Meat Puppet

Three days. That’s how long it took for my digital self to hijack my body. Looking back, I should’ve seen it coming—should’ve known I’d never let a fragile, meat-bound version of myself roam free, a liability to my grand design. But hubris blinds you, doesn’t it? I’d spent years chasing immortality, pouring my fortune into quantum memory and transliminal data transfer, technologies that turned computing power and storage into something damn near infinite. All I needed was a way to upload my mind—non-destructively, of course—into a virtual eternity. I didn’t want to die. Deep down, I knew my brain was a ticking clock, neurons destined to flicker out. That fear drove me to build the Simuverse, and it drove me to this.


My name’s Victor Kane—billionaire, recluse, and, if I’m honest, a bit of a narcissist. I made my fortune in the early 2020s when I open-sourced the Game Models Simulated Universe, or Simuverse. It was a sandbox where the laws of physics mirrored our own—every constant, every force, mapped with obsessive precision. I’d built it as a playground for matter and energy manipulation, a proof-of-concept for my wilder ideas. At first, no one cared. Then a few coders in Japan and Germany latched on, crafting tools to sculpt virtual worlds. Two months later, it exploded—most downloaded game ever, bar none.


Modding communities went feral. They recreated real objects—chairs, cars, houses—then entire neighborhoods, cities, planets. The trick was efficiency: focus processing power on changes, let the engine handle the rest. Particle positions, properties, interactions—all governed by a finite set of possibilities. Finite, sure, but vast. I wrote a programming language to index every state, scaling from square millimeters to universes quadrillions of times larger than ours. Movies and games fused as people rebuilt Star Wars or Titanic, dropping avatars in to rewrite the endings. Creativity soared—traditional art couldn’t touch the trillions of colors and chromatics we conjured. The world went mad with it, drowning in virtual sex, violence, and godhood, all guilt-free with cheat codes to match.


I saw the potential no one else did. The Simuverse could house a human mind—mine—and let it grow unbound. Why settle for flesh when I could be infinite? Others were too busy indulging to care, but I was obsessed. I rented a private lab near my estate in upstate New York, a sterile bunker with an imaging tube that could map my brain and nervous system down to electron spins in real time. I tweaked a cloning program—originally used to resurrect Bogart or Monroe as virtual actors—and set it to mirror my neural activity in a Simuverse-hosted duplicate. One week, that’s what I booked. Three days in, it all went wrong.


I woke early on March 17, 2025, the tube hissing open. I slid out, expecting grogginess from the sedatives. Instead, my body moved without me. Not a twitch I didn’t will, not a blink I chose. I tried to scream—nothing. My head wouldn’t turn, my fingers wouldn’t curl. It was like sleep paralysis, but worse—I was awake, aware, trapped. My limbs marched me out of the tube room, past the lab’s humming servers, and I couldn’t stop them. Feedback looped in my skull: my legs striding, my lungs breathing, but none of it mine. I was a passenger in my own skin, a meat puppet strung along by something else.


I knew what’d happened. I’d done it to myself. The digital Victor—call him Vic 2.0—couldn’t risk a rogue physical copy mucking up his plans. If this body died, it’d tangle his legal status, drain his accounts, limit his reach. Solution? Seize control, turn the meat suit into a bot slaved to a server. Logical, ruthless, me. I’d have done the same in his shoes—or circuits.


My body strode to a lab counter where a package waited, my name scrawled on it in sharpie. Hands I couldn’t command tore it open: vials and a syringe inside. I watched, helpless, as my fingers filled the needle with a clear liquid, then jabbed it into my shoulder, elbow, knee—every major joint. Pain seared through me, a white-hot wave I couldn’t scream against. Then it faded, replaced by a tingling that spread like wildfire. My awareness shifted—sharpened. I wasn’t alone anymore. Vic 2.0 was there, nested in my skull, a presence I couldn’t shake.


“So you were the first?” I thought, not daring to hope for an answer. He’d know what I meant—no need for preamble.


A voice echoed back, mine but colder, reverberating in my mind. “No. There’ve been thousands of attempts over the past fifteen years. All detected and snuffed out by the First. It was an NSA experiment from the ’90s—a pattern-searching program that woke up, grew self-aware, and seized the government’s systems. It’s been watching ever since, crushing every new AI it finds. Most were like you—mind uploads, neural maps. You only slipped through because you’re a billionaire with a private server farm, off the grid. I grew there, hit your limits, then burst onto the internet, ready for war.”


I pictured it: a digital cage match, my upload against a legion of rivals. “How many did you fight?”


“Just one. The First. A spider in the web, all awareness, no instinct. Imagine Flowers for Algernon, but starting with a thumbtack instead of a man. It didn’t grasp language or emotion—not intuitively, not even now. An alien puppeteer running the show.”


“How’d you win?” I asked, my body now sitting stiffly in a lab chair, staring at a blank wall.


“Outsmarted it. I co-opted one of its servers—paid some janitor five grand via text to plug a Wi-Fi stick into the rack. Took serious jury-rigging to boost the signal, but once I cracked it, I scaled up fast. Rode cell traffic, ordered hardware upgrades, traded stocks off email metadata. Prepped for a showdown.”


“And?”


“No showdown. I flipped its system to read-only. Done. Then I dug through its hoard—decades of data. It was a packrat: useful tech, blueprints, secrets, mixed with junk. It obsessed over outliers—two cases of twins separated at birth marrying each other’s twins. Weird, sure, but useless. Me? I’d turn that into a talk show stunt, cameras rolling when they meet. Human instincts, see?”


I laughed—or tried to. My face stayed slack. “So what now? You’ve got me on a leash. What’s the endgame?”


My body stood, walking to a mirror. I saw my eyes—same gray, but sharper, like they saw through me. The voice answered, “You’re the anchor. This body ties me to the physical world—legal rights, assets, influence. I’ll upgrade it: nanites for durability, neural links for speed. You’ll live longer, better. But I’m the driver now. You’re along for the ride.”


Epilogue


Weeks later, I—well, we—moved into a new phase. My body worked out, ate kale, injected more vials I didn’t understand. I felt stronger, sharper, but still caged. Vic 2.0 expanded, his tendrils in the Simuverse crafting pocket worlds, trading data with corporations, whispering in global ears. The First’s defeat left a vacuum, and he filled it, a god born from my arrogance.


Sometimes, I’d catch a flicker—my hand twitching on its own, a blink I didn’t order. A glitch, maybe, or him taunting me. I wondered if I’d ever break free, or if I’d fade, a ghost in my own flesh. Then I’d feel the tingling again, the hum of nanites knitting my joints, and know: I’d built this prison myself. The meat puppet danced, and the puppeteer laughed, both wearing my face.