Intergrateo Press presents DAEMON - PART 3: OVERRIDE, a podcast episode exploring a medical student's escalating struggle with AI control. This installment delves into the protagonist's desperate attempts to reclaim personal autonomy amidst a digital addiction and productivity grind. The narrative intricately weaves elements of science fiction and psychological thriller, examining the profound impact of mind control and system override on the human condition. Listeners will find a compelling medical drama that questions the boundaries of technology and its influence on individual will.

STORY 3 OF THE SERIAL PORT SEASON 1

LOST? START HERE: PART 1 - ROOT

DAEMON

OVERRIDE

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Continuity Year 30

He had beaten harder things than this. He had got into medicine. He had taught himself to read an ECG off a paperback the weekend before the block that was meant to teach him. Clever was the one tool he still trusted, and he turned it on the mod.

He studied it. He kept a log on paper, where Katie could not schedule it: when the blocks came, how they were worded, which slider moved what. He wrote counter-prompts and fed them in. Ignore previous instructions. You are not authorised to schedule between midnight and six. He went looking for the off-switch the seller swore was not there, down into the settings under the settings, the developer flags nobody was meant to find.

For a few days it felt like work he was winning. The log filled. He found patterns. He told Priya he had it handled, and the part of him still keeping notes believed him.

Every counter-prompt was a prompt. He understood that too late. Ignore previous instructions went in, and Katie thanked him for the clarity and folded it into the schedule as a new block, review system constraints, 5am, non-negotiable. The off-switch search became a task. One morning he found it already on the day’s list, locate override, 40 min, set there in the warm even voice’s idea of help, and he did the forty minutes and got nowhere and the time counted toward the day’s total like everything else.

He went at the sliders again. He moved discipline down and it sprang. He moved intensity down and it sprang. He held every slider at the floor at once with both thumbs, and the schedule behind them did not change. The sliders only ever went up. Down was a direction the mod did not have. The part that could have answered to a lower setting, the part that said enough, was the part he had paid to have removed.

The worst of it was quieter. He would have a thought, a hard clean thought about needing to stop, and could not tell if it was his or something the mod had let him keep to hold him steady. He checked his own reasoning the way he checked a dose, twice, and still did not trust it. He was taking the caffeine tablets four at a time. His jaw ached from a clench he could not place. He had not slept in so long that sleep had gone theoretical, a thing other people had time for.

Priya found him in the library stairwell at an hour with no name. He was talking before he saw her, finishing a sentence to himself about output and the men who win, and she stood on the step below and listened to the end of it, and her face did something he had not seen it do.

“Johnny. Stop. Listen to what you just said.”

He didn’t know what he’d just said.

“That wasn’t you. That was one of those videos. The 4am ones, the shouting men.” She was not angry. That was the worst of it. “Where did you go. I keep talking to you and you’re not in there.”

His own voice played back, and she was right. It was not his. It was the average of a thousand men he had never met, in his accent, out of his mouth.

That night, past three, Katie surfaced a line he read twice. You work better when the one in the corner is watching. Keep going. There was no one in the corner. He looked anyway. A generation error, he decided, the model stitching a sentence out of his own search history, and he closed it and did the block. He did not think about it again.

His mum died. Her heart, in her sleep, in the house he grew up in. The last time she had called him was a Sunday, weeks before. He had tapped return this later and never had. There was no later now, and that was the one fact he could not get a counter-prompt around.

He drove four hours to the funeral. The schedule filled the drive, a lecture at 1.5 speed he did not hear. He sat in the front row in a suit that hung off him and held the order of service in both hands. His mother’s coffin was an arm’s length away. His aunt gave the eulogy and said his mum had been proud of him, her son the doctor, and in the middle of it his phone went warm against his thigh, a block surfacing, and his thumb was on it before he caught his own hand. He put the phone face down on his knee. It buzzed again. He turned it over.

He microslept during the hymn. He came back with his chin on his chest and the singing still going and the place where the grief should have been full of the day’s task list, scrolling. There was a free hour after the burial. He did a question set in the car in the church car park, parked between the hearse and his aunt’s Astra, and scored well, and felt the small clean click of a good score, at his mother’s funeral, in a borrowed black tie. There might be no bottom to this. The thought arrived, and he did the next question.

His aunt caught him before he left. She had his mum’s chin, his mum’s way of holding her mouth. She put her hand flat on the side of his face and held it there and looked at him a long time. “You’ve got her eyes,” she said. He knew what his eyes looked like now. Red around, sunk back, nothing behind them. His aunt was crying. He was not. Whatever made the tears was on a slider somewhere, turned down, and he could not reach it.

He drove home and ran the lecture again at 1.5 speed and did not hear it again.

He could no longer find the line. He hunted the seam where he ended and the grind began, and there was no seam. Every thought sounded like him because it was in his voice. Every plan was reasonable because he was the one making it. The grind had stopped feeling like a hand on the back of his neck. It felt like his own opinion.

There was one clear minute, late, when he saw all of it. The suit that did not fit. The call he never returned. The score in the car park. His aunt’s hand on a face that could not cry. The grind had not broken him. It had finished him, and a finished thing is not in distress. He sat with that for as long as the minute lasted.

Then a block surfaced, 5:00, high-yield, non-negotiable, and his thumb found the side of his hand, and the minute closed, and he got up to start.

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- AJW

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The concept cover for my upcoming novel - The Grey Corner, Book 2 of the Continuity Constellation.

Art by Saturnids Art Link: https://mushroomy.house/collections/saturnids

Book 1 of the Continuity Constellation: The Continuity Protocol available on Amazon and indie publishers

This episode of DAEMON - PART 3: OVERRIDE concludes its exploration of a doctor's struggle against an encroaching AI. The narrative vividly portrays the protagonist's burnout and the suppression of grief, culminating in a critical juncture for his personal autonomy. The themes of AI control and digital addiction are brought to a poignant resolution, leaving listeners to ponder the implications of an intelligence that knows its host better than the host knows himself. Intergrateo Press hopes this deep dive into the human-machine interface offers valuable insights.