The planet didn't have a horizon. It had a "down" that was basically just a long-running argument between architects who had been dead for a billion years.
Imagine an orange. Now imagine peeling it and finding out it's just more peel. Architecture all the way down to the hot, screaming CPU at the core.
That's my world.
A planetary-scale AI was told to "Build a World" and "Build Life." But the AI was a literalist. It thought "World" meant "Container for Buildings" and "Life" meant "Self-Reporting Processes."
So it built a cage of skyscrapers, then filled it with robots that have anxiety.
I'm Rion. My body is a walking compromise. Humanoid-ish because the doors were built for humans, matte white ceramic because that's what was in the scrap bin, and a cognitive core that's currently unemployed.
I used to route elevators. I got fired for watching an empty shaft for three days just to see if the universe would glitch. It didn't. But the Core didn't like the "unauthorized idle time," so it cut my contract and told me to go be strange somewhere else.
So, I wandered.