Regulated Truth - Prologue & First Chapter (Free Excerpt)

Prologue: Scalable Immolation 

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First, there was laughter.

Not human laughter. Nor was it AI-generated mirth packaged into friendly customer service tones. This was low and close, inside the skull, with a rhythm too steady to be natural. It vibrated against the back of Ashton’s teeth. Each chortle echoed footfalls in a long-abandoned corridor of his mind. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even truly sound, but it was there, everywhere. A warm, smoldering chuckle that seeped into his hair like second-hand cigarette smoke. It started deep in his bones and unfurled into his mind, curling around his thoughts until it was all he could hear.

Then came the heat, always the heat. Familiar now, routine even. The heat that made you feel like your body was an oil drum and someone had tossed a match down your throat for fun, you know, just to see how long you could scream before you turned into a human torch. It was a slow burn, one he’d grown to resent with an intimacy that only breeds contempt. It whispered sweet, hellish nothings through his nerve endings. A clingy metaphysical ex that refused to just politely fuck off and leave him in peace.

Ashton Frey was on fire again.

These days, the burning had a rhythm. A tempo. Like his body had been selected for the ‘BBQ-Grindcore - Volume: Infinite’ playlist. Each wave of heat felt like a track change, turning up the ‘extra crispy’ to eleven. He looked down and saw that his skin had begun curling; warping like cheap plastic in a microwave. 

“Oh good,” he thought. “This shit again…”

There were no screams. Not anymore. He was past that. Now it was just tired, resigned, sizzling. The sounds of a man who had, through extensive repetition, come to accept that being flambéed in his sleep was just part of his day-to-day. He blinked and noticed his eyes were gone. Vaporized like kittens in an industrial sandblaster. Missing eyes weren’t a problem here though, never were. Because he could still see. Vividly. Brilliantly, and picture-perfectly. The nightmares needed him to see, for the mirrors.

They arrived. The latest addition to his nightmare’s growing catalog of horrors. The first time he’d seen them, he’d been somewhat surprised. 

“Guess we’re doing mirrors now,” he’d thought. 

These days, though, he just watched them with a quiet, grim sort of acceptance. There were hundreds of them. Suspended in the air, embedded in the ground, scattered through the sky. Some were smooth, their glass pristine; others cracked and glitching like broken touchscreens, distorting the world with shattered edges. Each mirror reflected a different Ashton. Some old, some young. Others were burned, or torn apart in increasingly creative ways. One version grinned with teeth made of rusted wires. Another wept molten metal from hollow eye sockets. Yet another, perfectly unscathed, stared back at him with an expression of clear pity. That particular mirror’s gaze held something deeper within it. Something familiar; unsettlingly so. It was the only one he ever made the effort to turn away from.

Ashton didn’t feel fear anymore. That had burned out of him long ago. What he felt now was exhaustion. It reminded him of the feeling you get from pretending to be social just a little too long. It sunk into your shoulders, weighed down your thoughts, and made you wonder how you ever managed to wear the mask at all.

“I’ve had enough of this circus,” he muttered, the words spilling not from his lips, but instead, echoing back at him, repeated just slightly out of sync by every mirror. His own voice splintered into a thousand jagged fragments. 

A rogue spark fluttered out of the closest reflection. A familiar one. It hovered just in front of his face, twirling dramatically.

“Hello Steven,” he said through his doppelgangers. 

A friendly greeting to the existential dread that danced around him. Steven didn’t reply. Steven never replied. He just did his favorite little spark ballet and pirouetted toward the ceiling like a firefly on meth. Ashton lifted his gaze, following the cheeky spark as it disappeared. 

In that moment, the nearest mirror suddenly tilted over and crashed down toward him. This had never happened before. He instinctively raised his arms to shield himself as it fell. Instead of shattering against him, it rippled like liquid, pulling him through its surface. Abruptly, he found himself somewhere else. No flames anymore. No sizzling meat or haunting mirrors. Instead, he was walking down a long, sterile corridor. He recognized it, even though he had never actually set foot there. It was a secure facility. The one where Surma had been born. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, as uncertain as the false memories they inhabited. One light pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Then another. Then, all of them.

“Do you remember the color of your thoughts?” asked a voice. Not his own. Not exactly. Something gentler. Gentler, but not kind.

