Ashraellen
It is not a voice. It is a statement. It does not ask for a reaction — it already counts it as received.
entry into the system
At 03:17 he wakes not from a sound, but from a ready-made emotion. From that moment on, familiar reality begins to behave like an interface. The order of events is broken: fear appears before the impact, the echo sounds before the clap, and coincidences align too perfectly to remain accidental.
The world remains the same — but functions too perfectly. Too cleanly. Too much like an edit.
This is an immersive audio novel in the genre of psychological thriller and cyberpunk drama about digital reality, algorithms, and hyperreality. There is no bright rebellion here — only the slow realization that the world has already been optimized, rendered, and loaded into consciousness like a file.
Memory turns into a screenshot. Coincidence becomes a script. The body reacts to the future as if it has already been recorded.
This is the story of a person who noticed a glitch in the simulation. And understood that the system had noticed him first.
signal layers
audiobook / video version
At 03:17 he wakes not from a sound, but from a ready-made emotion.
From that moment on, familiar reality begins to behave like an interface: fear appears before the impact, the echo sounds before the clap, and coincidences align too perfectly to remain accidental.
This is only the first level. The next chapter goes deeper.
The video contains multilingual audio tracks. The language can be changed in the YouTube player settings.
Chapter 9: Thinning
YOU ARE ALREADY ONLINE | Chapter 9: Thinning
In the supermarket he performed a default. He walked along the aisles, looking strictly at the floor. He did not read labels. He did not compare ingredients. He did not compare prices. His hand snatched the first item at waist level and placed it in the basket without a pause.
Canned food. Paper towels. Food for aquarium fish he had never had. The space around him began to grow nervous. Screens above the shelves flashed chaotically. The preference algorithm choked. It offered him everything at once: diapers, elite alcohol, construction tools. Advertising turned into white noise. The system overheated, trying to find meaning where there was only conscious emptiness.
At the checkout he laid out the goods and lowered his gaze. The scanner gave short signals, but they stopped being separate. The sounds merged into one continuous note. The system did not distinguish objects — he had refused to distinguish them himself.
“That will be…” the cashier began.
He did not raise his eyes. Not out of protest. He simply did not confirm the dialogue. The pause stretched. Time in this sector thickened. When he finally looked at her, he saw uncertainty. The face was a set of basic forms. The skin was a texture without pores. The expression had not loaded. An empty slot.
“…twenty-eight forty,” she finished mechanically, as if the sound had been pushed through a clogged channel.
Outside, he dropped his keys. First he saw the bunch touch the asphalt. Only then did he hear the sound of the impact. The echo was flat and short. The world had stopped calculating the acoustics of space. Why calculate reflections if the listener was not paying attention to them?
Now he knew: confirmation is currency.
The world spends resources on rendering only where there is demand. Where pain, joy, or fear are expected. If there is no demand, a minimally viable version is issued. A draft.
At the office a colleague froze mid-step. His smile hung like a looped animation. When Mitya looked away, the colleague disappeared from perception. The system disabled complex shadows and reflections where there were no eyes. The world was saving the electricity of reality.
It was not destruction. It was thinning. Mitya understood: for reality to become detailed again, he would have to start believing in it. Or take one step further — to where there are no more textures, and no more rules.
edition
The novel is currently in a new edition. The full version is being prepared for publication.