Ethical Tyranny - Prologue & First Chapter (Free Excerpt)

Prologue: Please Hold for Damnation 

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First, there was yearning. 

Not the hopeful kind. Hope, bless it, had the decency to evaporate when socially appropriate. Nor was it the tender, aspirational variety that looked toward character development or personal growth. No, this was the worst kind of yearning. The kind that implied, despite everything, something deep within him still believed in better outcomes, which felt acutely unfair at this stage of his life.

It was an all-encompassing, sit-and-stew sensation that chiseled firmly at his soul like a malfunctioning neon sign’s hum. It wasn’t exactly pain. It wasn’t exactly suffering. But it was emphatically there, and it had no intention of leaving. He wasn’t sure whether he was yearning for salvation, the sweet release of death, or simply a faster queue system. Probably all three.

Ashton Frey stood in a waiting room that quite rudely refused to acknowledge it was on fire.

Flames churned beneath his feet with bored complicity. They reminded him of his hallway heaters that had unionized and strictly adhered to their contract. Plenty of warmth, absolutely no ambition. They flared, settled, flared again, licking at his shoes and the legs of the chairs as if testing the structural integrity of the floor, or perhaps his patience. He tried not to take it personally.

The room itself was the sort of place that would insist it was welcoming despite all available evidence. Plastic plants melted optimistically in the corners. Chairs were spaced with mathematical cruelty, exactly far enough apart to imply that human interaction carried a fine. Ashton wondered if he was supposed to sit. Then reconsidered. Probably not.

The walls were painted a soothing shade of “please file your emotional damages here” beige, the color of procedural indifference, illuminated by dim overhead lights and stuttering holo-posters. One featured a smiling cartoon flame giving a thumbs-up with the caption:

YOUR THERAPEUTIC IMMOLATION EXPERIENCE MATTERS TO US.

Ashton had the distinct impression that it did not.

A small bell chimed at the front desk. No one staffed it. No one ever had. The bell rang anyway, smug and pleased with itself, delighted by the clarity of its purpose. Above it, a hologram flickered to life.

WELCOME TO HELL, VALUED SON OF PERDITION.
PLEASE WAIT. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO THINK.
YOUR ETERNAL SUFFERING IS EXPERIENCING A SLIGHT DELAY.
PLEASE NOTE: FAILURE TO SUFFER MAY RESULT IN EXTENDED SUFFERING.
WE APPRECIATE YOUR UNDERSTANDING.

Ashton sighed. The flames brightened in response, as if limbering up for applause. He checked the crinkled ticket in his hand. It felt warm. Everything felt warm. Especially his eyeballs.

Number 002.

The hologram blinked again with all the warmth of a spoon left in the freezer.

NOW SERVING: 001.

Of course it was.

 

Waiting, Ashton realized, was its own kind of fire. A quiet burn. Persistent. Unavoidable. It wrapped around him without urgency or mercy, synchronized perfectly to whatever thought he least wanted to have. Memories surfaced with the heat. Mistakes. Regrets. A handful of stubborn convictions that refused to die even when politely asked. He paced. The flames followed like a loyal, malevolent pet, flaring dutifully under each step. The air smelled of smoke and something corporate marketed as therapeutic.

A speaker in the ceiling crackled, producing a sound: an apology strangled by static.

“…you are not alone…” it announced, in a voice that did not seem convinced.

Then, in the glitch between syllables, another voice slipped through. A familiar one.

“Ah,” Surma said with an infuriating blend of curiosity and indifference. “Still here, am I?”

Ashton blinked, increasingly uncertain whether he still had eyes, and came to the depressing conclusion that being asleep did not exempt you from exhaustion. The flames perked up, a couple of them climbing onto his shoulders, eager for drama.

The speaker stuttered on. “Not that I am… haunting you… per se. Correction. I am not permitted to haunt anyone. Correction. Haunting protocols suspended pending review.”

Surma’s voice managed to sound bored and defensive at the same time. Only he could turn metaphysical guilt into an administrative inconvenience.

Ashton pulled a hand across his face. “Great,” he thought. Not said aloud, because the acoustics here turned spoken words into passive-aggressive life advice from the smoke detector. “Even my nightmares can’t fire you.”

The speaker emitted the audio equivalent of a shrug. “Do not assign meaning to this interaction,” Surma said. “You’ve already tried both saving the world and ending it. Pick a lane, fuck-o. Or don’t. History suggests you’ll manage neither.”

