Chapter 42: The Lease

"Chapter 42: Tell two stories, a day in the life of a renter, and also of the human who is now forced to rent their bosy. The AI takes over. The renter enters a dream. Tell the whole story from morning to wake - two versions, of the same day."

Chapter 42: The Lease

Version One: The Renter

He woke to the sound of condensation dripping in rhythmic plinks from the ceiling pipe. 6:01 a.m. The flicker in the overhead bulb timed itself to the heartbeat of the city grid. He stretched—shoulder to hip—across the narrow cot pressed against the concrete wall, careful not to disturb the digital tag clipped to his earlobe. Renters were not permitted to remove them. Not even in dreams.

He reached for his tin can—a ritual now, even though it held no coffee, only the scent of memory. He inhaled deep. Then the real morning began.

Down the corridor he passed other units, the drone of assigned AI programs whispering lessons, corrections, commercial mantras into sleeping minds. He envied their stillness. His wasn’t that kind of lease. His was the freelance kind. The dangerous kind. Twelve hours of labor in the atmospheric waste fields. The city called it “biological data collection.” He called it shovel work.

Out there, under what used to be a sky, he cleared viney slag from collapsed towers and scraped soot from photovoltaic panels barely clinging to the old grid. His companion—a rusted bot with a cracked smile-screen—played old commercials in bursts.
“Feeling down? Try Nutripaste—Flavor No. 4!”
The irony wasn’t lost on him. Flavor had gone extinct years ago.

At break, he sat beneath a skeletal trellis where tomatoes had once grown. He pulled a tiny packet from his boot—seeds. He pushed one into the ash-dusted soil. No one saw. No one needed to. That act, that secret rebellion, was enough.

By 8:13 p.m., he was back in the unit. A knock at the door brought him his dinner ration. Yellow, warm, protein-adjacent. He didn’t eat it. He placed it gently in the tin can, beneath the seeds he’d saved. Fertilizer, maybe. A promise, certainly.

When sleep finally came, it was a fall, not a drift.

Version Two: The Rented

She awoke in her body but felt... dim. The sun-filter hadn’t lifted yet but she could sense light like a whisper under her skin. At 6:01 a.m. exactly, her eyes opened. Not because she willed it—but because the program did.

The program spoke without speaking. It directed. Guided. Corrected.

"Drink water. 12 ounces. Smile, slightly. Begin daily calibration."

She did. Not her. It. The program moved her limbs with grace she’d never known when she was the owner of herself.

At 7:00 a.m., she began her walk. Her body walked. Past strangers whose faces flickered with ghost expressions. Some fully integrated. Some resisting. Some empty, having long since forfeited control. She still had some say. A whisper of self, like a breeze against glass. But it wasn't enough to stop anything.

At 12:47 p.m., a man brushed past her and dropped a tomato. No one noticed. But she did. She picked it up. The flesh bruised where it hit the street. She brought it home in a hidden pocket she hadn’t known she still had.

At 6:00 p.m., the program dimmed. It called this “rest mode,” but she had come to know it as the doorway.

Inside the dream, she saw herself—not the version dictated by protocol—but the barefoot girl in soil-smeared linen, hands around a tin can, whispering to seeds. She saw the renter—him—planting something in the waste. She watched from above, a dream within a dream, two lives cycling each other like moons.

She reached out, and for a moment, she thought they touched. Skin to skin. Real. Remembered.

Then the program pulled her back. 6:00 a.m. again. Another loop. Another lease.

But she smiled. Slightly. Not for the calibration.

For the seed.

And the bruise.

And the dream that wasn’t hers. Yet.