The World-Stealer

What had made you one of the richest people in the outer world had made humans equal in their private ones. Art and architecture could be as expensive as ever: what did that matter when neural computers could let you shape your perception however you wanted?    

You have advantages, of course. The fastest circuits with the subtlest algorithms and, in an area that is only gray if your legal budget matches many countries', access to how others use the technology under the guise of safety monitoring. You gather reality filters like any other form of data, sort it through your personal algorithms, and live in worlds created by other people's imagination.

You never stay long in those heavens. You tell yourself it's boredom. You return, always, to the dim brown-red pervasive pain of your personal world, an unending sobbing its only weather, the dead its ecosystem, a bleak algorithmically relentless rewriting of your perceptions programmed you don't remember when. It's not a bug, or a trap, or a choice. Yet you always return there, you and tens of millions, some before killing themselves, some, say the statistics your lobbyists have dedicatedly pushed, instead of taking their own lives.

You don't feel guilt or regret. You have nothing to punish yourself. None of the others do. But no world feels as real as the one where the sky is ashes, especially not the one you used to see years ago when you still turned off your device.