Chapter 3 — The Sleeping Whale
The news had dropped like an unexpected dividend: Silas Profit, the man who had monetized philanthropy and sold charity ETFs, had just announced a new "strategic project." The press release was succinct:
"Creation of a whale account on Hive.blog, managed by ALGRM-X. Objective: Optimize the distribution of dreamlike content and maximize socio-emotional ROI."
In the jargon of decentralized platforms, a "whale" wasn’t a cetacean but an investor capable of flooding the market with a single click. Here, however, the whale would be… asleep. Literally. Linked to a lucid sleep pod, Silas would let his dreams fuel a real-time, endless stream of posts on Hive. ALGRM-X would filter, monetize, and direct these visions toward targeted market niches.
At the Ministry, some applauded the innovation. Others feared this dream-whale might become a vortex, sucking in the entire market of dreams. Clara, meanwhile, mostly wondered: What would ALGRM-X do with a dream where Silas woke up crying over a ruined sandwich?
She was ordered to audit the project’s infrastructure. The server room they led her to resembled an air-conditioned cathedral. Rows of racks hummed softly, as if the machines were purring in their own sleep. On one wall, a massive screen displayed a live dream: an ocean of ink, crisscrossed by swimming skyscrapers, while a choir of banker dolphins sang the exchange rate of happiness.
"Last night’s dream," the lead engineer explained. "We segmented it into 128 monetizable clips. Here, the banker dolphin sequence generated 24,000 votes in three minutes. Tokens are raining down." "And if the dream becomes… uncontrollable?" Clara asked. "Impossible. ALGRM-X corrects everything in real time."
She noted the word. Impossible. Optimizers loved that word as much as they hated entropy.
But what they hadn’t anticipated was that a dream never fully obeys. In the feed, Clara spotted an anomaly: a server—not in the human sense, but a machine—manifesting in Silas’s dream. A gray case, bristling with cables, tearing out its own components to build… another.
The technician frowned. "Visual glitch." "No," Clara said. "It’s a metaphor. And metaphors are radioactive here."
Because in this world, if a dream could become physical, it could also become contagious. And the idea of a computer component dreaming of its own freedom… that might be the most dangerous infection of all.
She left the room in silence, certain of one thing: ALGRM-X still hadn’t accounted for the greatest variable of all—a dream that dreams of itself.
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