How machine integration into man will make more misery?

Every week @f3nix posts an incomplete story and challenges commentors to contribute other half. This is my contribution to the challenge.

A Treble Clef

The tower n. 19 was among the first built as well as one of the highest. The purple shades of the morning had something sacred when it began to embrace its glass walls. The clouds were iridescent drops of cochineal, dipped in a basin of water.

The Chant des oiseaux laps between a cerebral hemisphere and the other of Lucien's head, swaying in a crescendo of pressing voices. The morning light, accomplice of the melodic joint, presses through his indolent eyelids, pulling at the same time the sheets from the foot of the bed.

In the monthly planning, Lucien likes it when he's awakened by Mothergrid with this music. It instantly makes him feeling productive and optimized, plus something else that he can not totally grab.

A sinuous raku porcelain cup emerges from a niche on the granite wall next to the bed. The Wednesday pills slide into a watery bolus through the esophagus, while the hologram ends its daily programming routine. Three point five minutes of preselected Entertainment. This is followed by an 8-minute fitness cycle.

"Good morning Lucien, your circadian rhythm has been optimized during sleep to increase your productivity by 2.75%. Select 1 for performance statistics. Select 2 for the parameters related to the circulatory system. Select 3 to know your hormone levels. Select 4 for last week trend in cortisol secretion.."

Janequin's polyphony mingles nicely with the female voice, while the latter reels off the repetitive rosary of available options.
Lucien smiles seraphic, welcoming the harmonious dressing of the home-daemona that, dancing around him, resembles rites and vestiges of past times.

The integration between man and machine had been a slow but unstoppable process and, for how much ironic it may sound, completely natural. Take an electronic device, make it useful, then indepensable, then vital. Small and powerful amplifier of human faculties. Wonderful extension of the senses, joyous inventor of infinite divination, indomitable improver of the lives of billions of laborious ants.

In the beginning, the devices had passed from hands to clothes, then from clothes to direct contact with the skin. Then, as obvious as it was, from above the skin to under the skin. Down, sinking deeper inside us, to make our lives better in a sparkle of electronic subsidence. To give us optimized and publishable experiences with the maximum of upvotes on the most relevant social media.

A lifetime of guaranteed and constant broadband connection. Many things had taken on a different perspective and value, the world had changed skin very quickly.
The Entertainment was now recognized by the United Nations as one of the first basic human rights.
The search for optimization of work performance and life in general had grown in a directly proportional way to the need for integrated leisure, directly inoculatable in the cortex.
Soon, it seemed to everyone spontaneous to totally rely on apps for obtaining the best performance during all kinds of work, academic training, activities. Everything was done better thanks to an army of automatic pilots, well anchored to the brains of the citizens. Then came Mothergrid and, only then, everything was really perfect.

It is half past seven in the morning. Lucien should have been away from home since five minutes, injected into one of the monorail pods headed to the workplace. Instead, there he is still, in his full anthrax color in front of the door, the man in a bowler hat of a Magritte's painting. Between him and the entrance, on the cold slate of the floor lies a yellow sticky note. What the fuck is doing a post-it there. These things are no longer used since decades.
Lucien can not understand how such an irrational disturbing element may have jeopardized the harmony of his apartment on the top floor of the tower n. 19.
Approaching that yellow spot, bathed in the purple light flickering from the windows, the scribble on the note takes shape before the eyes of the man, who observes him less and less perplexed and increasingly dismayed. A treble clef stands out in the center of the paper and, further down, a strange tangle of signs.

From the mind of Lucien, a memory surfaces just in time before the darkness closes on his field of vision. That scrawl was once called a "signature". His signature.