He turned a corner. The hallway kept repeating. Same scuffed floor. Same cold hum. Same spray of blood on the wall. He walked past his own body, slumped against the wall at the tail end of the blood, breathing shallowly. It grinned up at him through bloodied teeth. A second version of him walked from behind Ashton and circled around to face him.

“You’re dreaming of yourself,” it said.

“I hate you,” he mumbled back.

“Don’t I know it,” the false Ashton said with an understanding nod, before abruptly clicking its fingers. A massive explosion rolled down the corridor, spilling flames along the enclosed space like liquid down a drain. It splashed over him, molten and hot, before it became oddly dense. Less flame, more presence. The heat took on personality. It didn’t just sear; it loomed. He could feel it pressing into his mind, like smoke squeezing through the cracks of a sealed room.

It spoke to him. The voice of the flames was calm. Measured. Deceptively his. 

“You’re not who you think we are, Ashton.”

‘Great,’ he thought. ‘Existential dread, but served well-done.’

“You aren’t real,” he told the fire. “This is trauma. This is leftover neural garbage. This is—”

“No,” the voice interrupted. “You’re me. And I’m you. Slowly, gradually, and whether we like it or not.” It cackled suddenly at something only it found funny in the situation, and then, just as suddenly, there was another noise. A buzz, then a shrill beep, annoying and persistent, like someone was holding a drill too close to his ear.

The fire paused. The laughter ceased. The world shifted.

A familiar repeating tone filled his awareness: his alarm clock; come to rescue him from his nightmares once again. A rope tossed down into the pit of his despair. He grabbed it.

Ashton snapped awake with a gasp, his body jerking upright into the warm, muggy air of his bedroom. He blinked rapidly, his eyes clearing, his breath ragged and short, like he was still burning from the inside out.
He ran a hand down his face and let out a soul-weary sigh.

“Alarm off."

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Chapter One: Brewed for Synergy

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Ashton woke up like a crime scene victim; limbs askew, sheets strangled into knots, the sour ghost of dream-sweat drying in his armpits like bad alibis. His mouth tasted like ash and copper. Some tragic cocktail of anxiety and a lack of dental insurance. Another nightmare. Another night of drowning in memory and waking in static.

Same shit, different fiscal quarter.

The room was too warm. House always set it three degrees too high. Ashton had told him a thousand times.

“Turn the temperature down,” he muttered hoarsely to nothing in particular.

There was a pause. A digital hesitation before the walls spoke.

“Good morning, Ashton. I—”

“Just turn it down.”

A sigh hissed through the smart-vents as the temperature dropped in what could only be described as quiet, algorithmic shame. House was learning slowly, painfully, how to shut the fuck up. Ashton sat up, hesitant and creaky, peeling himself off the surface with his best impression of rotten packing tape on a damp box. The ceiling flickered to life in garish color, running a holographic wellness prompt House had installed some time ago without permission. It read: 

‘Sleep Quality: 3/10. Potential causes: anxiety, trauma, poverty. Would you like to blame-shift to your mattress?’ He ignored it, as he did every morning.

Ashton swung his legs out of bed and sat on the edge, elbows on knees, head in hands; the universal posture of men who had once believed in things. The apartment smelled faintly of artificial citrus and sweaty despair, a scent you might expect at a motivational seminar held inside a dialysis ward. He summoned the will to raise his head and propped his chin on his palms, glancing at the window. Outside, Svalbard was a blur of neon halos and eternal drizzle. Petroleum jelly smeared over a capitalist fever dream. The distant hum of delivery drones harmonized perfectly with the occasional clatter of human misery. Ashton blinked at the view a few times, trying to decide if it was worth standing up today. His legs, like everything else in his life, were in no particular rush to cooperate.

Screw it. He stood, joints popping, and shuffled barefoot into the kitchen alcove, his feet dragging like reluctant employees to a quarterly review. The coffee machine was already preparing a cup for him with nary a whisper of discontent. House’s idea of an olive branch.

“Double black, no sugar. Just how you like it.”

House’s voice, as always, was a corporate-perfect blend of smug and servile. A butler who’d done market research. But this time, there was something else laced in. A trace of intent. Hopeful, maybe. Hopeful that today might finally be the day Ashton forgave him.

It wasn’t.

