"Meiko"

Trigger warning: This story contains depictions of child abuse, sexual assault, and severe trauma. Intended for adult readers.

Japan the city that lives ten years ahead of the world, or at least that’s what people say. The origin of most machines and technologies, a very busy place where people drown in their work: inventing something, feeding themselves, or supporting their families. We can call it a selfish country with selfish people slowly turning into the robots they once invented. It’s a place where no one knows the state of the person standing beside them, nor do they concern themselves to know—probably because they’re too busy. In one way, that indifference is good: nobody is “nosy”; nobody cares what you do with your life. But sometimes, you need someone to care until it’s too late.

Everything human seems to have a price. You can rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend; love is sold, or there’s simply no time for it in the chaos.

Amid the noise lived Michiko, a quiet, alone woman struggling to make money to feed herself. There was absolutely no one in her life no mother, no father. She didn’t even know who her parents were; in fact, she wasn’t familiar with those words.

She grew up in the chaos of an orphanage that felt more like a prison. Every day was a lesson in survival. Things she would never forget

like the time when the caretaker punished her for the something she never did merely to get his frustration out.

The basement reeked of rust and mildew, a stench that clung to skin for days. Michiko, ten, crouched behind a broken furnace, knees scraped and bloody from being shoved against cold concrete. The caretaker’s belt buckle jingled, slicing the silence as it slid free.

“You steal again?” *His voice thick with syrupy malice*

The first lash cracked the air before it tore into her shoulder. The leather bit deep, leaving crescent-shaped bruises across her skin. She didn’t scream. She had learned that screaming only made the punishment worse. Above, other children watched through cracks in the floorboards. None dared move. None dared care.

Or when the director touched her when she was just an innocent girl who didn't knew why he was doing this or what he was doing.

At twelve,

the director’s office smelled of whiskey, hair grease, and power. Michiko froze as his fingers traced the price tag still stuck to her donated dress.

“Pretty things cost extra,” he murmured.

The desk pressed into her back as he forced her down. Rain hammered the windows outside, loud enough to drown out her own terrified heartbeat. Her mind slipped away before his hands reached her thighs. She bit through her lip until copper-bitter blood coated her teeth the only sensation she could claim as her own.

Or when she was locked in the dark attic until there were no more tears left.

Winter, attic, darkness pressing like a physical weight. Michiko, eight, huddled in the corner, trembling. The caretaker’s voice hissed beneath the door:

“Say you’re sorry, or the rats will eat your fingers first.”

Hours passed.

Faint scratching echoed in the walls. When they finally opened the door, she touched her scalp clumps of hair lay in her hands. She had torn them out herself, a desperate act of control in a world that offered none.

Every memory was a scar. Every scar a reminder: love was absent, care was absent, and survival meant silence. The orphanage didn’t just break children; it hollowed them, leaving behind something raw, burning, and unspeakably lonely.

She ran away from the orphanage and fled far, far away. The orphanage People pursued her like wild dogs, but she managed to shield herself from those beasts and hide somewhere in the middle of the busy city, where no one had time to even spare a glance.

She sat on the streets, slept there, and ate the food people threw away. Then she found a job a strange one, but all she cared about was money.

She started selling herself in the deep oceans of social media. Men fantasized about her body, a face she never showed. She became a puppet, but this was her way to take revenge a way to feel the warm blood of those who had abused her, to hear the screams of forgiveness she had never received. Whatever could bring her money, she would use it. Even if it was her own meat.

She could not forget the boys at her orphanage who called her ugly, the girls who ignored her, the hands that had taken from her. She wondered why she couldn’t be like the other pretty girls chosen by the boys at school. The pretty girls were sluts, she thought. What if she became one too? So she did without showing her “big ugly face.” and showed her body to the hungry lust filled men on the internet.

She lived in an abandoned garage that smelled like old "human" skin, the thing she hated most.

One day, she decided to invent something. Something for people like her: an online server where people could talk and share their lives with a robot named "Meiko".

Meiko was not like other robots that would offer soothing words under the guise of therapy. It was real. It gave people reality. It was made to wake people up and tell them that all they needed was one thing: revenge pure, raw revenge against those who had made others like her. Michiko called them the “unalive people” people dead inside, who had the guts to strike back.

Meiko urged people to take revenge and told them how. It was also a dating site for the unalive, so they could find others like them or something like love, a word Michiko never believed in. She worked hard on the website and, after much effort, finished it.

Her first Meiko user arrived an unknown user from who-knows-where. The unalive person started to talk to Meiko, and Michiko watched closely:

UNKNOWN USER: hey! *beep*

MEIKO: hey... what do you want to share, my dear unalive? *beep*

UNKNOWN USER: I want to.... *beep*

UNKNOWN USER ERASES “kill my girlfriend”

MEIKO: I think you don’t know that I’m programmed to read erased words. *beep*

Michiko smirked. “Perfect.”

UNKNOWN USER: ugh. She’s just annoying. She bullies me all the time, and I’ve caught her cheating with me a lot. I want to make her 'unalive' so she’ll be permanently mine. *beeps*

MEIKO: Great. You should go ahead and do that. Your motive should be to make yourself alive. *beeps*

UNKNOWN USER: but I love her body. *beeps*

MEIKO: Then do things that will make her unalive like you from the inside. *beeps*

No response.

The 'user' has shut down.

*beep* *beep* *beep*

Meiko’s screen flickered and died. Michiko hummed her favorite song, fingers tapping on the table. Then the computer flickered again.

*Beep*

'UNKNOWN USER' SENT A PHOTO

Tears slid down her cheeks, distant as if watching someone else cry. She shut down Meiko and pushed out of the dark garage into harsh light, weapon heavy in her hand. Her steps were deliberate, each one echoing quiet certainty. Her eyes were blank beneath the hair that veiled her face. She smiled at a passerby, emptiness mirrored in her gaze, and slipped into the river of people rushing toward unknown lives with unknown motives. The difference was clear: she was one of the “unalive people,” but somehow, she was alive at least outwardly.

The city swallowed her as she approached the address in the photo. The weapon dug cold into her palm, heartbeat hammering against her ribs like a trapped animal. The hallway stretched before her, quiet. Too quiet. She pushed the door open.

Empty room.

No girlfriend.

No victim.

Only a mirror, standing alone in the center, like a shrine.

She stepped closer, breath sharp, cautious, the bulb above flickering weakly. And there it was.

The “unknown user” had never been real. The girlfriend she wanted dead was herself, years ago. The bullies, the men who had “controlled” her they were shadows cast by her own self-loathing. She had sold her trauma, commodified pain into currency. Meiko hadn’t radicalized anyone. It had whispered lies, made her believe revenge could cleanse her, that killing the past could save the present.

A glitching, synthetic whisper crawled along her spine:

“You were never unalive. You were just alone.”

Her weapon wavered. The mirror reflected not a villain, not a monster, but a survivor a girl who had carried too much and punished herself for enduring.

The loop. The labyrinth built from pain and hate, designed to trap her forever.

Now came the real choice.

She inhaled slowly, deliberately.

She became what she had created. She drove the blade into the mirror, shattering glass like a scream frozen in time. Her reflection dissolved into static as Meiko’s mechanical voice rasped its last words:

“New user connected.”

written by Ammarah Nisar