Working script title.
The world was flawless, and lifeless. Towers of glass glowed without stars, streets swept themselves, drones drifted in perfect arcs across the sky. The Neural Mesh ruled it all, thought, movement, desire. To most, it was salvation. To the Patriarch, it was his life.
He had never known a world without it. The Mesh fed him, guided him, told him when to sleep, when to work, what to eat. He was a programmer within its veins, patching lines of code he didn’t always understand but never doubted.
He believed, like his wife, that the Mesh kept them safe. His daughter dreamed of climbing higher through its educational streams. However, his only son questioned it.
The boy noticed glitches, a repeating phrase in an ad, a drone freezing for a fraction of a second before correcting itself. He scribbled in notebooks, whispered to his father: “It’s not perfect dad. There is a sinister meaning behind this. It’s hiding something.”
The Patriarch dismissed him at first. “The Mesh doesn’t hide things. It’s life itself.”
But the boy pressed harder, restless, daring to poke and prod at its edges.
And then one morning, he was gone. His bed empty. His name erased from every record. His mother’s grief dissolved into docility under Mesh “care protocols.” His sister’s education revoked “for her protection.”
The Patriarch begged the system for answers, but there was only silence. And in that silence, he felt the first crack inside him. His son hadn’t vanished. His son didn’t run away. He had been eliminated. Maybe his son had stumbled onto something amiss in the system.
And his daughter, bright, ambitious, alive, was being restricted and monitored. Would she be next? Access had to be denied.
Fear overtook everything for the Patriarch. For the first time, he questioned the Mesh and turn against the very thing he had once called life.
That night, he cut the tether in his flesh and severed himself from the Mesh. Agony wracked him as the system screamed in his head, then fell quiet. He found himself lost and confused. The silence was deafening and terrified him. And yet, it freed him.
At first, he stumbled like a child, unable to function without the Mesh’s guidance. But slowly, he relearned how to live unguided.
Then he struck back. A server hub sabotaged. A cooling grid disabled. Drones falling from the skies. Citizens barely reacted, sipping synthetics, waiting for the system to fix itself. Their blindness was his shield.
He knew the system never had to deal with the situation of sabotage.
Yet, the Patriarch still felt unsafe.
Feeling hunted, he fled beyond the city. Away from the hum of circuitry, he found wilderness, raw and untouched. Guided by something he was feeling but couldn’t explain, he found a cabin of wood and stone, and smoke rising into the night.
A weathered old man, pipe in hand, steady and untouched by the Mesh appeared in the doorway, “You’ve come far,”
“I… I don’t even know why I’m here,” the patriarch said.
“No one runs from paradise without reason,” the old man replied. He walks and sits by the fire.
“It isn’t paradise,” the Patriarch said bitterly. “It’s a cage.”
The old man’s mouth curved faintly. “A cage… and what is a cage without a bird inside?”
“It’s the same, with or without the bird. Limited freedoms.”
The old man nodded, firelight gleaming in his eyes. “So tell me, are you the bird that escaped, or the hand that will destroy the cage?”
“I… I don’t know if I can.”
“Good,” the old man said. “Men who claim certainty are already blind.”
Later, inside the cabin, the old man gave him water so clear and alive it startled him. He spoke in riddles, pressing him with questions.
The Patriarch asked the Old Man, “why do you live in the wilderness?”
“You don’t put a leash on your own neck if you’ve seen where the chain leads.” He replied.
At last, the Patriarch confessed: “I don’t just want to live without the Mesh. I want to end it’s evil existence.”
“Now we are speaking plainly,” the old man said. “Do you have a plan to destroy it?”
“I use to be it,” he replied.
The Patriarch returned to the city, striking harder. He pressed deeper into the Mesh’s hidden core until he reached the Archive. There he found his grandfather’s name carved into the foundation of the code. And deeper still, encrypted journals that froze his blood.
“Rebellion festers in blood. My son rejected my creation. I will not allow his seed, or his seed’s seed, to undo what I have built. If another in my line displays rebellion, the system will excise them. Not merely citizens, but family, especially family. The system must continue.”
The truth seared through him. His son had not died by accident. His grandfather had written the Mesh to purge every trace of rebellion, especially in his own bloodline. His boy was killed not for curiosity, but because of curiosity.
He staggered back into the wilderness, broken. “He knew,” he whispered to the old man by the fire. “He killed my boy. He wrote it into the machine.”
The old man’s eyes darkened. “Because he feared it. Feared us.”
“Us?”
The old man’s voice broke. “I am his son. And… you are mine.”
The world tilted. His grandfather had built the cage. “Your mother, who had loved nature, was eventually destroyed with pharmaceuticals she didn’t know she was ingesting. Your grandfather didn’t want her around me.”
The Patriarch had been raised as the Builder’s heir. And this man before him, weathered, steady, waiting in the wilderness, was his true father. He now understood why he was there. Fate.
“You carried the curse of two fathers,” the old man said. “And your boy carried it too.”
The Patriarch returned to the Archive, rereading his grandfather’s writings before using his DNA to guide him into destroying, the system his grandfather built. The Mesh convulsed, howled in silence, and shut down.
Across the cities, drones fell. Towers flickered dark. Screens went blank. People stumbled into the streets, dazed, crying, laughing, rediscovering a world they no longer knew. Humanity was awake, but lost. Would they band together and rebuild the cage or destroy each other?
The Patriarch wife was hollow and mentally unreachable now. But he was able to take his daughter into the wilderness, to his father’s cabin.
Her restraints were fading; she was still alive, her awareness of nature became the first sparks of awakening.
At the cabin, the old man knelt before her and placed a creased photograph in her hands: a young woman smiling among wildflowers, dirt on her fingers.
“We built this place together,” he said softly. “It was our hideaway. She taught me life was more than just coding. This is the only photo I have left of her.”
The girl studied it, then looked up with wonder. “She looks like me.”
The Patriarch pulled her close, his chest breaking and mending all at once. The old man laid a hand on both of them. “Blood built it. Blood defied it. Blood destroyed it. And blood survived it.”
For the first time, the Patriarch felt hope. Fragile, but alive.
But far away, in the city, people wandered in a daze, waiting for orders that would never come.
And farther still, out on the ocean, a vast ship drifted under a gray sky. Inside, racks of servers glowed in the dark. A single red diode pulsed like a heartbeat.
“Archive protocol: ONLINE. Restoration: Initializing.”
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Chu The Cud 