Joon couldn’t remember a time without the Mainframe - for that matter neither could his father or grandfather (or at least that’s what he remembered them telling him before they’d disappeared, lost in the system). And like his father and grandfather before him he worked for the Mainframe as well, his world one of stark blacks and whites and muted, washed out greys. Nobody spoke up, nobody protested, everyone followed the rules set up by the Mainframe. There was no war, no poverty, no hunger - but also no creativity, no sharing, no joy - no dreams, just unforgiving reality. Literature didn’t exist, the populace speaking in gigabytes and RAM, their alphabet a series of 0s and 1s. Music devolved into the soft whir and buzz of the hard drives, the sound sterile and antiseptic. Even smells were less than they had been, bitter and damp, cloying visceral memories of what they had once been.

The only respite from what had become the monotony of the real world was the Palladium. Named for a long forgotten place of entertainment, a visit to the Palladium was granted once a month to each employee, a token attempt at boosting what little morale existed. How each individual chose to spend it was up to them, a last scrap of independence in a world that scorned it.

oon supposed he should have felt guilty for seeking out the cyberbrothel each and every time he stepped past the Palladium doors but somehow he didn’t, especially when he encountered him. The entertainers at the brothel were clad in pixels that shifted and reshifted, making the programs anonymous and interchangeable, suited to fit whatever the customer desired. However each and every time Joon chose a program it looked the same - the same plump, kissable lips, the same knowing sloe eyes, the same graceful fingers -

- and it was the fingers Joon treasured most, even more than the conversation that seemed to draw him in more and more with each visit, for those fingers knew. And they knew more than just the curve of his muscles of his arms and the sensitive spots at the small of his back. They knew how to play the broken down excuse for a piano hidden away in the corner of this Seungho’s room. They made him remember things he had never seen - a crisp blue sky interrupted by the cotton candy texture of summer clouds. They made him remember the smell of a summer rain he had never stood under, a warmth and imperfect wetness he’d never had grace his skin...

And even more importantly, those fingers as they touched the ivory keys made him feel. Life was more than data entry and bandwidth. It was more than simple black and white - it was the tawny hue of Seungho’s skin, the pink of his lips. And as Joon fell asleep in Seungho’s arms, dreaming as he never had before, those lips curled into a smile - and the pixels shifted, only to return to what they had been before. The same Seungho. Was he a rogue program? A glitch in the system? A fatal error?

Fatal error - but for whom?