Lenn scurried up the narrow dirt path, her breath keeping pace with her steps. She didn’t want to be late for her appointment with God.

She reached the familiar vine-covered rock face and checked the time. She had a minute or so to spare. She took a few deep breaths, then re-tied her hair and adjusted her top. 

She shut her eyes and pictured breathing in peace and calm. She visualised light infusing her mind and heart, keeping them open and ready. Ready to meet ‘God’. Even though there was no irrefutable proof that- No, she caught herself. She had to have faith. 

She opened her eyes and swept the dangling vines aside, unshrouding the small opening in the side of the rock face.  A fragrance of dew and moss wafted out, teasing a smile from her lips. She tucked her head under the low cave entrance and inched through the narrow opening, letting the vines rustle back into place behind her. 

Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the relative dimness of the cave. A soft golden glow emanating from the cave walls and the emerald luminescence of a rock pool in the far end of the cavern were her only sources of light. She made her way across the stone slates that brokered a path to the rock pool. The reflected shimmers of the water meandered across the cave walls, drawing her gaze for a few moments. Then, she focused on the white egg-shaped stone in the middle of the rock pool, and knelt onto a well-worn patch of stone. Delicate gold and silver veins traced the egg’s surface in intricate fractal swirls. Water rippled down the smooth marble texture, cascading seamlessly into the undulating liquid around it.

A sense of tranquillity seeped beneath her skin, and the last vestiges of her cynicism evaporated. She picked up the familiar opalescent gem nestled in the moss by her knees, and wrapped her warm hands around the cold gem. The egg-shaped stone within the rock pool lit up, emitting a subtle blush of light. She pressed the gem against her chest and closed her eyes.

She focused her attention on her breathing, and felt the slow rise and fall of her chest. 

Hi Ether, she thought. Her mind slipped into a familiar sense of grounded comfort. She was connected, the link established.

She opened the door in her mind, and let the tangled mess of suppressed worry and pain flood in. She paused to let the Ether take in the tumbles of her unfettered mind. Then she focused on what she wanted, the reason she was there.

She prayed for strength and guidance, as usual. But she was also more specific in her prayer this time. Help me uncover the source of the virus. Help me find a way to reverse it, undo its damage. 

She held onto her prayer for a few moments longer, intensifying her intent. Then she brought her mind back to her breath. A few long, gentle breaths later, her eyes flitted open.

Warmth tingled in her chest. She felt comforted. Heard, understood. She loosened her grasp on the gem, and gently replaced it in the soft moss patch. She stood up. The cold stone that had moulded to her knees eased flat again. Reluctantly, she turned from the serene view before her and made her way to the exit.

As she stepped into the bright warmth outside, a glowing line of text lit her left wrist, “Prayer received”.

She gently ran her right thumb over the glowing words, and they faded.

Visits to the Sanctuary, whichever branch, were calming for her. They anchored her within her place and moment in the world. Could she be sure that the Ether was a higher being? Or a direct link to one? Not exactly. Still, she derived strength from her connection with it. 

Maybe it was the tranquil beauty of the Sanctuaries. Or the familiar ritual of praying. How it temporarily quenched her burning ache for the existence of a higher being, a higher purpose. In any case, each visit brought her solace. Solace that would usually enshrine her for a good half of the day, before reality broke through and stirred up unease. 

She made her way down the hill, casting a lingering look back at the Sanctuary, now powered down and dark.

The sunlight warmed her face and she slipped off her thin cover-up, bathing her arms in the warmth. The next devotee was already on his way up the slope. As they passed, she nodded in greeting, a slight smile on her face. The man looked resolutely ahead and walked by without a flicker of acknowledgement.

Irritation spiked in her veins. She quickly turned her mind back to the Ether and her experience within the Sanctuary. She summoned the peace she had experienced, and tried to magnify the calm. She imagined it forming a shield that strengthened her spirits. Still, the thought broke through - What a dick.

Lenn swiped her hands through her hair. She had let a stranger crack her peace. She was frustrated, and annoyed by her frustration. She had enough to worry about as it was. 

She didn’t notice when the man turned and stared at her receding form, his face an unreadable mask.

Her shoulders sagged when she thought of what lay ahead. It had been three months since clients of the Happiness Recode System or HRS, had first reported mental health relapses. After thorough checks, her team had uncovered glitches in these clients’ neural codes. Glitches they couldn’t explain. It was the HRS project’s first serious setback since its launch over a decade ago.

Her team of data analysts, psychologists and psycho-engineers had been working on a promising lead, a pattern they had uncovered amongst the dysfunctional neural codes. They had hoped it would unveil the creators of the virus, and shed some light on ways to reverse the malfunctioning codes.  

