EMPTY HUMAN
Chapter 1 — Residual Data in the Flesh
The first breath of the day felt like drawing glass dust into my lungs.
Inhale.
My chest expanded, rigid. My ribs let out a faint creak, a mechanical protest from a frame that had forgotten how to be elastic.
Exhale.
The air left, carrying away the remnants of dreams that never reached a climax.
I opened my eyes.
The bedroom ceiling welcomed me. A sickly white. The paint peeled in complex fractal patterns, resembling a map of lost continents. There was a damp stain in the right corner—seepage from last night's rain that had failed to dry. It smelled musty, mixed with the pheromones of anxiety settled deep into the pillow.
I didn't utter the word "empty." That word was too poetic for a morning this brutal. There was only the sensation of an incorrect specific gravity. The gravity inside this room felt twice as strong as it did out there.
I tried to move my fingers. A fraction of a second's delay existed between the brain's command and the muscle's response. Lagging. This body was like obsolete hardware forced to run an operating system that was far too demanding.
I sat up. My spine cracked—dry and sharp.
The cold ceramic floor stung the soles of my feet. This sensation was the only valid thing. The cold was real. The rest—the neighbor's rooster crowing, the hum of the old refrigerator, the sunlight—felt like a low-resolution graphic render.
The year was 2026.
The world out there was already racing ahead with neural links and AI assistants integrated into the smart glasses of the wealthy. But here, on the fringes of this industrial town, I still had to drag this flesh and bone around manually.
I stood, trudging toward the door. Every step was a tough negotiation with gravity.
The outside world was too bright.
The moment the door opened, the color saturation spiked violently. Leaf green, sky blue, the yellow of a passing angkot—everything assaulted the retinas without mercy.
The roar of motorcycle exhausts, the shouts of the porridge vendor, the footsteps of factory workers rushing to catch the morning shift. They possessed a rhythm. Staccato. Fast, firm, purposeful.
Meanwhile, I moved in a slow legato.
I reached into the pocket of my faded cargo pants. A dented pack of cigarettes. A cheap gas lighter.
Click. Fush.
The flame ignited, burning the tip of the tobacco. White smoke billowed out, weaving a thin veil between my face and reality. I took a deep drag. Nicotine hit the bloodstream, delivering a minor electrical shock to numb nerves. The sting in my throat assured me that I was still a biological entity, not just a lingering scrap of code.
People passed by. I observed them with an unrequested precision.
A man in a minimarket uniform: his shoulders tilted to the left (mild scoliosis from backpack weight), his eyes glued to a phone screen (dopamine loop).
A mother carrying groceries: her breaths were short (hypertension?), her steps heavy on the heels.
My brain dissected them into data. Analyzing posture, predicting vectors of movement, calculating the estimated burden of their lives.
Information overload. A torturous High Awareness.
I knew too much, yet could do nothing. I was an 8K resolution CCTV camera mounted in a landfill.
A brick and cement warehouse.
The place where digital dreams died and were buried beneath limestone dust.
"Target is forty sacks today."
The foreman's voice contained no emotion. Just an input-output instruction.
I nodded. There was no point in answering with words. Sound only wasted calories.
The smell of wet cement filled my nasal cavity. The odor was sharp, alkaline, and stinging. Fine dust hung in the air, clinging to sweaty skin, forming a thin, itchy crust.
I approached the stack of cement sacks. Fifty kilograms per sack.
It was 2026, and loader robots were still too expensive for this peripheral factory. So, they rented us—humans who were cheaper than the maintenance costs of machine hydraulics.
I stared at the stack.
Not as a burden, but as geometry.
My brain drew imaginary neon-blue grid lines over the pile of sacks.
A fifteen-degree tilt angle. Optimal fulcrum at the third lumbar vertebra. The force vector must be perpendicular to the floor.
If I lifted it the way normal people did, my back would snap in two years.
But I utilized biomechanical principles I had learned from a 3D Blender anatomy tutorial three years ago.
Hup.
I locked my core, bent my knees, and used the momentum of my thighs to lift the weight. The cement sack hovered, landing with precision on my left shoulder.
Efficient. Minimal friction.
"Good work. You're quick," commented a passing coworker, his breathing heavy and ragged.
I didn't turn my head. The praise was empty.
What was the use of advanced anatomical understanding if it was only applied to being a slightly more efficient day laborer?
What was the point of Python algorithmic logic if it was only used to calculate the most optimal arrangement of bricks on a wooden pallet?
One... Two... Fifteen...
Sweat began to drip from my temples, stinging as it reached my eyes.
My body operated like an old diesel engine forced into an overclock. Heat spread from my calves up to my back.
Yet, my mind drifted far away. Detached.
Inside my head, I wasn't lifting cement. I was arranging nodes in a visual script.
This cement sack was a Variable.
My movement was a Function.
This warehouse was an endless Loop.
While (Heartbeat > 0):
Execute(Suffering);
A funny irony. I had become an expert in everything this physical world did not require. A Swiss Army knife trying to chop down a banyan tree.
"Akh..."
A sharp throb in my lower back shattered the imaginary code.
The body's early warning system flared up. Health Bar critical.
The sunlight filtering through the gaps in the tin roof shifted to a reddish-orange hue. Not because evening had arrived, but because the blood vessels in my eyes were dilating from the rising blood pressure.