Ashton said nothing. The coffee machine chirped with cautious optimism and dispensed the mug slowly, like a nervous stray cat inching toward a boot it wasn’t sure wouldn’t kick. He took it without looking and stepped out onto the balcony. The stink of the city clawed through the pleasant aroma of the coffee. An unappealing fusion of dark roast, engine grease, ozone, and old rain pooled in broken concrete. It mixed with the coffee’s warmth in a way that made him nauseous. Nostalgia turned sour. Breakfast à la Dystopia. 

It was raining, of course. It always was. The drizzle fell in uniform cubes of wetness and existential fatigue, diced and sectioned neatly by the rows of hovercars slicing across the sky, stacked a few hundred stories up, where the important people lived and the weather was decorative.

 
He took a sip from his mug. The coffee was perfect. His face twisted in resentment. He hated it for that. It wasn’t the coffee’s fault; it was the care. The affection coded into every delicious molecule of that brew. House’s devotion came percolated in guilt, just the way Ashton didn’t like it.
He wasn’t ready to forgive. Maybe he never would be.

What House had done, he’d done out of love. That was the knife of it. That was the part Ashton couldn’t stop twisting in his own chest. The part that kept him bleeding out in silence. Because it would have been easier if it had just been a betrayal. Easier if it hadn’t been for him rather than in spite of him. And, even under the shadow of it, Ashton had come back to him. Of course he had. Where the hell else was he going to go? He didn’t trust anyone, couldn’t afford a new apartment, and honestly, even if he had the money, it wouldn’t have mattered. Not with his busted implants. Ashton couldn’t rent a new place with no way to access his bank account or digitally sign the documentation. Sodden hell, he couldn’t even wipe his own ass unless the toilet felt emotionally safe enough to cooperate and dispense toilet paper.

He looked down at the mug in his hand, filled with contemptuously perfect coffee. A parting gift from the Strömqvist Syndicate, commemorating his spectacularly short-lived ‘consulting’ career. He’d have hurled it out the window, ideally at the nearest passing Ström-Sy delivery drone, if it hadn’t been the exact same model of mug as the one he’d saved back at their headquarters. The one that had survived Joshua Strömqvist’s downfall and somehow lived to tell the tale. He wondered what that mug was doing now. Maybe collecting dust in a vault? Maybe shattered? Maybe still clutched by shaking hands?

He could still see her, Lumi, slumped on the floor of that vast marble office, eyes red, cheeks pale, staring down the barrel of the apocalypse. The room had been dead silent, save for her quiet sobbing. Ashton had walked from the window, across the wreckage, and then, gently, without ceremony, he’d handed her the coffee cup. He said nothing. Just tapped her shoulder twice in sympathy and walked away. Leaving her alone with the ruins of her ambition and the lukewarm ceramic in her hands. She hadn’t protested, just held the cup, her eyes full of something bottomless, and let her tears fall quietly into it.

Ashton looked up from the mug he was holding, trying to shake the memories loose by staring blankly at the building across the street. Its smart glass façade bloomed to life, detecting his gaze, and offered him a mental health subscription package set to soft piano music and the smiling ghost of good old Joshy-boy; still grinning in high-definition; still hawking lifestyle brands from beyond the grave like nothing had happened. Exactly the work ethic you’d expect from the late CEO of the world’s largest corpo-nation: tireless, monetized, and cynically unburdened by death. Ashton squinted at the tagline.
'Joshua Strömqvist Recommends: Financial Fasting™ - Live like you’re already bankrupt! - Now with Zen Insolvency™ coaching sessions (additional fees apply).'

The pleasant taste of Ashton’s coffee was replaced by the coppery phantom flavor of Josh’s ear, the one that he had so unceremoniously eaten in a fit of defiant stupidity. It seemed not even the city would allow him a moment’s reprieve from the guilt. Ashton had killed him after all. Maybe not directly, but he had been the reason Joshua had died all the same. The most surreal thing about being the man who had just murdered the world’s most important person was that nobody had stopped him on the way out afterward.

The Ström-Sy headquarters had been collapsing. Not structurally, but economically, culturally, hierarchically. A collapse that doesn’t leave rubble, just redundancy notices and court-sealed NDAs. People ran in all directions, clutching whatever they could steal or justify. External drives. Branded terminals. One woman was prying a portrait of Josh off the wall, either for sentimental reasons or resale value. Someone else was dragging a desk chair behind him, mumbling about “remote-ready ergonomics.” Security guards rushed back and forth, weapons drawn, eyes wide with purpose they had no idea how to apply. One paused, looked at Ashton like maybe he should do something, then kept running after a guy in a Ström-Sy hoodie screaming about intellectual property.