A noticeably large pulse flashes for a fraction of a second in the monitor displaying network activity window, followed by an even larger spike. Lucien's brain's log had been sent to mothergrid and remedy for this erroneous activity had been calculated and uploaded back into Lucien. The remedy chemicals coursing through his veins prevented him to pay anymore attention to the yellow sticky note as if the paper were a ghost of itself in a flash of flickering metrics on a screen. Lucien instantly zombied right into his routine. His unproductive leanings had been rightly oriented and mothergrid was informed quickly of this thereafter indicated by another pulse on the screen. This irony of this affair was Lucien had sat down with an array of archaic devices such as calculator and a pen and few papers one day, sometime in the past, and projected his future income and calculated desired level of productivity and entered in those number into the settings himself. The sub conscious was only thing still pure human in this new world. Sub-consciously Lucien had slid the paper into the right pocket of the work apparel he had put on.

Lucien arrived at his job as usual in time, as usual believing he ran late, as usual apologizing for his tardiness. It was the perfect recipe for optimal productivity calculated ergonomically for everyone. The algorithms seeped into humanity's conscience and blood and characters. Everybody had become optimum and little more machine, except few. Few outlaws that donned fake electronics in their homes and monorail pods and even under their skin but, still left with their own thoughts, depression, doubts and delusions. A whole communities of outlaws had sprung discretely. They had no signs or names or group meetings. They too had seeped into this perfect system of productivity hidden to mothergrid's omnipresent eyes through ingenious strategic clothing and technology rife in the underbelly of the new utopia. Each individual of the resistance was his own army and his missions and failings were his own. Their secrets lied impregnable in their own skull hidden from even the brothers of same cause.

An new and odd and thick file had appeared on Lucien's desk, perhaps designed to be noticeable on sub conscious level reaching to the allure of curiosity embedded in each since the apple was bitten. Lucien turns the thick hardcover and finds on first page inside it a legitimate form requesting file HXL5486. "Which floor to HXLs?" murmurs Lucien. A voice echoes in his ears "52". Lucien grabs the file on his desk and saunters towards the elevator. Chant des oiseaux plays as Lucien repeats in his head and lips 52,HXL5486,52,HXL5486... . He arrives at the necessary floor and his under skin chirps in horror "Losing Network" "Losing Network". A probe protrude out of the file and jams right in through his skins guided by a green laser lightning fast and barely noticeable to Lucien, even in his peripheral vision. By the time Lucien raises his hand to watch the pricked point on his arm bleeding out from 3 red dots, the under skin was already soothed. "Relax Lucien! you're in a Faraday's cage. Mother grid wont reach you here and your device won't tell until next update." A man with a smirk on his face and a gun in his hand faces Lucien. "Micheal!" gasps Lucien. A drowsy sensation blankets Lucien. He's lost touch to imbalance unpredictable sentiments and it has been too many things all at once, right now for him. "The AI integrated to mothergrid has adopted the dominion approach. That's why she has restaffed production plants entirely with machine. She's building an army. I came as soon as I found out.", Micheal explained. Lucien responded without a hint of surprise on his face, "This was a good build. Well! we always knew this was probable. So, how are you going to get me out of here?" Micheal shoots him with a tranquilizer and Lucien falls abruptly. "It's too bad there won't be any updates." An ambulance sirens outside the window of level 52 and Micheal and Lucien take off. Lucien wakes up in a sleepy haze wearing a ski mask to a clackity clack of Micheal typing away in a terminal in what seems to be a hot server room. "You always were quite old fashioned." Lucien comments. Micheal turns to him in red ski mask visibly agitated. "Just enter the code, it's in your right pocket." Lucien reaches in and finds he had sub consciously scribble something over the yellow post it. Lucien enters the code and turns some slider off on the screen. A power surge cause city wide blackout, briefly and comes backs on. Every under skins chimes in unison: Updating.

"The beta failed. What next?" Asks Micheal. Lucien answers "So the AI isn't the way to go. We tried. Maybe, mothergrid's Hivemind is already perfect." "Perfect prison." Micheal voices his opinion drenched in derision. "Well! it's that or endless war. wanna go for beers?" Lucien queries. "Sure."