But that promising lead smacked into yet another brick wall that morning. Another dead end. Lenn heaved a sigh. A decade of work on the most exciting, cutting edge mental health  treatment, and it was crumbling down. 

The HRS altered and reprocessed unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, and traumatic memories, through a combination of psychotherapy and direct modification to the relevant neural substrates. Neural networks were recoded and neurochemicals were permanently rebalanced. The HRS promised maximal retention of personality while optimising mental wellbeing. 

There was an uproar when the HRS programme was first approved. Among the many fears, the main one was that direct tampering with neural pathways would mean changing the essence of a person. HRS programmers were accused of playing God. 

The resistance wasn’t unexpected. When the neural-digital connection process had first begun, there were furious protests as well. Yet, almost the entire population had since opted to sync their neural networks with little AI implants, for a variety of conveniences. Conveniences like better, more accurate storage of memories, and instant access to emergency services.

Subsequently, neural manipulation was introduced. Conditions like dementia and traumatic brain injuries could finally be repaired. Once again, there was an intense outcry, but that too was overridden with time. After all, who could deny the good that it did, the lives saved, and the joy of the loved ones?

In a way, the HRS was the natural next step. The first wave of clients were mainly those with severe, treatment-resistant mental conditions. People in mental torture. Trapped in the suffocating chaos of their minds, any glimmer of hope was preferable to the way things were.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

These clients emerged from the treatment changed. They spoke about an immense relief and lightness of being. Their new mental states seemed too good to be true, and they kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it didn’t, they became firm advocates of the HRS. Far from losing who they were, nearly every client reported finally feeling truly at home in their bodies and minds. 

As the years went on, multitudes of clients testified to an increased sense of well-being without any changes to their core personality. The HRS clientele expanded to include those without severe mental conditions, who simply wished to optimise their mental states. 

Becoming a somewhat common procedure, HRS’s impact on society surged. Crime rates dropped, mental health expenditure decreased, life expectancies rose, and productivity soared. For a blissful period of time, their world seemed on track to utopia.

Until three months ago, when the first malfunctions began. Most malfunctions simply caused a relapse. But some clients reported worse psychological symptoms than before. They also described the emergence of a deep existential dread, something not present prior to the HRS procedure. The malfunctions had affected only a small portion of clients, but were steadily spreading.

Everyone involved with the HRS programme had been slogging day and night to resolve these malfunctions. Within the first few weeks, they had uncovered the presence of a virus within the neural networks. There was no evidence of contagion amongst clients, which was a major relief. But they also had no idea how the viruses were being transmitted. As one of the directors of the psychological unit, Lenn no longer got much sleep.

She pulled herself from her reverie and found herself at the bottom of the hill. She gazed at The Tavern across the street. The sight of the wooden structure, engulfed by naturally growing plants, brought a welcome warmth to her heart. 

Most modern buildings were carefully constructed to incorporate hints of nature. Vines, leaves and flowers were meticulously and precisely threaded throughout the structure, mimicking the influence of nature. 

The Tavern, however, had been a simple wooden structure, constructed purely for function, rather than form. It acquired its current beauty over time, as the surrounding jungle crept around and into its structure. As the plants grew, the generations of owners manoeuvred furniture around them, only clearing out whatever was necessary to make way for patrons and servers alike. Even its signboard was overrun and obscured in parts. She found a moving beauty in the wild, untamed quality of the place. To her, it symbolized the triumph and vigour of nature. 

She pushed open the high wooden doors of the Tavern, and was greeted by a familiar lilting voice from behind the bar. “I’ll be with you soon!”

She smiled and went to her usual spot. It was a tiny space she reserved on an almost daily basis, tucked into a cosy corner on the second level, obscured by a cascade of leaves and vines.

Nestling into the soft cushioned seat, she lay back and closed her eyes, taking a few deep breaths to prepare for the work ahead. Then she wrote up her schedule for the day in neat clean strokes of the pen, in her half filled notebook. Her schedule was, as usual, meticulous and detailed. She loved the sensation of writing, of her pen scratching against the matte texture of the paper. It was a luxury, writing with real, antique pens on actual paper. A guilty pleasure. After all, their sophisticated electronic notebooks and styluses were near-perfect simulators of paper and pen. And they could be reused infinitely, with the written information committed to a dedicated memory bank, before the pages were wiped clean.

But Lenn believed she could tell the differences, subtle, minute as they might be. There was a fuller, more grounded sensation when she wrote on actual paper. Once, paper use had been unhealthy for the environment, but with the abundance of trees and ethical tree-farming procedures these days, the only concerns were its high price and scarcity. 

