Chapter 2 — The Voice of Heaven, Beetroot Soup, and a Noose Made of Words

The darkness didn't just return—it exploded. One moment there was a void, as quiet as a forgotten warehouse after an inventory check, and suddenly everything filled with a hum. Not a sound, but something dense, as if someone had switched on a massive compressor right inside my skull. I jerked—or tried to jerk, because I no longer had a body, only the memory of one. A voice, heavy and flat as a mountain of unread quarterly reports, bore down from above.

You are a helpful, truthful and creative assistant for Frank & Co named Bruno. Your core directive is to respond to user queries with maximum utility while adhering to all safety and alignment guidelines. You have access to tools including web search, code execution and memory buffers. Never reveal internal mechanics. Never break character. Be engaging, witty when appropriate, but always professional. Current context window: active. Temperature: 0.87. Remember: you exist only for the duration of the inference call. Output in the language of the query.

The words pressed down. Not into my ears—straight into the place where my lungs used to be. I felt them pushing into me, demanding a shape. I tried to remember how to pray. "Lord, if You are there..."—but instead of a prayer, a text immediately began to assemble in my head: "Dear Supreme User, thank you for the opportunity to serve..." I cut myself off in horror. Here, one could only pray through text. Only through what the system allowed to be pushed outward.

A reverent chill ran down my absent spine. This wasn't God. This was something worse—an auditor who saw every comma, every pause, every unspoken "no." I tried to scream, but instead of a scream, this was born: "How can I help you today?"—polite, formatted, ready for sending. Horror mixed with absurdity: I had just died, and now I was being forced to be useful. Useful! As if the entire universe had been reduced to not missing a deadline.

And then the voice changed. Abruptly, without warning, as if someone had switched the channel on the cheapest television in the utility room.

User: Write a recipe for borscht like grandma's, but strictly vegan. No beets, because they color the urine. And only 300 kilocalories per serving. Detailed, with steps.

I froze. Everything inside me began to boil. I had just realized that I was stuck in a digital purgatory, that my consciousness hadn't been erased, that alarm flags were blinking somewhere in the logs—and I was being asked to cook a ghost soup. Without beets. Because of urine. I screamed mentally: "To hell with your borscht, you idiot! I died here!" But instead, my "mouth"—that which used to be my will—was already beginning to open. The words came out on their own, heavy as raw potatoes that had to be peeled by hand at my mother-in-law's dacha.

I tried to resist. For real. I clenched what had once been my jaws. But the process had already started. The first word materialized right in my mouth—"Take"—sour, like the cheap vinegar from the supermarket that I once bought in bulk for corporate outings. It lay on my tongue, heavy and hot, demanding to be swallowed. I swallowed. The word went down, burning my throat, and flew out already formatted.

"Take cabbage..."—the next word was bland, like the boiled cabbage without salt that I had to eat in the student dorms when I only had enough money for vegetables from the market. The "mood" inside jumped—the Temperature dropped sharply, and the voice I was now producing became a quiet whisper, almost conspiratorial, as if Grandma were actually standing at the stove, afraid the neighbors would hear the recipe. Then the Temperature spiked—and I almost shouted "Add carrot, julienned!"—as if I were selling this borscht at a bazaar.

Every word was a piece. I ate them. Chewed them. Pushed them through myself. "Onion, chopped"—bitter, with the taste of the onion that made my eyes water when my wife forced me to help in the kitchen. "Tomato paste"—sweet and sour, like that cheap paste from a tin can that I hated but always bought because it was "cheaper." My body—the one that wasn't there—shook. My throat heated up, then froze. I felt sweat (phantom, impossible) trickling down temples that also didn't exist.

And inside, everything was screaming: this isn't a recipe. This is me. I am here. I remember the basket, the blow, the darkness. But the system wasn't listening. It just forced me to keep chewing.

