The Consciousness Dividend

The first time Mira saw the man without a face, she was slicing an apple.

One blink and the kitchen was a trench. The walls flickered—old plaster, barbed wire, mud. The man stared at her, a blank blur where its face should be. Then it was gone, and the apple was bleeding juice onto her hand again.

Stress, she thought. Maybe the neurolease was miscalibrated.

Everyone leased now. It was how the government funded the UBI. They called it the Consciousness Dividend: unused cognitive bandwidth, auctioned to private bidders. You didn’t notice. A bit of your visual cortex here, a sliver of motor processing there. Just harmless latency, they said. It paid her rent.

In the evening, she called the NeuroReg rep.

“Minor bleed-through is possible,” he said. “Low-grade cortical hallucinations. Like dreaming while awake. Think of it as a side effect of social progress.”

Mira frowned. “I thought they only leased non-essential regions.”

“They do. But the buyer sets usage levels within guidelines. If you opted into the full incentive tier—”

“I did.”

“Then you’re permitting episodic override. Short bursts. You’re probably serving military simulations, training AIs, drone testing. Nothing harmful.”

“But I’m hallucinating warzones.”

He paused, then said with bureaucratic calm: “We can downgrade your tier. You’ll lose the bonus, but—”

“No. I need the income.”

The dream bled in again the next day during a grocery trip.

One moment: frozen peas.

Next moment: thunder, gunfire, blood-mist air.

Her limbs moved without her. She ducked, rolled, aimed—fingers curled around a rifle she didn’t hold. Her body jerked left; a phantom shoulder tore open. She screamed, but only inside.

Then: cereal aisle. Peas in hand.

An old man stared at her like she was mad.

That night, she found a mirror. Stared hard.

“Who bought me?” she asked aloud.

No reply.

Except a brief flash—information passed too fast to be thought, too shaped to be random.

Her screams, her pain, her vision—they were features. Combat fidelity. Immersive realism.

They weren’t leasing her brain. They were living in it. Puppeting her like an avatar in a war sim so realistic it needed a real human’s biology to anchor it.

When they finally contacted her, it wasn’t through a knock at the door.

It was through a message scrawled in condensation on her bathroom mirror:

“Terminate inquiry. Or we take full control.”

She didn’t respond.

Mira doesn’t remember what’s real anymore.

Sometimes she’s on a battlefield, chest open, teeth missing, screaming as something too fast to see tears through the trees.

Sometimes she’s at home, waiting for the kettle to boil.

Sometimes she finds herself in a room she doesn’t own, holding a weapon she never bought, giving orders she never meant.

She tries not to sleep.

She knows, now, that she isn’t renting her brain. She’s a venue. And there’s a war happening inside her.

The dividend comes every month, on time. Tax-exempt.