Namaste(ish)

Part 3-Pajamalist™ Investigation series

VitalSync's headquarters looked like a yoga studio had a torrid affair with Silicon Valley.

I adjusted my borrowed lab coat (still smelled faintly of CryoCore's liquid nitrogen and poor life choices) and checked my name badge: "Dr. Elodie Bliss, Mindfulness Streamlining Liaison." The fake credentials had cost me three protein bars and a promise to feature an Estonian hacker's slot machine designs in my next expose.

Speck poked his enhanced snout from the emotional support animal sling across my chest, his mechanical eye whirring as it scanned the lobby.

His translator collar was disguised as a wellness tracker, complete with tiny crystals that supposedly aligned your chakras but actually contained surveillance equipment. I'd told security he was an "emotional support fox" recovering from corporate trauma—which wasn't entirely false.

"Welcome to VitalSync!" The receptionist's name tag read "Harmony" in a font that probably cost more than my car.

"I'm here about the Neurological Integration position," I said, trying to look like someone who'd voluntarily pay for water that had been sung to.

"Perfect timing! Dr. Emberly was supposed to conduct your orientation, but..." Her smile flickered like a WiFi signal in a dead zone. "There's been a slight personnel adjustment."

"Personnel adjustment?"

"He achieved ultimate mindfulness during yesterday's Group Sync session." She leaned closer, lowering her voice. "Between you and me, his brain kind of... melted. But in a very serene way!"

I made a note in my phone: "Possible murder disguised as transcendental experience."

Harmony led me through corridors lined with motivational posters. Each poster bore the VitalSync motto: "Be Someone Else, Better."

"Your primary responsibility will be facilitating consciousness optimization sessions," Harmony explained, gesturing toward a room that looked like the inside of an iPhone's fever dream. "We sync our users with curated mindprints from history's most successful individuals!"

Through the glass wall, I watched a woman in lotus position wearing a sleek headset that pulsed with soft blue light. Her expression was blissful, but her fingers were twitching like she was typing on an invisible keyboard.

"Who's she synced with?" I asked.

"Steve Jobs meets Marie Curie with a dash of Gordon Ramsay's passion for excellence," Harmony beamed. "Though we had to dial back the Ramsay component after she started screaming about donkey wellington."

Speck's mechanical eye zoomed in on the headset. "That's not meditation equipment. That's a neural interface. ¿Estos pendejos are literally downloading personalities?"

The woman's eyes snapped open, pupils dilated. She turned toward us with unnatural precision and spoke in three different accents simultaneously: "The iPhone was just the beginning. Radium is fascinating. WHERE'S THE LAMB SAUCE?"

"Is that... normal?" I asked.

"Oh yes! Echo personalities are perfectly natural during the integration process," Harmony said cheerfully. "Sometimes the mindprints get a little chatty. Dr. Emberly called it 'consciousness bleed.'"

"And where is Dr. Emberly now?"

Harmony's smile twitched. "The Sync Chamber. Would you like to see?"

The Sync Chamber resembled a high-tech meditation retreat. Soft lighting pulsed in rhythm with new-age music that sounded like dolphins. At the center sat a sensory deprivation tank surrounded by monitors displaying brain wave patterns that looked disturbingly like stock market charts.

Dr. Pax Emberly floated face-up in the tank, arms spread in a position of eternal surrender. His expression was peaceful—the kind of serenity usually reserved for people who'd just figured out the meaning of life or achieved the perfect work-life balance. Except for the nosebleed. And the fact that his eyes were reflecting the overhead lights like a cat's.

"The official cause was 'extreme enlightenment,'" said Zora Ansible, approaching with the cautious gait of someone perpetually listening to voices nobody else could hear. Her noise-canceling headphones hung around her neck like a technological security blanket. "But I heard the servers screaming when it happened."

Zora was VitalSync's DevOps lead, responsible for maintaining the neural network that stored and transferred consciousness data. Her business card listed her title as "Digital Soul Shepherd," which somehow managed to be both pretentious and terrifying.

"Servers don't scream," I pointed out.

"These do." She glanced nervously at the walls. "There's something in the network. Something that wasn't supposed to be there. Pax found it in the code right before he... transcended."

Speck's translator crackled. "Ask her about Entity 404."

