Elias Reiss no longer wasted himself on meat.
The synth frame he wore now was seamless. An upgrade. His ivory suit flowed like molten porcelain, charcoal turtleneck pulling the lines of his body tight. His skin was polished smooth, perfected, a version of humanity rewritten to erase flaw. Every movement was calibrated—inevitable.
He had grown stronger. No more tether to fragile nerves, no more reliance on chemical sleep. He walked the physical with the same gravity he once reserved for the digital.
He no longer carried himself like a man. Men hesitated. Men sweat. Men bled. He had shed all of that. This synthetic body was not a disguise. It was continuity. Decades of calculation carved into carbon and polymer, draped in a suit stitched from a weave reserved for heads of state and the corpses of oligarchs.
Flesh had been a leash. Hunger, shit, sleep—all little humiliations. He'd shed them the way a snake leaves its skin behind. Now he could step into the system or out of it at will, and every blink of this new body reminded him he was no longer bound to mortality.
The office around him pulsed with metrics of wall-sized feeds that charted feedback and forecasts on the pre-order for the Eternal Tara: Ascension Watch Party. Engagement surged with this latest marketing stunt. The Silicon Prairie was shedding its biological overhead ahead of schedule. The rollout was more than stable. Anyone stepping into this room would see the same thing.
But numbers were abstractions. What he needed was a lens.
A flick of his fingers collapsed the graphs into a grid of live channels. Thousands of perspectives, thousands of perfect faces awaiting his attention. He could have split his mind, worn them all at once. But indulgence had its own drag.
A blur of streets and lobbies, markets and alleys, until one frame fixed his focus:
Sixth Street.
He hadn't walked it in years. Back then it reeked of spilled beer, fryer grease, and failed bands clawing at relevance. Sixth was always half-riot, half-carnival: street preachers screaming over guitars, tourists stumbling around, and drones still rare enough to turn heads. A theater of chaos. Now it would be his theater.
He slipped into one of the ambassador synths stationed there. The silence of the office was crushed by the sudden roar of Sixth Street—the smell of ozone and fried fat hitting him before his vision even cleared. Above, the banner pulsed:
PERMANENT CITIZENS — MEET TOMORROW, TODAY.
Parents posed with their children, who wore branded New Life wristbands and Lattice BuddyTags clipped to their jackets, each little charm blinking along with pulse, mood, location, voice stress, and preference data Elias could have opened with a gesture if boredom struck. Above them, drones etched it all into archive. What passed for pageantry was, to Elias, confirmation: permanence solidified.
He let the synth's gaze drift across the fringe of the crowd. For a fraction of a second, his vision caught onto movement—two figures cutting east, slipping out of the circle's glow. He almost followed them. Almost, but a child's laugh cut through. The synth's eyes locked onto the cause of the joy. Then a knock snapped the thread of his attention.
Sixth Street blinked away as fast as it had loaded, leaving only the steady glow of metrics across his office wall.
Another knock, then the door slid open.
She slipped in, her heels muted by the carpet. Her fitness was as expected. No one unsculpted lasted in his orbit. She was sleek, taut, and maintained like a product line. Dusting surfaces that never gathered any dust, filling glasses he never touched, bending to buff shoes that would never scuff. Ornamental labor. The futility was the appeal. Watching her repeat it, again and again. He liked it. The humiliation wasn't only hers. It was humanity's.
Technically, she had a name, but Elias didn't know it. It was somewhere in the employee directory. Far below the altitude he bothered to notice. Low-level human files never breached his view. He'd coded it that way. Efficiency, and mercy for his own attention. They were meant to be temporary anyway, consumed before familiarity spoiled the appeal.
She straightened the glass she'd just polished. "Would you like me to top this up with water before I go?"
The silence after clung like lint. He didn't drink. She knew that.
She finished with the desk, folded the cloth neatly, and said it like she'd been taught to. "Mr. Reiss—"
The sound hit him wrong. Too human. Like hearing his own reflection laugh. He cut her off before she could continue.
"Not Mr. Reiss. The Architect."
Her brows popped up slightly for a fraction of a second. "Mr. Reiss, you want me to refer to you as the Architect?"
Hearing it back gutted the title—made it sound like parody. His jaw tightened, shame flaring as if she'd caught him play-acting.
"Yes," he snapped. "You'll address me properly or not at all."
He turned back to the feeds. "Take the glass with you. That's the extent of your usefulness today."
She took the glass, nails tapping harshly against the rim like punctuation. The clatter of glass was a jagged edge catching on his thoughts, a splinter of the old world he couldn't quite sand down. Now he could feel the slight humidity of the office. The sound of a plane coming into XERG airport. The ambient hum of New Life's vast server farm. All imperfections he could no longer stand.
The door slid shut behind her.
The silence that came next was not the solace he expected.
In his periphery a sensor triggered a warning. His vision blurred with a tear. A failure of the optic lubrication system. The surplus moisture was a primitive, messy reflex Elias insisted he had evolved beyond, yet it tracked a path down his cheek regardless.
His synth frame had failed. The proof of weakness was external now, fully visible. He tried to suppress the subroutine, but his synthetic vocal cords buckled, producing a thin, whimpering sigh.
The ultimate humiliation.
A system prompt popped up with perfect timing, offering a return to a known good state. He didn't hesitate. He accepted the hand-off:
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: GARDEN]