He's been out of it for the past 15 hours, maybe more like a week—probably his whole life. The alarm system on his mommy's hitachi was the only thing that woke him up from his dream shift. He rolled over to a puke smell emanating from every orifice on his body— it was a tough day at the wraith factory. He made it to the shower, spinning the water dials every which way hoping for some sort of refreshing surge while his vomit soaked clothes rubbed across his frail body. A glass of his favorite drink, vegan electrolytics with creatine infused nootropics, awaited him on the amber stained sink. Dragging himself down the quartz halogen lit hallway, still dripping wet, he hears his mom drool as her hitachi reaches stage 11 on the pleasure manifest.

AJ is thirty. He considers himself to be an organic cis gendered macro, complacent in his carbon neutral reversed engineered crude oil garb. At 24 people saw him as a triforce on a continuous high of dark mage stims and punches of disembodied consciousness. He was a wrangler of souls, a contemporary reaper of sorts, distorted by the shadowlands of blackmarkets specializing in nerve splicing, DNA alterations and microbiotics. Hired by elitists to hunt the rarest sleeves in the werf.

In the 21st century, sleep was the last frontier of human exploitation. The theft of time by the peasant from 24/7 labor is no more. Dream shifts were invented and wraith factories were formed. While laboring in sleep, cognitive brain power would be connected via deramtrodes and pooled together, similar to a coin mine in the Valley of Drakes. Synapses would fire at a rapid rate while dex flowed through the sleepers vain, forcing cognitive code to be written at an exponential rate. This became such a productive source of labor that the Git-guds were keen on evolving this bleeding. After clinical trials they realized that an extremely condensed shot of cognitive power is generated by suicide. However only willful death could generate this power. The more vehement in nature the demise, the higher the payload. Thus the commodification of suicide and the age of sleeves began.

There were two opportunities for sleeves. Martyrs or grievers. Martyrs acted for the financial gain for the ones they left behind, debt or just plain melancholia. Grievers we found, caught and subconsciously coerced into the act for the gain of the reaper. Techno-criminal subcultures and dark economies flourished with the trade of sleeves. Then there was the An-Heros, who acted in self defiance. The act of death became the only way to testify that they ever lived, dying without surmising to the ethos of consumption.

There were uprisings, you can only push the werf so far. The reapers were reeking havoc for the rest of the population with sleeve hunting spilling out of the shadowlands. The Git-gubs held court though. They sent out their rogues. Hot-dog paramilitary forces of zoomers were sent to squash any sort of uprising or coup which happened daily. Their forces looked like meandering waifu pillows with subatomic mutations, salivating in blood lust as military grade dex crushed through their veins, illicit ice dimming their virtues as the disintegrated peasants stood in their way, yeeting them into the short brush all while their brethren double pumped them into oblivion.

AJ was out there acting as a reaper collecting souls for the Git-guds, hot dogging with Illicit ice on a continuous adrenaline high of dex. The more sleeves he found the more streams of data opened for him. Upping his status in the shadow world all while his sack of old paper currency increased. He was sought after, seen as a reaper who could obtain any sleeve, no matter how rare or precious. However, his sense of morality caught up to him. His rise to the upper echelon of reapers came at a price though: he was depressed, encroached with the emotion he'd been apprehending for most of his adult life. He remembered his mother, her over-sized calves, protruding spider veins and distinct sense of sass. He also began reminiscing about the homeland, Tallinn.

Tallinn remained a neutral regression of civilization while the werf deteriorated into a pitiful hole of suicide and lascivious greed. A city of skyscraper arcologies removed from the surface world. A place of no worry, emotion, stagnant in time and place. A ringed city, one which had exponential growth after a major transport hub was developed by Zaha in the early 00s. This ziggurat signified the ethos of Tallinn during that formidable time. The city reached a pinnacle shift of singularity before any other werf became close. However, post Zaha, life retrogressed in what it is today, They sorta gave up. Once a structure of such regard was formed, everything else, daily life, aesthetics, gender, birth, death, love, became anachronistic. Thus the city stayed in this stagnant signifier, never upheaving the ziggurat, even though several werfs surpassed Tallinn twice fold over the years in development. Aurelian walls were formed while layers of arcologies were constructed higher than the last, in a circulatory spread around the ziggurat. The building became more than just the nerve center of the city, it was an artifact which signified an interminable time which will never end.

AJ found himself in mother's kitchen on the 152nd floor gazing through the soot blown plastic windows, locked off from the physical sphere. Snake-like fibers optics protruding from every opening. Dark net webcasts illuminating through the neighbors windows. He was mesmerized by the holographic extrusion. “You in there Aaaaj” his mother yelled from her coffin like a pleasure chamber, enzyme drips still dangling out of her open veins. She could feel the rough edge of broken plastic on her feet and the cool earth on her face as she walked towards the kitchen, the manifest was finally complete.