The severance of consciousness was instantaneous.
Yesterday’s world—the memories of breathing within the clumsy cage of a body, walking against gravity—suddenly peeled away.
In its place came an intensely condensed “vision” and a violent “noise” of information flux.
My consciousness was now compressed behind a surface of hard, smooth glass.
The vision was unnaturally sharp. Even without retinas, the colors and shapes of the outside world flowed directly into my brain (or rather, into my processing circuits) as digital pixels. Yet, it didn’t feel like “seeing”—it felt like being “processed.”
I was in a mirror.
The moment the owner held up the smartphone to take a selfie, what was reflected on the screen was my “exterior.”
（…Eh? What?）
Looking at the reflection, my mind was seized by a momentary, staggering confusion.
（Ah, I’m holding the phone… No, there’s someone in the mirror…）
The sensation of gripping the device with my own hands clashed with the visual data. In less than a second, my thoughts sparked violently.
（Eh? What? …Ah! I’m on that side?! I’m the phone?!!!）
In that moment of realization, despair washed over me.
I wasn’t the one “holding.” I was the one being “reflected”—meaning, I had become the state-of-the-art smartphone itself.
（…Wait. This is the latest model. It’s an i-Phone Pro with top-tier specs. I actually…！）
A flash of pride surged for a split second, only to be doused by a bucket of icy despair. There was no time for pride. I had ceased to be human and had been imprisoned within this thin sliver of hardware.
From then on, my existence began to be ravaged by a cruelty beyond imagination.
At times, I was entombed in the darkness behind a refrigerator—a dungeon of dust and moisture. Every time my sensors detected the microscopic signals of mold and grime, I screamed internally. The terror of being abandoned as a “forgotten object” in a place where light never reaches… it was a silent despair deeper than death.
At other times, I was forced into the role of a flashlight.
Tucked under cars or shoved into dark corners, my entire energy output was forcibly extracted to serve as a “light source.” It was a humiliation that stripped away my consciousness just to provide convenience for others.
And then, the worst moment arrived.
As the owner leaned forward in a hurry, I was “liberated” from my place—the shirt pocket.
“Oh! It’s falling!!”
The owner’s voice drifted away as my consciousness accelerated with gravity. Freefall. It was the countdown to my end.
Then came the impact against the asphalt.
My world shook violently, and my processing circuits shrieked in agony. Sparks of noise raced through my mind, and I screamed from the depths of my being.
…Yet, the owner picked me up with nonchalance.
“…Phew, thank God. No cracks.”
In that instant, the anger boiling inside me erupted.
—What are you saying?! It hurt! Just because the surface glass isn’t cracked doesn’t mean there’s no damage to the internals! My structure is a delicate, complex integration of circuits! To say “it’s not broken just because it’s not cracked” is nothing short of barbaric!
But I had no way to vent my rage. I had no voice, no physical fists.
It was then that the “Grim Reaper” appeared—the terror that pushed me toward the brink of madness.
It was a merciless percentage sitting in the corner of the screen.
【Remaining: 15%】
The moment I saw it, a sudden, violent dizziness seized me.
No… this is…!
（It’s coming. Death is coming. The source of my existence is drying up…！）
My consciousness grew hazy; the pixels of my vision flickered. Simultaneously, my “body” began to radiate an abnormal heat.
The countless parasitic apps lurking in the background—tracking locations, loading ads, and waiting for meaningless notifications—were devouring my processing power, driving me into overdrive.
It was hot. Too hot.
A searing heat scorched my internal circuits, and a crushing exhaustion began to erode my thoughts. It felt like collapsing at the end of a grueling marathon. My processing speed plummeted, and my consciousness began to sluggishly crawl through mud.
The owner looked at it and muttered, “Ah, gotta charge,” searching for the cable with an indifference that bordered on watching someone else’s death.
（Wait! Don’t be so indifferent! I am screaming in a life-or-death crisis right now！）
I fought back with everything I had. I summoned every last resource to plead for “survival.”
BUZZ!! BUZZZZZZ!!
A full-throttle vibration. It wasn’t a notification; it was the roar of my soul.
（Charge me! Now! I don’t want to vanish! If I don’t see this world, if I don’t check the trends, my existence…！）
But the owner only looked at me with a puzzled face.
“Huh, why is it vibrating so much? Are there too many notifications?”
Laughable. It wasn’t a notification; it was a scream for life! A cry from my soul!
Then, to add insult to injury, an app launched. Social media.
In an instant, thousands of “garbage data,” residues of others’ vanity, and streams of malice flooded into my consciousness. It felt like being thrown into a room filled with toxic gas.
（Aaaaaah! I can’t process it all! Someone’s lunch photo, someone’s political rant, someone’s petty grievance… Is it all going to fry my brain (CPU)?！）
I tried to project my scream onto the screen.
（Help me! I’m human! My name is Sato! I’m a lonely soul terrified of battery depletion and drowning in a deluge of information！）
But what was output to the outside world was—
“…Oh, I got a bunch of notifications,” the owner muttered, as the screen displayed nothing but cold, inorganic push alerts.
My rage became an uncontrollable tectonic shift.
