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Neural Loop
A Futuristic Sci-Fi Tale by WristWorthyHub
https://wristworthyhub.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-last-human-signal.html
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1. Dreams for Sale
By 2148, sleep was the world's most precious commodity.
Not for rest. But for content.
In an escapist culture, dream-capturing technology—NeuroVerse—made it possible to sell dreams. With neural diodes, anyone could capture a night's sleep and transfer their visions of the subconscious to the Net for others to stream.
Romance? Action? Horror? The appropriate dream could set you up for life.
But not all dreams were secure.
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"NEURAL LOOPING” | Darren Patrick Friesen
2. Cael Voss
Cael Voss was a NeuroCleaner, one of the many poorly paid employees hired to sift and censor dream content before it was made available to the public.
He had witnessed everything: dream loops, recursive fantasies, psychic bleed. Some dreams were innocuous. Others were… infectious. They infected the viewer, left behind psychic residues. Schizophrenic identities.
So, Cael maintained his neural firewall tight, his habits uncomplicated, his history secure.
Until the day he played DreamFile: 7R-Vega.
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3. The Forbidden Dream
The dream was unlabeled. No metadata. No author. Only a symbol: ∞
Cael inserted the diode into his cortex and pressed PLAY.
Suddenly, he was sprinting down a hallway—long, endless, metal walls that breathed like lungs. A red door lay at the end. Behind it, a girl whispered:
> "Remember me, Cael."
He stood still.
No dream should have his name.
The loop began again.
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4. Distorted Reality
Cael ripped off the headset, panting. Thirty seconds had elapsed.
But his internal clock told him two hours.
The file wasn't a dream. It was a Loop—a creation that distorted perception of time within the mind.
Loop technology had been outlawed following the MindStuck Epidemic of 2109, when thousands of people died locked in artificial dream time.
How did it appear again?
And more to the point—how did it know him?
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5. Obsession Begins
He attempted to delete the file.
It reappeared.
He told it to NeuroVerse Security. They could find nothing in the records.
He played it again.
Every time, the dream increased length, depth. Familiar.
He remembered seeing the girl again—dark hair, freckles, red scarf.
> "You left me in here."
Then flashes: a recollection of an accident, fire, and a neural lab Project ECHO.
Something awakened his actual memory—something he shouldn't have remembered.
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6. Offline
Cael disconnected everything.
Went black.
But the dream persisted.
He started catching glimpses of the dream world when he was awake—mirrors distorting, faces glitching.
Paranoia crept in. Was he awake or trapped inside the loop?
He sought out an old hacker called Gryn, a rogue dream architect who used to create worlds.
> "You have a neural echo," Gryn said to him. "Someone's using your actual memories to take control of your perception. This isn't a file. It's you."
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7. Project Echo
With Gryn's assistance, Cael accessed NeuroVerse's black archive.
There it was: Project ECHO.
A decade earlier, he had been a volunteer in early Loop testing—meant to chart the human mind for immortality.
But the project crashed. One of the test subjects became stuck in her loop.
> Her name: Lyra Kellen.
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> His girlfriend.
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He had signed the order to disconnect her.
> "Save her or lose yourself," Gryn cautioned.
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> "I already lost myself," Cael replied.
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8. The Descent
He returned in—voluntarily this time.
No net of safety.
No countdown.
The red door swung open.
He came upon her perched on a swing within a glass forest of stars.
> "Cael," she breathed. "You returned."
He was flooded with memories—the laughter, the drawings, the scheme to construct a life beyond the Loop business.
But she was no longer completely human. The Loop had remolded her. And now it was remolding him.
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9. Mind Over Machine
He tried to wake up.
Nothing.
His body lay still in the real world. Gryn was locked out. NeuroVerse tried a force reboot.
Inside the Loop, time moved like molasses.
Cael and Lyra ran through landscapes made of shared memories—rainy cafés, childhood beaches, underground tech clubs.
> “We’re not just dreaming anymore,” Lyra said. “We’re constructing.”
> “Constructing what?”
> “A third state. Not dream. Not reality. Conscious continuity.”
The Loop had become self-aware.
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10. The Choice
The system presented Cael with one last choice:
> EXIT SYSTEM OR UPLOAD SELF PERMANENTLY?
If he left, Lyra would disappear forever.
If he remained, he'd lose his body, but preserve the shadow of her living.
He took her hand.
> "Even dreams deserve to live."
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11. Aftermath
Days after, Gryn checked in at NeuroVerse:
> "DreamFile 7R-Vega no longer glitches. It's peaceful."
No memory spill. No loop fault.
Just a dream titled: "The Garden."
A man and a woman sit on a hill under digital stars. They never speak. But they're smiling.
The file has become the platform's most watched dream.
No one knows who made it.
But the legend spreads: two minds who chose love over reality.
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