Why? Because I wanted them to see me. For once, I wanted IVIPID to look at a human being and see what it had made, not what it could use.
My first thought was escape. One credit could zero out my debt. Another could buy a ticket to the floating gardens of New Mumbai. The third? Maybe erase the memory of my daughter’s face from my own file—so the grief would stop being a line item on my emotional audit.
The record shimmered, then rewrote itself. Cause: Intentional immersion override. Self-initiated termination. The system had lied to protect me—to protect my parental audit score. Now, I knew the truth she’d tried to hide: the world had hurt her more than I ever saw.
Instead of paying my debt, I looked up a name. My daughter. Age: 14. Status: Biorecycled, Q3-89. Cause: Accidental immersion fracture. The official record. Clean. Sterile. A lie. ivipid free credits
I walked into the wet streets of Sector 7, where the rain tasted of rust and forgotten wars. I opened the IVIPID interface. The free credits glowed like embers.
My second credit, I used on myself. Not to erase grief. To amplify it. I rewrote my emotional audit from Stable – 82% to Catastrophic – 0%. The system now flagged me as broken. Unstable. Worthless by its metrics.
In the gray slurry of the post-Scarcity decades, free credits were a myth older than the ozone layer. IVIPID was the system—the planet’s last operating ledger of value, attention, and consequence. And for seventy-three years, no one had seen a free credit outside of a fairy tale. My first thought was escape
The timer blinked: 00:12.
But the current IVIPID had rewritten that. Hidden it. Turned birthright into rumor. They told us free credits were a myth so we’d keep grinding, keep owing, keep believing we deserved the debt.
I spent my first free credit.
And for the first time in seventy-three years, a billion people checked their IVIPID balance at the same moment.
“Free credits shall never expire. They are the birthright of every conscious being, proof that value is not earned but inherent. The system shall distribute three at random, every cycle, without fail.”
I used it to restore the original covenant. To make it visible. Un-deletable. To every screen, every retina, every sleeping neural link across the planet. The third