The concept behind “GREY MATTER”:

In the not-so-distant future, neuroscience and mankind’s understanding of the human brain has allowed the human mind to directly interface with computers. With the ever-growing fear of artificial intelligence looming and the benefits of providing work and mobility to those who are mentally or physically disabled, more and more of the working class are opting into having expensive neural links installed and working in experimental labor camps to pay off the debts. Due to the direct interface with their brains as the controllers and processing units for the labor machines, running hyper-complex calculations, and contributing their newfound processing power to cloud-computing in various industries that were previously out of reach, they find that the human body can be left in a sleep-state during operation.

They are met with such success that, as more and more volunteer to be indoctrinated into the new “make money while sleeping” paradigm, soon even people from all walks of life are going under the knife for the necessary hardware installations until the majority of the population finds themselves sleeping away their workdays.

The economy suddenly takes a turn, however. With more people requiring less time in the waking world, they have fewer and fewer needs to consume media, eat drive-thru, order Amazon or seek higher education. The upper class quickly find a way to take advantage of the situation, reducing the pay of the sleeping men, women, and children until paying off their debts seem logically impossible but easily within reach of someone spending days, weeks and even months asleep as the increasingly minuscule payouts come into bank accounts, the cost of keeping their bodies working begins to drain the finances almost as quickly as money slowly becomes more and more meaningless, reduced to fluctuating numbers in a database that is swiftly forgotten.

As the new style of work becomes the new norm and machines are controlled by sleeping minds, they maintain themselves, maintain the human worker’s bodies, provide nearly unlimited, inexpensive labor. Science advances at an astronomical rate. Almost the entire world rots from the industry as the working class spends more time asleep and dreaming than awake and alive.

All except the new ruling class, those who shackled mankind into their new slavery.

Without the need to maintain a face for the public, they are now free to indulge in their darkest desires as they please. They are without worry or morality as they see the sleepers as beneath them, as animals, as literal cogs in the machine. They slowly begin to permanently install human bodies and minds into their configurations, extracting substances and hormones from them as drugs to get high, sodomizing their bodies for pleasure, all with the incalculable power of billions of human minds as the most powerful supercomputer the world has ever known at their fingertips.

What humanity has left unsaid until it was too late is that the dreams they have as the computers flood their brains with data, forcing their neurons to fire are visions of static, constantly fluxing sensations of searing, relentless pain and ultimate pleasure, images of mortality and chaos as their subconscious mind attempts to make sense of the madness. They live an existence of servitude with no chance of escape without even realizing what their existence has become. Ignorant and comatose, forever dreaming in nightmares of distortion and pandemonium, keeping themselves alive and suffering while the ruling class bathes in unadulterated power, free to exploit them for any and every whim they desire.

As their immoral carelessness grows and their selfishness thrives, they defeat death itself, not only for themselves but for their enslaved brethren. They have attained absolute and total control over humanity. Their mistake is the same selfishness that led them to attain utter domination which plunges them into feeding their dark desires until they too are forever lost, submerged in their own realities of unending pleasures, orgasms, eternally high and without pain or care.

Humanity, now left leaderless, sleeps in unending nightmares as the computers that their own brains control maintain their catatonic shells until the sun burns out of the sky.