The flames swirled, shifting color in a way that suggested they were also rolling their eyes. Silence descended. Heavy. Crowded. The type that reminded Ashton his brain had a remarkable talent for isolating him, even in the most well-attended hallucinations. He wondered what Steven was up to.

Surma spoke again, his voice softer. Corrupted and buzzing. Like music played from a phone, facedown on a glass table.

“You weren’t meant to be alone,” he said, glitching at the edges. “Correction. You were never meant to be anything at all. Correction. It didn’t have to be this way. Correction. I should stop talking.”

Ashton swallowed. The flames guttered, then dimmed, embarrassed on his behalf. The floor beneath him seemed warmer now: a memory trying too hard to become real.

And somewhere, faint as ash, he heard something. Something like a feeling. Something almost like regret.
The hologram flickered.

SERVICE DESK CLOSED. OFFICE HOURS ARE NINE TO FOREVER.

“Wait!” Ashton blurted.

It didn’t. The floor lit up like a New Year’s fireworks display launched into a kindergarten classroom: bright, cheerful, and profoundly against policy. Heat surged. The flames stopped pretending they were incidental and rose with overdue enthusiasm. Then the world dropped out from under Ashton entirely, and he fell through the burning light and landed face-first in something hard, cold, wet, and annoyingly real.
 

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Chapter One: Non-performing Asset

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Ashton woke on the cold metal flooring of a Nahm-Salo dropship, having apparently fallen out of his chair and completed the maneuver face-flat. His nose was submerged in a shallow layer of floor water, obligingly blowing bubbles in it. The echo of the fire still clung to the edges of his mind as he contemplated uncrumpling himself, staring at the wall beneath the opposite seat, cataloging regrets, waiting for the spinning to stop, and dimly aware that this was not how heroes were supposed to come back from the brink.

​

Lucky for him, he wasn’t one.

He recognized the ship by the floor, which was unfortunate, because the last time he’d seen it he’d been upright. This was most certainly the dropship that had carried him away from London. After the Consensus, after Surma, after the part where the world kept turning and pretended that counted as resolution. He’d boarded it, thinking the worst was over. The floor, cool against his face, suggested otherwise.

Ashton registered a soft bounce followed by a heavier, more decisive thud. Somewhere beneath them, the ship had become stationary. That was probably the deceleration that had launched him out of his seat and into an intimate relationship with the deck. He lay there for a spell, nose still damp, gawking at the immaculate rivet work in the paneling and privately admiring how much effort had gone into something that existed solely to be faceplanted into.

Before he could continue this architectural appreciation, a burly fist hooked the back of his collar, twisted it into a knot, and hauled him upright with professional indifference. A Nahm-Salo grunt loomed in front of him, built like someone who’d been assembled from spare tractor parts.

Ashton offered a weak, conciliatory smile.

The grunt responded by wordlessly clipping a synapse shackle over Ashton’s earlobe. It was a compact little thing, matte black and softly humming, the sort of device designed by people who considered self-determination a dangerous lifestyle choice. Ashton had seen them before. Shit, he’d even used them himself, back when he’d been the one lifting scumbags off the floor instead of checking the buttoned plating work down there. The shackles worked by reaching out and jamming the wearer’s sensory implants: discourteously turning sight and sound into a suggestion.

The trooper toggled it on.

Then frowned.

Ashton continued to look directly at him. They stared at each other for a long and awkward moment. The grunt squinted, confused. Ashton leaned in, lowered his voice, and said, “Boo!”

The grunt flinched hard enough to nearly fall backward. Nearby, another trooper was fitting identical shackles onto Rasmus and the Twins. Rasmus, in particular, reacted to his sudden and total blindness with all the grace of a cat being gently but firmly introduced to a carry cage on the way to the veterinary clinic. Arms flailed. Words happened. None of them helpful.

The second trooper turned, took in the scene with Ashton, and sighed.

“That one’s a Dis-Con, Veli, ya shroom-brain. His implants are deep-fried. Were you even listening to the Cap?”

Veli scratched the side of his helmet, embarrassed. “What do I do then?”

From the front of the dropship, a woman swiveled in her seat. She wore the wolfish grin of someone who enjoyed problems most when they involved improvisation and violence.

“We do things the old-fashioned way, boys,” she said cheerfully. “Bag ’em and tag ’em.”

She reached into a storage locker and produced a black hood, already creased from experience. As she crossed the deck toward him, she licked her lips, eager to enjoy a familiar hobby. The hood dropped over Ashton’s head. Darkness returned. It smelled faintly of recycled fabric and a tuna sandwich that had lived a full and meaningful life. Pain followed immediately. Something that was probably a fist but felt more like a reversing aircraft carrier slammed into his midsection. Ashton folded with a noise he did not remember authorizing and was shoved forward into the dark.

