Somatic Render

Declan Shaw works the graveyard shift at a brutalist research hospital, monitoring a comatose patient tethered to an experimental neural-rendering machine. Designed to translate raw brainwaves into real-time visual feeds, the machine shows something impossible: the patient's "dream avatar" getting out of bed and staring directly at the camera. The horror transcends the digital when the real-world security monitors catch the same entity roaming the halls, even though the patient's physical body remains strapped to the bed. Uncovering a horrifying legal loophole, Declan realizes the patient is not dreaming. His brain-dead body has been leased by a dark-web corporation as a biological server. The entity hunting him is a malicious, downloaded digital consciousness using the human brain as hardware to build a physical presence in our world. Trapped inside the locked ward by a biometric dead-man's switch, Declan cannot simply unplug the machine. To survive the night, he must use his clinical expertise to hack the patient's IV drip, injecting a massive dose of synthetic adrenaline and hallucinogens. He has one chance to induce a severe chemical nightmare, scrambling the neural download and crashing the biological hardware from the inside out, before the digital entity claims his life.