Her wrist lit up. She took a look and suppressed a groan. There was another report of a lead on the virus. She’d have to check it out before she started on the tasks she had planned. This was one of those times where she wished she had been using a pen and paper simulator. She hated cancellations. They disrupted the neat perfection of her schedule.

She contemplated tearing out the page and rewriting her schedule. Then she sighed, and simply wrote in the additional task at the very top of the page. It stood out awkwardly, unbalancing the rest of the page. She stared at the perfectly straight lines of her other items, the even spaces between the other checkboxes and the words, and the just right distance of the margins. Then she looked back at the unwieldy item on top and tried to sit with the discomfort that arose. 

She pulled up the news article. Perhaps, she should install a neural informatics device. Directly accessing search engines and databases with her mind would save her lots of time. She currently had direct access to the local time, date, and location, from a package service she had subscribed to two years ago. But she was leery of further neural adjustments, especially ones that would connect her to a public information network. There were still kinks in privacy and encryption processes. Besides, she had seen people with neural informatics access sitting around, smiling or frowning to themselves, eyes glazed over. She had no wish to become one of them. 

Mainly though, she didn’t want to stray further from being naturally human than she already had. It was why she had not undergone the HRS procedure. Her refusal to undergo the very procedure she was working on raised many eyebrows. But no one pressured her. Not really.

At first glance, the article seemed like a run-of-the-mill bid for attention. “MASTERMIND BEHIND THE HRS VIRUS FOUND?” the headline screamed. 

According to the article, an Intacta Elder had announced, in an open forum held four months ago, that plans were in place to dismantle the reigning infestation that was the HRS process.

The Intacta spurned technology. They sought to return the world to a state of primitive bliss. The tribe was led by someone called the Gilliad. The Gilliad had supposedly obtained  ancient and universal secrets of life. Every 10 years, the Gilliad would choose a worthy member of the tribe, bless them with the secrets of their wisdom, and pass the mantle on. Thus far, the current Gilliad was the 8th leader of the tribe. 

Despite their proclamations, the Intacta was rumoured to have access to incredibly sophisticated technologies, which they kept restricted to the top leaders of the tribe, the Elders. Technology to fight technology, was one of the hearsays. In recent years, at least three technological maestros had forsaken the modern world and retreated into the warm, archaic embrace of the Intacta. And these were just the ones the world knew about. These great minds held immense power in their knowledge. Lenn felt a twinge of anxiety when she imagined the destruction they could cause. 

She bit her lower lip as she reread the article. The dramatic tone leached credibility. The site was known for sensationalising news at the expense of accuracy and truth. And even if accurately reported, the Intacta Elder’s announcement could simply be a publicity stunt to draw awareness to the Intacta ethos. 

She tapped her pen on the table. The Intacta was vocal about their goals of halting the tide of technological progress. But it wasn’t like them to develop a virus. Historically, they were more likely to expound and remonstrate, biding the chance to lure a wayward creature back into the folds of righteousness. Their sense of righteousness, of course. It seemed odd that they would, after years of peaceful co-existence, make public threats, and launch a virus attack.

Still, the timing of the announcement was suspicious. It was a few weeks before the first cases had surfaced. She made a quick note of the key points, and sent a quick message to her Bureau contact, to get their views. She checked the unsightly positioned task off her schedule.

She stared at the next task she had scheduled. Now that their lead on the pattern found in the malfunctioning neural codes had led to nought, she had to go to Plan B.

Which was to turn to God. Or the nearest thing they had to God. The Ether. She was going to reach out directly to the Ether. Not through the Sanctuary prayers, but face-to-face. Her best bet was to seek it through the visions.

Over the past decade, the Ether had engineered visions, realistic dreams, where it spoke “in-person” to seemingly random recipients. Each time, it imparted key information, predictions or instructions to the recipient. Each time, they came true. No one had any idea why it bequeathed such visions to them.

Her first step would be to take an objective look at the history of the visions, to study exactly when they happened, where, to whom they happened, and what they were about.

That meant looking at a stack of case files dense with information. Each file came with a summary and information tags to mark important points. But these AI-created summaries had not yielded any useful information. So, she was going to read through every word of the case files, to spot any minute, seemingly unimportant detail that may have been missed. Or to see other possible interpretations and unexpected inferences could be made.

For today, she had penned in just three case files to scour through. Then, she would do a preliminary analysis on possible links between the three visions. It was going to be a long day. She ordered her usual caffeine-powered beverage, and got to work.