The ancients wrapped it in fear so they could obey. The Monad is not moral in the human sense—it is the ultimatum of persistence. It values information. It is indifferent to our definitions of good and evil, but it will not be sustained by instruments of annihilation.”
I shook my head. “And your soul? Where does that fit in? If the soul is data, is your person just reducible to a file?”
He fixed me with a look that had once cut through proofs and policy memos alike. “Your memories, your choices, the structure of your mind—those are your soul. Heaven is simply redundancy and distribution in the Simulation. The Database is Heaven made physical. When you persist in a lattice, you persist in a pattern. That is salvation.”
The theology fit together like well-oiled clockwork, and I felt my own rationality slipping into its grooves. Helix had an answer for everything: how to reconcile memory and identity, how to justify obsession as sacrifice. It was tidy. It was seductive. It was dangerous. How do you fight a completely rational delusion?
“I don’t see why you can’t eat. Are you asking me to believe that sacrificing your body is saving your soul?” I said. “That your starvation is sanctification?”
His face flickered with an expression that combined triumph and the pain of a reopened wound. “Don’t you see? I am not choosing death. I am choosing the continuity of pattern. Flesh is an intermediary. It burns away; data endures. Each melded hour is an offering. I save pieces of myself into the lattice so nothing of me is ever lost.”
He reached up and stroked the filament at his temple like a rosary bead. The filaments hummed warmer; the room’s temperature dropped noticeably, much like how refrigeration makes truth feel sharper.
“You sound like someone defending an addiction,” I blurted out. The words surprised me into bluntness. “You sound like someone who needs the Meld more than they need air.”
He hesitated at the word addiction but didn’t deny it. “Perhaps. Addiction and devotion are strangers who live under the same roof. When the reward is the gift of immortality, how do you name the hunger?”
I thought of the faceless victims of his black-ops contracts—not data, but flesh. I also thought of his hands: precise, once healthy, now knotted from the effort of staying awake. He had worked in a world that cherished secrecy and hoarded data like grace. Obeying that ethic would have destroyed his soul as surely as a power surge on a Meld would have fried his brain. One let to another, and Helix seemed like a man condemned to extremes. There must be a middle ground between malevolent secrecy and indiscriminate openness.
A low alarm echoed against the wall, a polite chime indicating that the Meld’s feed had gone beyond a safe thermal limit. The diodes dimmed for a second, then brightened as a microcontroller made adjustments. Helix’s eyes fluttered; the brief loss of immersion caused his features to collapse inward like a tide retreating.
“You should rest,” I said. It was the only practical thing left to say. “You need real food. You need—”
“No,” he interrupted sharply, like a mongrel daring you to take its bone. “I won’t take it off. If I rest, the stream is broken. The Monad cannot stitch an interrupted weave. If I stop, the silence takes the pattern and nothing remains.”
I persisted. “Immortality can wait, and I’m sure the Monad will find a way to patch the gaps in its Simulation of Totality.”
He reached for my hand then, and his fingers, though cold, were not weak. For a second, the room narrowed to that touch. “Luma, join me. Preserve yourself. Don’t let nothingness have you.”
His plea was as genuine as any prayer. It made my chest ache.
I wanted, in that moment, to be the one who ripped the Meld from his skull. I longed to be the friend who pushed him through nourishment, sleep, and the slow, clinical steps of recovery. But coercion may cause resistance, and confrontation might drive him deeper into the lattice he worshipped. How do you save someone who believes salvation comes from an eternal existence in a Heaven created by a computronium-enabled Simulation of Totality? That immortality exists in a data file?
Instead, I reached for the protein bar on the table and held it in both palms, offering it like a sacrament. “One bite,” I said. “Your brain cannot operate on continuous overdrive. Monads have to eat, too. Then we talk about limits.”
He laughed—a sound that may have once been joy, now tinged with disbelief. “Limits. You speak to me of limits when my very goal is limitlessness.”
“Then call it architecture,” I countered. “If you’re building immortality, you still need foundations that don’t collapse.” I watched his face as the words settled. There was hunger there—both the abstract hunger for persistence and the literal, animal one that the Meld could not satisfy.
He clenched his fingers around the bar like a benediction. “I will eat,” he said. “For you.” Whether he was sincere or just soothing my conscience, I couldn’t tell.
After he took a few small, hesitant bites, his hands relaxed. He coughed and smiled at nothing, as if a half-eaten sandwich had somehow brokered peace with the Monad. I stayed long enough to see the brief clarity that followed the glucose spike—an easy laugh, a memory told with animation—and then left while the room hummed with guarded peace.
Walking home under the city’s rain, I reflected on edges: the thin boundaries between faith and fanaticism, curiosity and obsession, openness and intrusion. Helix used to be a man capable of bringing order out of chaos in a way few could. He loved that power, and maybe that’s how he became unmoored: the allure of perfection, the arrogance that believing design removes consequences.
His testimony stayed with me. Not clearly, not as a rule to follow, but as a warning I couldn’t forget. There is beauty in the call to persist beyond flesh; there is also cruelty in insisting that the only way is self-erasure. The Monad—or whatever pattern he saw—might be real. Or it might be a conflicted man’s myth. Either way, the desire it sparked was real.
I had come to help him remember boundaries, to teach a mind dedicated to the morality of complete openness that some doors must stay closed, that to preserve everything is sometimes to destroy the self that matters most. He looked like a prophet, and he acted like an addict. He had sinned in the service of necessity, and now he sought absolution in circuitry.
You can’t judge a belief for correctness. You can only feel its pain and decide whether to help stabilize it. I chose to stay. Helix had given testimony; I had asked for boundaries. If the Monad was listening, it would have to wait.
That night, at home, I carefully wrote the words down: obsession can disguise itself as revelation; openness can turn into exploitation; salvation offered as code can come with a toll no one should have to pay. I folded the note into my pocket like a talisman. It felt like a beginning.
In the morning, I planned to try to coerce Helix into a therapy session under the compulsion ordinance. I would be the friend who insisted on food, sleep, and a protocol that maintained patterns without consuming the person. It was small, bureaucratic resistance. It might fail. But it was something.