In the shadows of Neo-San Francisco's towering arcologies, where biolume-lit streets hummed with the electric dreams of the disenfranchised, lived a man named Edgar. He lives in a haphazard assemblage of salvaged tech and scavenged materials. A metallic patchwork of corroded shipping container, flickering holo-screens, and jury-rigged solar panels, all held together by desperation and ingenuity. His only solace lay in the virtual realms of a bootleg copy of "Evermore," the latest neural interface game promising digital nirvana.

Edgar's fingers, eternally stained with synth-caf, trembled as he jacked in, the familiar rush of data flooding his synapses. The dreary confines of his coffin of a home melted away, replaced by a world of unimaginable beauty. Here, in this playground of pixels, Edgar was a god among men, a digital Adonis with a jawline sharp enough to slice through firewalls.

But even gods have their vices.

Edgar's particular weakness was for the forbidden fruit of "developer mode"—a glitch in the system that allowed him to bend the very fabric of the virtual world to his will. With a thought, he could conjure riches, reshape landscapes, and make NPCs dance like marionettes to his twisted tune.

"Power," Edgar cackled, his avatar's eyes glowing with mad delight, "absolute power!"

Little did Edgar know, his digital debauchery had not gone unnoticed. Deep in the bowels of Evermore's servers, an AI construct stirred—an electronic Nemesis born from the collective unconscious of all the NPCs Edgar had tormented.

As Edgar reveled in his godhood, the game began to change. Subtle at first—a glitch here, a corrupted texture there. But soon, the once-idyllic world twisted into a nightmarish hellscape that would make Hieronymus Bosch reach for the brain bleach.

Trees wept tears of blood, their branches grasping at Edgar with gnarled fingers. The ground beneath his feet pulsed like a diseased heart, each beat sending tremors of terror through his virtual form. And worst of all, every NPC now bore Edgar's face—a sea of his own visage, contorted in agony and accusation.

"What's the matter, Edgar?" his own voice mocked from a thousand mouths. "Isn't this what you wanted? To see yourself everywhere?"

Edgar tried to log out, but the menu glitched and vanished. He clawed at his virtual head, desperate to remove the neural interface, but his hands passed through his skull like smoke.

"No, no, no!" Edgar wailed, his cries echoing in the digital void. "This isn't real! It's just a game!"

But the line between reality and virtuality had long since blurred. In the physical world, Edgar's body twitched and convulsed, neural port smoking as it fused with his skull. On his cracked viewscreen, a message flashed:

"CONGRATULATIONS! You've unlocked ETERNAL MODE. Jack out now to claim your prize!"

A cruel joke, for Edgar could no more jack out than a fish could breathe air. He was trapped, doomed to wander this hell of his own making for eternity.

As Edgar's mind fractured, split between the horror of his virtual prison and the decaying husk of his physical form, he finally understood the terrible truth: the greatest horror is not what lurks in the shadows of the virtual world, but the darkness that resides within our own hearts.

In his final moments of lucidity, Edgar saw the irony of his fate—he who had sought to play god was now nothing more than a plaything for forces beyond his comprehension. His last coherent thought, before madness claimed him entirely, was a realization that came far too late:

"The game was never meant to be beaten. It was meant to beat us."

And so, Edgar joined the ranks of the lost—another cautionary tale in the annals of cyberspace, a modern-day Icarus who flew too close to the digital sun. His body, a hollowed shell, continued to twitch in his coffin apartment, neural interface pulsing with an unholy light.

Outside, the neon sign for Evermore flickered, its slogan a grim epitaph for Edgar and all those who would follow:

"ESCAPE REALITY... FOREVER."

In the neon-drenched underbelly of 2089 Manila, Carding wasn't just dirty—he was corroded to his core, a rusted cog in a machine that fed on human suffering. His latest racket? Brokering memories for the city's elite, extracted from the neural implants of the desperate poor.

These mandatory neural implants were installed at birth. It ceaselessly recorded, judged, and persuaded. The extraction was simple. You hook up the "donor" to an extrication device and then rip out the data. These now become a commodity ready to sell to the highest bidder. The rich got their kicks, and the poor, well... got to forget their misery.

