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 stayed silent, stunned for a while. She was observing the bar without looking at it, her eyes wandering with no awareness. She felt dizzy.
How could her unremarkable existence have become a dead-end? She had always seen life as some sort of trade-off everyone chooses. Either you go for it and risk disappointments — you go all-in, and if you fail, you explode like a fighter jet shot down by a missile. But at least you try. Or you stay in the lane most people seem to be happy with, without many downs.
She was wrong, and she somehow got the worst of both worlds. She felt knocked down.
Just like Sol, some dodgy individuals had appeared in her life with a once-in-a-lifetime offer. Unlike Sol, it seemed she could not refuse it.
— I’m sorry you feel this way, Selma, said the skinny-fat broker.
— That’s not a way to apologize. “I’m sorry you feel this way,” she repeated, mocking the broker. What the fuck am I supposed to do now? And who wants to kill me, why?
— We don’t know any donkey-man, nor any hitman, for that matter. Also, we don’t really want to see you die, and we are not the ones trying to kill you. About the why? I have no idea. Sometimes people have a good reason to die. Maybe that’s your case?
— What you’re saying makes no fucking sense. Can you please speak normally and not like some guru? For fuck’s sake, I ain’t got no reason to die.
— You have no reason to live either.
The broker had hit the nail on the head. Selma looked with anger at a placid broker, her two eyes burning with rage, her jaw tightened.
— And for that matter, some donkey man hasn’t got no reason to see you alive as well, the broker followed.
— Well, you mean some donkey man wants to kill me.
— Yes, as far as I’m concerned, the donkey-man wants to kill you.
Selma regained her spirit and seemed to weigh the situation for what it was: grotesque. The whole story seemed absurd to her. She started feeling angry. In the last minutes, the broker had said two accurate things.
One, that she had dreamed about a donkey-man shooting her down. The other, that she had no reason to live, no purpose. That’s the latter she could not handle. In the space of a few minutes, she had come to terms with her imminent death, but not with her tasteless life.
— You are an attention defector, the broker said.
— Wh… what? A what?
— You’re not sufficiently connected, neither sufficiently predictable. Those two things usually come together.
Selma was lost. The broker could feel it. He owed her an explanation.
— Most people never shut down the SoulGrid. Almost all of them reach what we call the D-state. At that point, their brain no longer belongs to them, neither does their consciousness. The hijacking of their attention is complete.
— Why would that anger some donkey-mask hitman?
— We don’t know. Sometimes, when people drift away from the algorithm, the system itself reacts. It’s not used to absence. It generates a mirrored event — a kind of self-correcting scenario — often violent, sometimes fatal. There may be a threshold, where the SoulGrid either predicts what you’ll do or deletes you from the model. Whether the death is real or simulated… we still don’t know. But it means something. It always means something.
— I don’t feel unpredictable.
— It doesn’t mean you completely are. What it means is that it takes too much energy for the SoulGrid to predict you. You don’t give much attention to it, and it’s hard to predict your behaviours. In terms of risk–reward ratio, you are not very profitable.
— I’m not what? Profitable in terms of risk-reward ratio?
Selma’s soul was romantic and spiritual. The mere evocation that a ratio could decide her fate crushed her soul to the deepest.
The broker followed:
— In other words, it’s hard to sell you something, hard to generate content that gets you plugged. Hard to dopamine-drown you.
Selma paused. The broker almost seemed on her side. He hadn’t made an offer yet, and for a moment the tension thinned.
The restaurant still felt strangely out of time. The cushy banquet and the slow, analog music carried memories of her childhood, when things were built to last and silence still existed between sounds. The polished hardwood tables reflected the candlelight unevenly, the glasses were thick, imperfect, alive.
She rarely could feel a real surface. The world outside had traded the texture of things for the texture of data. Everything was connected: mugs, tables, banquettes, glasses. Every object had a pulse, an eye, a mouth that whispered information into the SoulGrid. Wherever data could be gathered, it was.
Even the way you held your glass mattered now. Your grip, your micro-tremors, your hesitation before the sip. Everything mattered. In the next generated feed, a character would hold it just the same way.
The mystery of a life and its multiple destinies had narrowed to a single path, one the algorithm wrote and served on digital trays to passive souls. Algorithms carried them from birth to death as passengers in their own stories. They wandered all together, next to each other, unaware of the whole. People’s lives had become stories with no main characters, if not the SoulGrid itself.
Selma turned toward the window. Down on the street, the city shimmered in holographic light. People drifted past like zombies. They were all there, breathing the same air, walking under the same sky, yet no one truly saw anyone.
A young couple sat on a metallic bench outside the restaurant, sending holographic hearts to each other. The boy looked tense, as if waiting for something.
A bird flew by itself and landed beside the girl. The SoulGrid could also send romantic drones on demand. The boy looked relieved.
After a long silence, she asked the broker
— So, if I understand well, there is a possibility no one wants to kill me, And that this donkey man is just some veiled threat?
The broker hesitated. He seemed to search for the right words.
— As you very well know, most systems are centralized within the SoulGrid — money, credit scores, even your right to unlock a building door.
He paused, looking at her glass as if the answer might be floating in it. Selma stayed silent.
He continued, slower this time:
— Most people spend their lives inside the Grid’s loops. Every ad they watch, every heartbeat registered by a sensor, every pause before they buy something. All of it feeds the system. Endless attention-seeking, endless data gathering. At some point, everyone becomes predictable. You get it?
Selma ignored the question.
He looked at her again.
— But you’re not. Some of its algorithms are angry at you.
The word angry hung between them.
— So it puts effort into getting you back into a predictable state, he said. Usually, they’ll dopamine-soak you or just forget about you. But once you’re banned from enough systems, you start to vanish. You live like a deadbeat. You end up borrowing money from loan sharks, stealing dead people’s identities.
He leaned closer, his voice low.
— But it seems the new version of the disorder is getting angrier. You are neither predictable nor very connected. Worse, you seem to have no purp…
Selma cut the broker off, again feeling the impulse to scream at him.
— Shut up with that. And shut up with the rest, too. What’s the deal now? You just talk and talk. You say a lot, but you say nothing.
— You still hang around the Rintintin restaurant? The one at Elizabeth and Spring?
Selma’s nerves tensed. The broker had tracked her down and mentioned something she could buy. What she didn’t know was whether they were expecting money, or something else.
In the restaurant, an old vinyl spun slowly, crackling under the needle.
It was a musical version of a poem by Mario Benedetti.
Y porque amor no es aureola ni cándida moraleja,
y porque somos pareja que sabe que no está sola,
te quiero en mi paraíso,
es decir, que en mi país
la gente viva feliz aunque no tenga permiso.
Si te quiero es porque sos
mi amor, mi cómplice y todo,
y en la calle, codo a codo,
somos mucho más que dos.
Selma looked again at the bench outside. The couple had left, and so had the bird.
The bench was still warm, quietly uploading the trace of their love to the SoulGrid — the sighs, the excitement, the illusion of connection.
Everything could be stored, except what had made it real.
Maybe that was the tragedy: things could be measured, replayed, even improved. Yet, they were never truly felt.