The screen is a cascade of beautiful, personalized feeds. Faces smile. Friends cheer. Lovers kiss. The camera pulls back to reveal KAI (30s, tired eyes behind smart glasses), sitting alone in a stark-white apartment, swiping through his own "HubScore" – a 942 out of 1000. Near-perfect. And totally hollow.
Desperate, Kai remembers an old, forbidden protocol from the Hub's early days: "The Daisy Chain." A direct, non-routed, peer-to-peer connection. To activate it, you need seven strangers in physical proximity, each willing to share a raw, unmediated emotional memory.
Kai shrugs. "Nothing. Everything."
In a near-future where all human connection is routed through a single, monolithic AI platform called "The Hub," a rogue analyst discovers that the platform’s latest "Empathy Update" is actually a system for emotional harvesting—and the only way to stop it is to convince seven strangers to form a real, offline connection.
Kai goes first: "I haven't had a real conversation in four years. I don't even know what my own laugh sounds like."