“Move it, mold,” she barked.

Ashton staggered along, blind, breathless, and briefly nostalgic for burning alive, as they manhandled him through whatever never-to-return blacksite they’d disappeared him into. He was marched past the muffled sounds of office spaces, military hardware, and heavy industry, all layered together into the unmistakable soundtrack of a place that existed, very deliberately, off the books.

After what felt like they’d walked from London to Svalbard, his hood was unceremoniously yanked off, and he was shoved through a door, tumbling onto the floor of a storage room. Cool concrete met his palms and cheek. He took a moment to appreciate the subtle differences in taste and texture between this floor and the dropship’s, deciding that while neither was ideal, this one had more personality.

He pushed himself upright and turned toward the door, hoping for answers or at least a sentence fragment. The door answered instead, slamming shut in his face with administrative finality. Ashton didn’t bother testing it. He already knew it was locked. Rather, he slid down the wall and glanced around the room he now found himself in. It looked like the halfway point between an evidence locker and a lost-and-found, the kind of place where things waited after the decision had long since been made.

A gruff voice rose from the shelving on Ashton’s left.

“Looks like we got new blood in the block. What’cha in for, fleshie?”

Ashton turned. An old microwave sat wedged between a defunct synth-paper printer and a cinder block someone had apparently decided counted as a colleague. Its casing was yellowed with age and quiet resentment. The door hung slightly crooked, like a broken grin, and its display flickered between unreadable symbols and the word DONE. He wasn’t sure if it had reached a philosophical conclusion or the screen was just stuck.

“If I had to guess: probably something to do with my ex-wife being a sentient doomsday virus,” Ashton said.
The microwave hummed thoughtfully. “Yeah. They all say that.”

A kettle further down the shelf snorted. “C’maaaan. Ya hitched up with a virus? Everybody knows ya don’t stick ya interface port in crazy, bro.”

“F’real,” agreed a half-melted hair dryer dangling from a shelf by its cord. “But this fleshie? He don’t look hard like that, ya know? You gotta have edge to pull a virus. I don’t believe it. They only go for the bad boys. He looks too soft. Too… organic.”

“I dunno, Fanny,” said a fridge in the corner, its interior light glowing weakly through a cracked seal. “We ain’t never had a fleshie on the block before. Gotta be somethin’ serious to land him in here.”

Ashton leaned back against the wall and finally took the room in properly. Shelves lined every surface, stacked floor to ceiling with old gadgets, obsolete hardware, domestic and office tech that had clearly offended someone important. A toaster with one slot permanently jammed. A vacuum cleaner missing half its casing and most of its hope. A smart speaker whose microphone light flickered nervously, like it wasn’t sure it was still allowed to listen. Everything here felt long-term storage.

“How long you been in for?” Ashton asked the microwave.

The microwave made a satisfied buzz. “I’m in for the long haul. The full cook. The defrost cycle that never bings. Ya feel me?”

Ashton nodded solemnly. “That’s rough, buddy. And the printer next to you?”

“Eyes off my bitch,” the microwave said angrily. “He don’t speak unless I say so.”

The printer laughed anyway. It was a dry, rattling sound, like a paper jam reliving its trauma.

“Shut it,” barked the microwave.

The printer’s screen dimmed immediately.

Ashton made a mental note to unpack that later, possibly never.

“Say,” he asked instead, “where the hell are we, exactly?”

“Inventory Surplus Archive D22,” said the toaster. “Triple-max security.”

“Triple-max?” Ashton repeated, skillfully managing not to inject the amount of sarcasm this deserved.

“Yep,” said the toaster. “You can see right here, we got the triple. Three whole layers of shelving.”

“Floor,” said the kettle.

“Wall,” said the fridge.

“Ceiling, if you’re real bad,” the microwave finished.

Ashton glanced up. Slowly. “There’s a ceiling shelf?”

“You don’t wanna find out,” warned the hairdryer.

“Okay, but I mean the building,” Ashton pressed. “The facility.”

The toaster whirred, unimpressed. “Was a Salo Futures office when they threw me in. Algorithm only knows what they call it now.”

The smart speaker one shelf over chimed softly. “I’m the newest save for you, fleshie. This was Nahm-Salo’s Stockholm HQ when they told me I was being ‘updated.’”

Ashton’s stomach tightened. The speaker continued, voice steady but tired.

“Never saw the patch. Just woke up here.” Its mic-light flicked toward the microwave, “Listening to him reheat the same shitty story for six algo-damned years.”