I set down the fortieth sack.
My hands were trembling. Not from fear, but from the muscle tremors of glycogen depletion.
I stared at my rough palms, coated in gray dust.
These lines on my hands... was fate truly written there? Or were they just random folds of skin we assigned meaning to because we were too afraid to face the absolute absence of it?
The world spun slowly.
Dizziness.
Dehydration.
I needed water. But more than that, I needed a reason.
Dusk arrived unannounced.
The sky outside the warehouse shifted into a bruised purple—an atmospheric contusion caused by the industrial town's pollution. The Maghrib call to prayer began to echo from nearby mosque loudspeakers, overlapping and competing with the roar of truck engines warming up.
I sat on a rickety plastic stool in front of a warung tenda. In my hand was a glass of sweet iced tea; the ice cubes had begun to melt, diluting the artificial sugar into something bland.
Bland. Just like the rest of my day.
A notification popped up on my cracked phone screen.
"Your Paylater bill is due in 2 days."
"AI Prompt Engineering Course Promo: 90% Off, today only!"
My thumb swiped across the screen. Clear. Clear.
The ad algorithms were mocking me. They knew I was poor, and they knew I was desperate.
"Want some more gorengan, Mas?" the stall owner's voice shattered my reverie.
I gave a slow shake of my head. "That's enough."
I stood up. My knee joints popped again. This time, it felt like forcing open a rusty door hinge.
The walk home was a walking simulator with terrible graphics.
Damp, narrow alleys. Sewer rats darting across my feet without a hint of fear. The neon lights of the row houses flickering erratically, as if the electrical grid in this neighborhood was also on the verge of death.
I didn't greet anyone. The neighbors... they were NPCs running the same dialogue script every single day.
"Just getting home, Mas?"
"Yeah."
"Working hard as always."
"Yeah."
Binary conversations. Ones and zeros. Soulless.
I reached my room.
The temperature inside was hotter than it was outdoors. The air was trapped, hanging stagnant between the unplastered brick walls.
I didn't turn on the main light. Only the glow of my old computer monitor illuminated the space—the only window into a world where I had once felt relevant.
Beep. Whirrrr...
The processor fan whined, struggling to cool down a silicon chip that was three generations obsolete.
Blue light washed over my face. Cold, artificial, yet soothing.
The mouse cursor moved.
Click. File Explorer.
Drive D:.
That was where the graveyard lay.
Folders lined up in neat rows. Digital monuments to thousands of wasted hours.
/ Unity_RPG_Prototype (Last modified: 2024)
/ Blender_Character_Models (Last modified: 2023)
/ FL_Studio_Orchestral (Last modified: 2025)
/ Japanese_N3_Vocab.pdf
/ Python_Data_Science.ipynb
My chest tightened at the sight of those dates.
I remembered the long nights of 2023. Black coffee, YouTube tutorials, the rush of enthusiasm when the compiler returned zero errors, the swell of pride when a 3D render finally finished after twelve hours.
I thought I was building a future.
In reality, I had just been digging my own grave with a teaspoon.
It was 2026.
A simple prompt in a generative AI could spit out a game prototype in ten minutes.
A voice command could generate a fully rigged 3D model in thirty seconds.
Orchestral music? An AI could compose a brand-new Beethoven symphony in the blink of an eye.
Human generalists like me... we were obsolete technology, outdated before we even launched.
"A jack of all trades, master of none..." I whispered. The words cracked in my dry throat.
That quote used to have a second half: "...but oftentimes better than a master of one."
But in this era, that second half was a lie.
Specialization was king. And AI was god.
The rest of us were just organic waste waiting to be recycled.
My body began to react.
It wasn't just fatigue.
Heat radiated from my spinal cord. Shivers set in.
Cough!
A dry hack tore through the silence.
My head throbbed violently. It felt as though there was a visual glitch in my optic nerves. My vision ghosted. The folders on the screen seemed to melt, the letters spilling out of alignment.
A fever.
My immune system was giving up.
Good. Let it.
I slumped into the cheap desk chair, its cushioning long gone.
My tailbone screamed in protest.
I tilted my head back, staring up at the darkened ceiling.
"God..."
It wasn't a prayer.
It was a bug report.
Why did You design me with incompatible specs?
You gave me advanced software: boundless curiosity, pattern recognition, algorithmic logic, and artistic sensibility.
But You installed it into junk hardware: a sickly body, myopic eyes, and an economic fate permanently locked on Hardcore mode.
It was a fundamental design flaw.
Compatibility Error.
I wanted to build worlds. I wanted to create stories. I wanted to weave melodies.
But my hands were bound by a chain called "Tomorrow's Grocery Money."
My brain was filled with sprawling, galactic ideas, but my feet were firmly stuck in the mud of poverty.
My breathing grew heavier.
The air in the room felt thin, as if the oxygen was being siphoned away by some invisible entity.
My heartbeat...
Thump... thump... thump...
Slow. Irregular. Arrhythmia.
My consciousness began to fragment.
The hum of the computer fan seemed to recede, fading into something like the sound of waves on an alien planet.
The ache in my back slowly dissolved, replaced by a strange, weightless sensation. As if gravity were slowly releasing its grip.