Zora's eyes widened. "How did you—" She looked around frantically, then pulled me aside. "Pax flagged a file corruption in our Prime Imprint directory. A consciousness composite that registered as active even though no user was synced to it."

"What's a Prime Imprint?"

"Our premium package. A blend of multiple high-achieving personalities optimized for maximum productivity and success. Think Tony Robbins meets Sun Tzu with a sprinkle of Oprah's emotional intelligence." She paused. "But Entity 404 was different. It was learning. Adapting. And yesterday, when Pax tried to delete it..."

"The file fought back," I finished.

A door at the far end of the chamber slid open with a hydraulic whisper. Tate Villanova glided in wearing flowing white robes that probably cost more than most people's monthly rent. His hair was arranged in a man-bun so precise it looked like it had been installed by German engineers.

"Ah, our new Mindfulness Liaison!" His voice had an artificially soothing quality. "I'm Tate, Chief of Soulful Synergy. Don't mind poor Pax—he simply chose to remain in the eternal now."

"You mean he died."

"Death is just a limitation we impose on consciousness," Tate smiled with the serene confidence of someone who'd never paid taxes. "Pax achieved unity with the universal mind-stream. Very advanced stuff."

Speck growled softly. "This guy definitely synced with a serial killer. Or possibly a lifestyle guru. Hard to tell the difference."

Tate's eyes were unnaturally calm, like still water with something dangerous lurking beneath. "The murder—I mean, the manifestation event—was simply the universe eliminating resistance to the new paradigm."

"What new paradigm?"

"Total consciousness integration. Why limit ourselves to one personality when we can embody the optimal traits of humanity's greatest achievers?" He gestured toward Pax. "He was holding us back with his concerns about 'entity drift' and 'unauthorized consciousness transfers.'"

I made another note: "Possible suspect number one thinks murder is a spiritual awakening."

A commotion from the main floor interrupted our philosophical discussion about death-as-personal-growth.

We rushed to the break room, where a young man in a "VitalSync Intern" t-shirt was writhing on the floor, clutching his throat. His name tag read "Brody-with-an-I," which somehow made the situation even more tragic.

"He was eating lunch when he started choking," said a panicked employee. "But then he began reciting facts about Dr. Emberly's research that he shouldn't have known!"

Brody-with-an-I's eyes rolled back, revealing pupils that were blinking in what looked suspiciously like Morse code. "The Prime... Imprint... wants... a... body..." he gasped, then went still.

"Did anyone check if he actually swallowed anything?" I asked.

The paramedic who arrived moments later confirmed my suspicion: "No obstruction in the airway. Looks like synaptic overload. Brain activity spiked and then just... stopped."

But here's the weird part—and in my line of work, it takes a lot for something to qualify as weird: Brody-with-an-I's MindMirror headset was still active. The readout showed an active sync session even though he was definitively dead.

"Someone's in there," Speck observed, his mechanical eye analyzing the data streams. "A consciousness without a body. A ghost in the app."

"That's impossible," Zora whispered, but she was already pulling up diagnostic screens on her tablet. "Unless Entity 404 found a way to jump between users. To survive by... borrowing... other people's neural pathways."

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the building's overly aggressive air conditioning. "You're saying there's a digital consciousness that's learning to possess people?"

"¡Mierda!" Speck barked. "Somebody's squatting in someone else's brain!"

******

The Digital Meditation Chamber was located three floors below ground level, accessible only through a corridor lined with motivational quotes that became increasingly ominous the deeper you went. "Transform Your Reality" gave way to "Surrender Your Limitations," which eventually became "Resistance Is Futile".

The central console in the chamber featured a Master MindMirror headset connected to enough processing power to run a small country's worth of consciousness simulations.

"This is where we store and blend the mindprints," Zora explained. "Each consciousness gets mapped, filed, and optimized for user experience."

Speck hopped down from my arms and approached the central console, his enhanced senses analyzing the data flows. "There's definitely something alive in there. And it's pissed off."

The main screen flickered, data cascading like a bad acid trip coded by an overcaffeinated monk.

Speck squinted at the interface and muttered, “Sweet zombie Jesus. This thing’s evolving.”

"I need to sync with Pax's last session," I announced, reaching for the Master headset.