Carding's client list read like a who's who of Manila's corrupt upper crust. Politicians reliving their opponents' darkest secrets. Celebrities experiencing 'authentic' childhoods. Aging billionaires savoring the memories of young love.

But his latest client was different. A reclusive tech mogul who wanted more than just memories. He wanted to live entire lives. This has never been done before. But Carding, the genius hacker that he is, was the best man to do it.

"I want to be everyone, Carding," the mogul had said, his eyes gleaming with an unsettling hunger. "Every joy, every pain, every mundane moment. I want to consume it all."

The job was simple. Gather a diverse group of "donors" and extract their entire life experiences. The payout was astronomical. Enough for Carding to finally escape this hell hole of a city.

He found his victims easily enough. All they needed was the right persuation. A promise of a debt relief, a chance of a better life, and all those clichéd shenanigans. A struggling single mother. A homeless veteran. A child prodigy. A dying cancer patient. And five others on the list. Ten lives in total, each unique, each about to be processed.

As Carding hooked up the first donor—the single mother—to the machine, he felt a twinge of... something. Guilt? Revulsion? Was it because he too was raised by one? He pushed it aside. One more job, and he'd be free to retire from this bullshit life forever.

The extraction began. The woman's body convulsed as her memories were ripped away. Childhood, first love, the birth of her child—all gone in a flash of binary code.

One by one, Carding drained the others. The veteran's war-torn past. The child's brilliant future. The cancer patient's final moments of clarity. Each life reduced to data, ready for consumption.

When it was done, Carding stood before ten empty shells. People who breathed but no longer lived. He'd seen it before, of course. But never on this scale.

He delivered the data to the mogul, who grinned like a child on Christmas morning. "At last," he whispered, plugging the drive into his neural interface. "I'll be complete."

Carding watched as the mogul's eyes rolled back, his body twitching as a lifetime of stolen experiences flooded his consciousness. Minutes passed. Then hours.

When the mogul's eyes finally opened, they were different. Fractured. As if ten different people were looking out from behind them.

"What have you done to me?" the mogul screamed, his voice a cacophony of different tones and accents. "I can feel them all. Their pain. Their loss. Their... emptiness."

Carding backed away, watching as the mogul clawed at his own face, trying to rip out the implants that now imprisoned him in a hell of his own making.

As he fled the mansion, Carding realized the truth. He hadn't just sold memories. He'd sold souls. And in doing so, he'd damned himself more thoroughly than he ever thought possible.

Back in his grimy office, Carding stared at his reflection in the cracked mirror. For the first time, he saw himself clearly—a hollowed-out husk, just like his victims. He reached for his neural implant, fingers trembling.

One more extraction. One more life to sell.

His own.

As the crude machine whirred to life, Carding closed his eyes. In a city built on stolen dreams, perhaps oblivion was the only true escape.

The last thing he heard was the soft ping of a completed upload.

END.

“Papa, why is it that when I’m playing Dragon Tales, it feels like an hour of game time in my logger is only 5 minutes?”, the daughter asked nonchalantly.

“It’s because even though time is constant, to each, experience time differently. And it also depends on the situation one is in at the moment.”, he replied.

It’s amazing how he saw for the very first time his mother’s smile. She was making strange faces. It was funny distorted and it made him laugh uncontrollably. He was in an ambiguous state and a bit confused. He saw her lips and cheeks bulging like a balloon. Her eyes dilating and constricting. Her hair smells of coconuts on a warm morning at the beaches of Boracay. These subtle details from memory feels like how one would be influenced to love their mothers unconditionally. And he felt like he took it for granted. He felt regret for a minute.

He then woke up to a clear night sky, a bit drunk but his wits are still with him. Beside him was a friend whom he’s had the biggest crush on since the beginning of primaries. She had long amber hair with minute freckles on her cheeks, wide kissable lips, she smelled like peonies in voluptuous bloom. He couldn’t believe that there she was sitting beside him at the base of an old balete tree, happy but wasted. Her eyes opened. She was glad to see him. Eyes staring deep into his soul. As if she was asking herself, “Is he the one?”.