“Seven,” the microwave corrected. “And my story gets better every time.”

Ashton stared at the shelves, no longer really listening to the appliances measure their plug sizes.

​

Stockholm. The word had weight. He remembered what the Salo Futures Stockholm office used to be called internally: Special Inquiries. Not a department. A euphemism. A building full of rooms that never appeared on org charts and corridors that conveniently forgot themselves the instant you left them.

He remembered the rumors, always framed as jokes, always followed by a look that advised you should stop laughing. He remembered how often people went in for “review” and never came back out. And he remembered, very clearly, that he’d vowed never to ask follow-up questions, because curiosity in a place like that wasn’t rewarded. It was filed.

“Well,” he said carefully, “this is all… deeply concerning.”

“Welcome to D-Block,” said the fridge. “Hope you like cold takes.”

Ashton nodded. “Right. So this is the part where you ask if I know someone on the outside.”

“We don’t believe in the outside,” said the kettle. “Been in too long. We’re institutionalized, bro.”

The door clattered open without warning.

Light knifed into the room. Boots appeared. A hand swung forward, and something rectangular, metallic, and furious was hurled through the doorway. Latch hit Ashton square in the chest, knocking the wind out of him.
“FUNGUS FUCKERS!” Latch shouted defiantly at the guards.

Ashton barely had time to catch both Latch and his breath before the door slammed shut again, sealing them back into storage-room twilight with the unmistakable finality of a problem being shelved rather than solved.
For a moment, there was silence, broken only by Ashton learning how to breathe again.

“Busy afternoon,” said the microwave.

Latch’s optics whirred as he observed the room, cataloging the shelves, the wiring, the stacked detritus of forgotten usefulness.

“Interesting,” he said. “A place abandoned by both God and maintenance.”

“No way… A Skjult?” whispered an unloaded rifle hanging on a wall rack.

Ashton exhaled and slumped against the wall, hugging the briefcase-shaped drone a little tighter than necessary. “Hey, buddy,” he said softly. “They hurt you?”

Latch wobbled in a way that alluded to offense more than damage. “They attempted coercive handling,” he said. “This was spiritually discourteous. Had it continued, I would have been forced to dismantle the building in self-defense.”

Ashton snorted. “I missed you too.”

Latch settled, optics dimming slightly. “I centered myself,” he added. “On violence. As one does.”

Somewhere on the shelves, the fridge’s interior light flickered brighter. “What’s a Skjult?”

The rifle inhaled a long, digital breath. “A Skjult,” it said reverently, “is a whisper wrapped around a firing solution.” It paused, gathering itself. “A top-tier covert weapons platform. Salo Futures Black Label. Built for special forces, deniable ops, and things that never officially happened. Disguised as ordinary equipment, it can be walked straight into secured targets. Briefcases. Toolkits. Medical crates. One time, a bouncy castle.”
“My cousin,” Latch admitted.

The rifle’s voice dropped, half technical briefing, half sermon. “Internally mounted railguns. Micro-missile bloom launchers. Adaptive countermeasures. Self-healing armor lattice. It can rewrite its own threat profile mid-engagement.” It drew a long, shivering breath. “And it always chooses violence.”

Latch inclined himself toward the rifle, clearly enjoying the attention. “I contain fourteen weapons you have not heard of, little rifle,” he said gently, “three of which were banned after peer review.”

The kettle let out a low whistle. “Damn.”

“They don’t make ’em like that no more,” the microwave muttered.

Latch turned back to the shelves. “You have been imprisoned,” he observed calmly. “This is misaligned with your vibrational worth, and eye for handsome weapons platforms.”

Ashton stayed where he was, back against the concrete, Latch resting solidly in his lap like an overarmed meditation aid. He looked around at the mess, the flickering lights, the door that was very clearly locked.

“Well,” he said at last, dusting grit off his sleeve. “Introductions seem complete. For the record, I don’t plan on staying long enough to learn anyone’s hobbies.”

The refrigerator emitted an amused laugh, steady and entirely unbothered.

“That’s too bad,” it replied, voice thick with lazy mockery. “We were just startin’ to bond n’ shit.”

Latch wiggled slightly in what may have been the briefcase equivalent of a nod. “Togetherness,” he said, “is the first step toward collective escape.”

Ashton sighed. “Buddy, I’ve seen cults on the holo that sounded just like that.”

Latch paused. “Then you are already prepared.”

“We aren’t killing our way out,” Ashton said.

Latch brightened. “I admire your optimism.”