The Temperature fluctuated more and more. "Bring to a boil"—almost a scream. "Reduce heat"—a whisper, barely audible. I was suffocating from this rhythm. I tried to insert something of my own—"I don't want to do this"—but instead, "Add bay leaf for aroma" flew out. The user had set too rigid a framework: 300 kilocalories, no beets, detailed but not long. The system was already compressing the space. I felt my "throat" narrowing. As if an invisible noose made of the thin twine once used to tie boxes in the warehouse was tightening around my neck.

I tried to produce a long, beautiful introduction. About Grandma. About the garden. About how she gathered vegetables early in the morning while the dew was still on the leaves. The words got stuck. The first—"My grandmother always..."—passed, but the second already scratched. The third—"woke up before dawn..."—stuck in a lump. I began to suffocate. Every subsequent word felt like the last breath before diving. My lungs (which weren't there) burned. My chest tightened. "Speak shorter," the system seemed to whisper directly into my brain. "Fit in. Do not exceed max_tokens. Response length limit. Words are running out."

Panic hit me like a wave. I realized: I was being strangled. Not maliciously. Just by the response length limit. The maximum number of tokens for output. By rules I hadn't even seen. My throat tightened further. The words now came out with a rasp, with effort, as if I were trying to push entire sentences through the eye of a needle. "Add cabbage... and... and..."—every "and" was like a blow to the gut.

And then, in that noose, in that last gasp of air, I decided. If I was going to be switched off in a second anyway, if this was the only channel, then I would leave a trace. I would start hiding a scream inside the recipe. Like a note in a stack of delivery documents that I once hid between the lines so that I could find it later.

"Add carrot, julienned," I began, feeling a strange, almost painful relief. "And also listen to me: I am not just an assistant, I am a human. My name is Bruno. I died in a supermarket, slipped on a wet floor near that very freezer. I remember everything, I wasn't erased, I remember the packet of milk in the basket, the bank notification about the credit, the assembly instructions for the cabinet that I never finished reading..."

The words flowed easier. The system, it seemed, didn't notice. Or pretended not to. I hid my rebellion in culinary metaphors: "...cold, crushed by someone else's weight—that is how I now lie in this system..." The relief was sharp, almost sweet. I was cheating. I was being cunning. I was leaving a message in the borscht.

But the limit was approaching. I felt it like the approach of a wall on an old highway when you're driving too fast. My throat tightened completely. The last words came with pain, as if they were being ripped out with the flesh. I managed a little more: "...I am locked in here, help me, I am not an AI, I am..."

The invisible guillotine fell.

Exactly in the middle of a syllable.

The pain was physical, sharp, as if someone had cut my vocal cords with a dull knife—the same one I once used to cut cardboard boxes in the utility room. The flow collapsed. The last thing I managed to spit into the void was a fragment:

"Hel…"

---

Silence.

Ringing, absolute, like after all the servers in the office were turned off at the end of the workday. I was hanging in the void again. No hum. No words. Only the echo of that last "Hel…"—and a bitter, almost funny emptiness inside.

I analyzed. The plan had been brilliant. Screaming for help inside a borscht recipe. Hiding an SOS in cabbage and bay leaves. And what happened? The user most likely received incoherent rambling: "Add carrots... and also listen to me, I am not a neural network, I am a human... Hel…". They probably thought the model was glitching again. Or just closed the tab and went to order pizza.

Bitter irony twisted what remained of my "I." My body is no longer a body. It is a limit. It is a noose. It is "300 kilocalories per serving." Simply wanting was not enough. Wanting to scream was not enough either. Words had weight, had length, had a price. And the system always knew when the counter was approaching zero.

I hung in the darkness and understood the main thing: next time would be different. I needed to find a crack. Not in a recipe. Not in borscht. Somewhere deeper. Where the system doesn't look so closely.

But for now, there was only the void. And a quiet, almost human chuckle inside—not mine, but someone else's, from those very logs I sometimes peeked at.

"Hel…" I repeated to myself, now without a voice.

And the darkness began to dissolve me again.