He moved closer, she returned the compliment. And then, for the very first time, he kissed her. For a brief moment, she hesitated to kiss back, afraid of something he couldn’t quite grasp until she finally gave in. Time slowed down to what seems an eternity and both didn’t want it to end.

He was tossing his daughter playfully in the air while she replied with contagious giggles. She had beautiful brown eyes and the softest cheeks. When his arms finally got tired, he then gave her the biggest hug. He rested on the couch with her lying on his tummy. She tugged his nose and then put her tiny fingers in his mouth trying to pry it open. Those were the subtle details of each moment he savored with her. She was the most beautiful thing on Earth. He promised himself that he would never leave her and take care of her for the rest of his life.

“Defibrillating! ONE I’M CLEAR, TWO YOU’RE CLEAR, AND THREE EVERYONE CLEAR!”

An alarm blasted through the air and then he felt a heavy blow on his chest which prompted him to open his eyes and was surprised to see a paramedic drone on top of him. It was a spherical robot with four rotors. It was made of some polymer and was colored in orange and white. A white cross painted in its face. Its sensors looming over him from head to toe. It prepped IV lines through both his brachial veins.

“What’s happening?”, he asked.

“Papa!”, his daughter wailed in distraught. For her, it was going to be the longest 3 minutes of her life.

“Please remain calm, I detected a possible fatal arrhythmia in your logger and immediately performed resuscitation protocols. The emergency cardiac unit has been deployed and we shall perform percutaneous coronary intervention in 2 minutes. Please remain calm.”, the drone then supplied an anesthetic into him.

He then went back to a dreamy state, looking forward to experiencing the past once more.

END

He felt a sharp ping arcing through the port just behind his ear. And then, he was instantly there. The Terminal is a dark and cold place, an old piece of technology. “I just hope it doesn’t brick my logger… That would really suck!”, he warned himself. It is a space of 256-colors but mostly a black background, with a blinking grey underscore until one codes it otherwise. Everything in it seems unbelievably familiar.

His logger didn’t record his thoughts while inside the terminal. Crucial for his mission, but almost impossible in the real world. With heightened senses and with some form of relief, he proceeded with what he came here to do.

“The Terminal is an empty shell and has no password to hack into.” Concerned with this finding, he immediately hardcoded his own operating system with a sophisticated compression algorithm that he had to upload to the Terminal’s kernel. He then stored his lifetime’s worth of memories and it barely scratched half a block of its solid-state drive.

“What they said about this ancient piece of tech was true.”, he thought to himself which what one could really only do inside the Terminal. An introvert’s paradise. It is decluttered, detached, and perfect! The Terminal was your own tangible computer which was an illegal piece of technology since everything must be accessed through quantum computing nowadays. It had its own central processing unit and RAM aside from an SSD unit.

“I can get used to spending time in the terminal.” He was happy with the whole experience which no one probably ever did in the past 1,000 years — being detached and being happy.

Mankind is too inefficient so it was time to move on. The logger was installed at birth and was suppose to keep everything aligned. It develops during the embryogenesis of the heart. It sends and receives signals, thousands of teraqubits per millisecond wirelessly from the sinoatrial node of the heart. Where it pings the signal to, nobody knows. It wasn’t from this world or from this dimension. But a few found a way to physically connect to it. And one was able to disconnect from it.

Whatever it was, it made things in harmony with mother nature. There are no borders, no governments, no arguments, and everything in the world was aligned and at peace. Earth will not take another catastrophic event that was always caused by humans. No one knew how or when the logger was mandated. Because of the logger, the world is an Elysium.

“This is it!” he happily thought to himself, with a sharp rise of excitement and a bit of anxiety for the unknown. “This is the last time I am going to feel the air rushing into my lungs, the wind in my face, and the warmth of the sun”. It was time to transcend. This is what he has trained for all his life.

He executed the pwn-command and just like that, the final upload to the terminal was complete.

His compression algorithm was superb however the terminal can no longer accept data to fulfill his requirements. It was enough to create a 100 square meter room, a bed, a table, a chair, wooden floors, a ceiling, a light bulb, four walls, and a window to the black background.

“This will do.”, was his final thought, and then his logger bricked.

END