Soulgrid is a near-future cyberpunk novel where every human is plugged into an hologram-generator upgrade of the smartphone. Algorithms no longer just predict the future, they manufacture it, nudging every choice through dopamine triggers and endless streams of data, 24/7/365.
Sol, a dopamine-soaked deadbeat, is offered the unthinkable: a meeting with the love of his life. The offer comes from a shady broker, a man who seems to be wired straight into the SoulGrid’s core. SoulGrid is part of Kernel Blog, and the first issues will be completely free.
Selma grew up with two conspiracist hippies, addicts hiding their drug problems behind mindfulness slogans and other bullshit. As broken as they were, they did teach her something: the value of the present, the importance of connection. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.
They were those two fleeting instants, and nothing more.
Her earliest memory came when she was maybe five. Lunch at school. A weird awakening. She remembered trying to talk to the kids, to the teachers, while they scrolled on what was then the last generation of smartphones, right before the new mind-connected devices replaced them.
The consciousness threshold had already tipped. Most of those kids were brain-fried before they could even express an idea. Their parents were battery chickens laying hard-boiled eggs: good enough to eat, good enough to feed the system, but with none of the substance that could ever make a living thing.
She remembered trying to tell them about her last walk in the forest. All she got were empty stares, thin smiles, geriatric grumbles.
The ritual was always the same: eyes drifting slowly away, back into their empty feeds. On one screen she caught a glimpse: the blonde kid next to her was watching pandas dancing in a park. A park that looked exactly like the one she had just described.
The early SoulGrid was already working then. It could catch the smallest word, the faintest whisper, and spit it back as generated content. Like a gossiping auntie, sex life long gone, living bitterly through the stories of other people’s existence.
They sat there together, each one trapped in their private hallucination, scrolling their way to the grave.
Selma had spent the last hour and a half of her morning mind-scrolling through supposed life-changing tips she was never going to implement anyway. A hundred tricks for productivity, for health, for happiness. None of which mattered once the scrolling session ended.
Her routine, like that of most people around her, was just this: mindlessly consuming content, soon to be forgotten. One video, one article, one hologram bubble after another. Each promising a shift, each dissolving into nothing. The illusion of motion while staying perfectly still.
Her brain felt foggy. She tried to stay positive, telling herself that the very awareness of the fog was proof there was still something left inside.
It was the same feeling you get when you spend too much time on three-second videos, and you can feel the feed sliding through your brain. Your dreams and the digital trash you swallow morbidly start to blend into one and the same. They used to say—at least some of them used to say—that before the SoulGrid, the creators believed technology would merge with human intelligence. That man and machine would reinforce each other. That we would be augmented.
Maybe it was true.
It was accurate in some ways: safer, fewer deaths, diseases predicted before they happened. But for Selma and those who had grown up close to flesh humans, it was also a weight. No experience remained, only the memory of it, stripped bare of meaning.
They didn’t call it capitalism or liberalism anymore. Those words belonged to another social fabric. It was nothing like Adam Smith or Hayek, nothing about empowerment, freedom, or rational optimism. Artificial intelligence leaders had gone rogue. It ended up in the hands of unscrupulous entities willing to turn every regulator into a vassal, and every second of idle life into productive time.
Selma liked thinking about these things, but it exhausted her. Thinking critically was a treadmill of thought. Easier to scroll, to drop into the noise, to sink into the sofa. Blue skies, endless videos, endless generated content—the kind she half-consciously called “laugh at”—could carry her away for hours.
She sometimes worked as a waitress in a dive bar. She wasn’t particularly fun, but she was decent at it. You could still connect to people, at least the drunkest ones. The late-night unintelligible screams, the half-slurred statements, the students knocking back beer-pong parties one after another, and the regular fights over nothing more than a suspicious look. None of that was a child’s dream. But it was life.
In some unexpected twist of history, the most aware people of her time were the hippies, the homeless, the junkies, and the drunks.
Still, most guests merged eating and scrolling into a single act, gumming down hyper-processed, hyper-coloured food, mouths open, paying involuntary tribute to their cro-magnon ancestors. Another unexpected twist of history, among many.
Conversation was rare. She searched for offline spots, because there were still contrarians. But sometimes, mid-service, she would feel her brain misfire: forgetting simple orders, struggling with tasks that should have been automatic. The disconnection happened more and more.
She came downstairs into her building, opened the door watching an ad. That was how it always was. Attention had been commoditized decades ago. There was no act too small to monetize. To experience a moment free of advertising, you had to pay. That was the shift.
People used to complain about things like that. Deadbeat salesmen. Brokers hawking overpriced rentals. Now the lower middle-class neighborhoods were hollowed out. The vibrancy had left. Neighbors didn’t share anything but grumbles. Their eyes were down, scrolling through their feeds. Their brain activity powered their scrolls. Their muscles barely moved.
A few still clung to old smartphones. The last models projected holograms, tiny glowing micro-balls you could scroll just by moving your eyes.
— Are you Selma? asked an unremarkable, skinny-yet-fat-looking, middle-aged bald man who seemed to be waiting for her at the door.
— Who are you? You scared me.
— I just need a minute of your time to sell you something you’ve likely never bought before, and will likely never have to buy again.
And for reasons she couldn’t explain, she didn’t turn away.