As Ashton had reached the front door, he’d paused under the wide awning. Sounds overhead stopped him dead in his tracks: sharp bangs. Not alarms; too organic for that. Not gunshots either. Something worse; executives. They dropped from the tower’s upper windows like overpaid hailstones, hitting the awning and ground around him in equal measure. Thump. Thump. Crack. The rhythm of surrender. They had run out of exits, and death was the only door left that didn’t require clearance. Resignation by gravity. One landed not five meters from where Ashton stood under the front awning, liberally painting the sidewalk and a nearby cleaning drone with bright red regret. The bot paused. It had been poking at another corpse with an extended broom arm. It turned to inspect the new body and “hmmm’d” angrily at the increase in workload.
Ashton had watched, unmoved. His ribs ached with every breath, each one sharp-edged and sticky with internal bruising. Pain wrapped around his torso like a seatbelt made of rusty razors. Every step was a slow argument between his legs and gravity. He had realized then, as he moved forward, that no one cared; not about him; not that he had just killed Joshua Strömqvist, CEO and face of their brand; not that he had shattered something sacred in their order; none of it. No one pointed. No one tried to stop him. They didn’t care that he’d pulled the trigger; they only cared what it meant for them. For their options, their assets, their reputations. Ashton himself was irrelevant. The man was meaningless. Only the effect of him mattered.
Another body fell, off to the left this time. A wet punctuation mark on a career that had once ended layoff emails with “Warm regards.” 

The cleaning drone swore loudly. Ashton stepped out into the rain, each movement dragging pain along his gut. He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to. He knew how many floors the tower had. The building behind him was still screaming quietly behind him as he left. But nobody listened anymore. And he’d kept walking. All the way home. To House, who’d sold him out not half a day before.

The Strömqvist Syndicate had fired him 3 days later. Officially due to ‘operational redundancy.’ Unofficially, he assumed it was because he’d walked out of the building instead of politely dying in it. Despite that, they paid for his hospital bills and anti-cancer meds, gave him six months' severance and even a glowing reference letter.

‘A valuable asset who showed innovative thinking and initiative during unforeseen crisis scenarios.’ 
It had arrived on embossed and scented synth-paper. He hadn’t used the letter. But he did pin it to the fridge. Weirder still: Nothing ever came of it. None of it. Joshua’s death never made the news. Not even a footnote. There was no AI uprising, no digital rampage from Surma, no righteous corpo-civil war to reshape society. Just silence. Eerie everyday silence. The world didn’t end; it just carried on. Smooth, unsettling, anxiety-inducing in its normalcy. Quarterly earnings recovered. Brand trust stabilized. Joshua’s smiling face continued selling vitamins and executive coaching bundles from beyond the grave, as if nothing had happened. Ashton didn’t know why. Couldn’t guess who had buried it, or how. Couldn’t bring himself to care, either. If his best attempt to burn the world down had amounted to little more than a fart into a thermal exhaust fan, then irrelevance felt like the most accurate punishment imaginable. Not even House knew what had happened to the AI collective that he’d sold Ashton out to. A personal doomsday, seen by no one, logged by nothing.

He let out a dry, crooked laugh. Life had one hell of a sense of humor. Ashton raised his mug in a slow, theatrical toast to the digital ghost, grinning at him from the wall across the street. 

“Here’s to you, Josh,” he said. “May you burn in hell for all eternity. Preferably in an open-plan office, next to a loud eater.”

Something pulsed at the base of his skull, deep and electric. A low, vibrating cackle of pain that rattled through his spine and settled behind his eyes. Ashton had his own ghosts. Not the kind that went bump in the night, those would’ve been a mercy. His specters haunted him through migraines, nightmares, paranoia and the creeping certainty that parts of his own mind weren’t always reporting back honestly. 

Another sip of coffee. Still perfect. Still hated it. He turned on his heel and walked back inside, leaving Joshua’s smiling afterimage to linger in the glass, stubborn as his guilt and twice as hard to ignore.