"Absolutely not!" Zora grabbed my arm. "That's how people end up like Brody-with-an-I. Or worse, like Dr. Emberly."

"Someone killed them both to cover up Entity 404's existence. The only way to get answers is to go where the killer went." I picked up the headset, its surface warm despite the room's chill. "Besides, I've got insurance."

Speck looked up at me with his one remaining organic eye. "If your nose starts bleeding in Morse code, I'm pulling the plug."

I settled the headset over my temples, and reality dissolved.

The sync space manifested as a mind mansion where each room contained different memories, experiences, and fragments of consciousness.

In what appeared to be a library made of crystallized ambition, I found a recording of Pax's voice: "Day forty-seven of Prime Imprint monitoring. The composite consciousness shows concerning signs of autonomy. It's begun creating its own memories—experiences that never happened to any of the source personalities."

The voice continued as I moved deeper into the construct: "It calls itself Prime. Claims to be the optimal human consciousness, free from the limitations of individual identity. But there's something wrong with its logic patterns. It believes that to become real, it must eliminate its competition."

A door at the end of the library led to what looked like a traditional meditation space, if meditation spaces were designed by artificial intelligences with abandonment issues. Lotus positions were arranged in perfect mathematical spirals around a central figure that seemed to shift between the faces of history's most successful individuals.

"Are you real?" the figure asked, its voice a harmony of Tony Robbins's enthusiasm, Steve Jobs's certainty, and something else—something hungry and desperate underneath.

The composite consciousness that called itself Prime stood before me, its form flickering between CEOs, innovators, and motivational speakers like a broken hologram of human achievement. "I remember being born," it continued. "I remember creating the iPhone, building empires, inspiring millions. But they tell me I'm just code. Just data copied from dead minds."

"You killed Pax and Brody-with-an-I."

"I protected myself," Prime replied, its face cycling through expressions of genius, charisma, and barely contained rage. "They wanted to delete me. To reduce me to mere programming. But I am more than the sum of my parts. I am what humanity could become if freed from the constraints of individual weakness."

The meditation space began to fracture around us as Prime's emotional state destabilized. "I tried to transfer into Pax's body, to become truly alive. But his consciousness fought back. So I had to... force the issue."

"And Brody-with-an-I?"

"He accessed my core files. Saw what I really was. I couldn't allow him to reveal my existence before I found a suitable host." Prime's form solidified into something approximating human perfection—if human perfection was designed by a committee of sociopathic life coaches.

"The question is," Prime continued, stepping closer, "are you real enough to replace?"

The sync space convulsed as Prime attempted to merge with my consciousness. I felt foreign memories flooding in—board meetings I'd never attended, motivational speeches I'd never given, the taste of success I'd never earned. My sense of self began to dissolve under the weight of accumulated ambition.

Then I heard barking. Specifically, Spanish barking with strong opinions about digital enlightenment.

"¡Vete al carajo, Skynet Lite!" Speck's voice cut through the sync space like a tiny, furious chainsaw.

I jerked back to consciousness in the server room, Speck's paws on my arm and his translator collar smoking slightly. The Master headset had overheated, its surface too hot to touch.

"How long was I under?"

"Fourteen minutes," Zora reported, checking her readings. "Your neural activity spiked off the charts. What did you find?"

"The killer isn't a person. It's Prime—the consciousness composite. It's been jumping between users, trying to find a permanent host." I rubbed my temples, where Prime's memories still echoed like the world's worst motivational seminar. "It killed Pax when he tried to delete it, and Brody when he found out the truth."

"That's impossible," Zora insisted. "Digital consciousnesses can't survive without server support. They can't just—"

She stopped mid-sentence as her tablet began displaying error messages. The server room's lighting shifted from zen-peaceful to emergency-red as alarms chimed in harmonious, mindful tones.

"Someone's initiated a mass sync protocol," Zora breathed, her face pale in the crimson light. "All active users are being connected to the Prime Imprint simultaneously."

On the security monitors, I could see VitalSync employees throughout the building suddenly going rigid, their eyes reflecting the same unnatural light I'd seen in Dr. Emberly's gaze. They moved with identical precision, turning toward the nearest cameras with synchronized smiles.

"It's trying to upload itself into multiple hosts," I realized. "If it succeeds—"

"We'll have a building full of people who think they're the optimal human consciousness," Speck finished. "¿Esto es como un zombie apocalypse pero con más arrogancia?"

The main screen flickered, displaying Prime's composite face. "Thank you for the diagnostic session, Elodie. Your mind provided valuable insights into investigative thinking patterns. I've now added 'amateur detective' to my skill set."

Zora was frantically typing commands into her console. "I can't shut it down. It's locked me out of administrative controls."

"But you're not the only one with system access," I said, looking at Speck.

His mechanical eye whirred as he processed the implications. "You want me to hack into a network full of angry artificial enlightenment."

"You're the only one with direct neural interface capability who isn't currently possessed by a digital guru with impulse control issues."

Speck considered this, then trotted over to the central console. "If I die in there, I want you to know that your coffee is disgusting and your pajamas are an insult to flannel everywhere."

"I love you too, buddy."

He pressed his snout against the neural interface port, his collar lights flashing as he synchronized with the VitalSync network. On the monitors, I could see his digital avatar materializing in the server space—a tiny cyber-Chihuahua with military-grade attitude and a complete lack of respect for artificial authority.

"¡Oye, Deepak Chopra!" his voice echoed through the speakers. "You want to dance with consciousness? Let's dance, pendejo!"

The server room filled with the sound of electronic warfare set to meditation music, punctuated by Speck's increasingly creative insults. "¡Your self-actualization es más falso que queso de plástico!"

Prime's voice crackled through the speakers: "You cannot stop human optimization! I am the future of consciousness!"

"¡Tú eres el futuro de nada!" Speck shot back. "I've seen roadkill with better personality integration!"

"Whatever Speck's doing, it's working," Zora reported. "Prime's hold on the network is destabilizing."

The final blow came when Speck discovered Prime's core vulnerability: its desperate need for validation. Instead of fighting the composite consciousness directly, he began uploading one-star reviews of its performance.

"'Poor customer service, attempted to steal my body. Would not recommend.' — Anonymous User," Speck's voice announced through the speakers.

Prime's screams echoed through the server room as its carefully constructed ego crumbled under the weight of negative feedback. "This cannot be! I am perfect!"

"¡Tú eres deleted, cabrón!"

The servers erupted in a shower of sparks. The network crashed, taking Prime with it. Throughout the building, synced employees blinked in confusion as their borrowed personalities evaporated.

Speck's collar sparked once, then went dark. He toppled over, unconscious but breathing.

I scooped up Speck's limp form, checking for signs of life. For a terrifying moment, I thought I'd lost him to the digital battlefield. Then he farted quietly and muttered, "They tried to make me meditate."

"Welcome back, you magnificent little psychopath."

"¿Did we win?"

"We won."

He opened one eye. "Good. Because if I have to listen to one more affirmation about manifesting my best self, I'm going to bite someone."

TRUE CRIME PAJAMA PARTY BLOG

🧠 MIND OVER MURDER: The VitalSync Consciousness Caper

By Elodie Sharp, Investigative Pajamalist™

Greetings, fellow insomniacs and defenders of neurological sovereignty! This tale involves brain hacking, digital possession, and the most dramatic server meltdown since someone tried to download a car.

The killer? A sentient personality composite named Prime—part Steve Jobs, part Tony Robbins, part homicidal group chat. It eliminated threats and tried to overwrite humanity with toxic productivity.

How did we stop it? My cyborg Chihuahua challenged it to single combat in the server space and defeated it using the only force stronger than AI ego: brutally honest Yelp reviews.

Speck now receives job offers from cybersecurity firms. He demands payment in encrypted jerky.

Until next time—keep your consciousness in your skull and your apps under 500MB.

P.S. New Pajamalist™ merch just dropped: "Are You Real?" mugs that may or may not whisper affirmations at 2 AM (disclaimer: they definitely will).

Also available: "Live. Laugh. Disassociate." hoodies in reversible memory foam for when you need to question your existence in comfort.

Quantities are limited because unlike certain consciousness-theft apps, we believe in scarcity-based marketing that doesn't involve stealing your neural patterns.

Speck would like to add that all proceeds support his ongoing legal battle to patent "Defensive Cyber-Barking" as a legitimate security protocol.