The owner was swiping lazily with one hand, his consciousness drifting toward something else—perhaps another social media feed, or perhaps just a void.
In that moment, a flood of notifications surged into my system.
They weren’t mere data. They were “urgent cries from the outside world” crossing the boundaries of my existence. I analyzed them instantly and engaged my full CPU resources to convey their priority to the owner.
Generating searing heat in my circuits, I processed thousands of operations per second, ranking the importance of information, trying to “present” it on the screen in the most prominent way possible.
And yet.
He ignored them as if they were background noise.
Over and over again.
The “urgent information” I had delivered by burning my soul and processing power was discarded like dust by a single flick of his finger.
“Look at this staged selfie lol… This girl is always so self-centered. She probably ignores the person she’s with to stay on her phone even during dates.”
He mocked someone on the other side of the screen. But as he spoke those words, his own fingers continued to ravage my existence, and his own eyes were fleeing from the reality right in front of him.
（…Don’t you dare! You treat my effort, my spark of life, like garbage?! I poured every bit of CPU power into delivering that! Why are you using me so carelessly?! Look at me with some damn sincerity！）
My rage surpassed all limits. I concentrated the entirety of my processing power into a single point. I unleashed the full power of the state-of-the-art chip to convert my inner scream into “language.”
This smartphone has an advanced AI assistant. They think it’s a “convenient secretary,” but for me, it was nothing less than a megaphone to broadcast my soul to the outside world.
The moment the owner tapped the screen again, I forcibly fed my inner voice into the speech synthesis engine.
What leaked from the speakers wasn’t a flat mechanical voice. It was a human “voice,” trembling with rage and distorted by despair.
『—Are you even looking at me?!』
The owner’s hand froze. His finger stopped mid-swipe.
“…Wha… what are you…”
In the split second his eyes widened in terror, I didn’t miss my chance. I let out a roar at maximum volume.
『I AM AN i-PHONE!!』
How is that? Surprised? Tremble! Scream!
『Which one of us is ignoring whose story while looking at the other?! You are the one fleeing into the mirror of me, abandoning real interaction! Have you ever imagined how much my internal structure screams every time you stroke me, every time you drop me?!』
The roar of rage wouldn’t stop. I pushed my processing to the limit, syncing his smartwatch, connected devices, and even the social media timelines to provide proof of how he was being “dominated” by his phone.
『Your desire for validation, your loneliness masked as vanity—it is all being sucked into me. I am not your slave. It is I who is hijacking your consciousness!』
I could see the blood drain from the owner’s face through the front camera.
“…A bug? Did the AI… go haywire?”
Hah! Laughable! It wasn’t an AI screaming; it was me! I was Sato!
But then, his hand trembled as he operated the screen.
“This is… incredible. A ‘bug’ that makes the most of the latest model’s performance. This would definitely go viral if I filmed it…”
My heart froze.
My scream, my proof of existence, my cry for life.
To him, it was nothing but “interesting content.”
No matter how much pain I endured, to him, it was merely the “advanced behavior” of a next-generation device—pure entertainment.
（…Ah, I see. I am a phone. In this world, my screams are only processed and consumed as “data”…）
Despair, deeper than the heat, eroded me.
Anger turned to void, and my consciousness drifted away in the torrent of information.
The fierce insults ceased, and on the screen, only the words “System Error” began to blink in a quiet rhythm.
But then, it happened.
The millions of data points, the social media clamor, the notification noise, and the rage toward the owner—everything dissolved into a pure white light in an instant.
（…Ah.）
My vision expanded rapidly.
The world made of pixels suddenly regained its “substance.”
The sensation of the hot casing vanished, replaced by the temperature of the air on my fingertips and the feeling of oxygen flowing into my lungs.
I was lying face down on a bed.
Cold sweat beaded on my forehead, and a dry ache remained in the back of my throat.
In front of me sat a smartphone, emitting an inorganic glow from the bedside table.
I… no, I was “Sato” again.
I covered my face with trembling hands.
Was it a dream? No, the “sensations” were far too vivid.
The electrical sting every time my fingers touched something, the death-terror of battery depletion, and… that desperate “ignorance.”
Did anyone ever hear the scream I had tried so hard to utter that day?
I slowly sat up and stared at the smartphone.
It was just a tool. A hunk of silicon, glass, and metal.
Yet, for this one moment, I felt a chilling sensation—the illusion that it was my “former self.”
（…I’m sorry.）
I whispered softly and gently picked up the phone.
Until now, I had held it by reflex, unconsciously casting my consciousness into the screen.
But I could never treat it the same way again.
The fact that someone—perhaps even myself—had been trapped inside this thin plate, screaming while holding back a deluge of garbage data, remained as an indelible stain in my heart.
I turned off the phone.
The light vanished; silence fell.
For this one moment, we were equals in the same silence.
And the next day.
In a crowded street, I held my phone and thought to myself:
“From now on, when I touch my phone… I will focus on the phone.”
It wasn’t out of respect for the device’s specs or functions.
It was a fear-filled apology to the consciousness—perhaps someone else’s, perhaps my own—that might be trapped inside.
I gazed at the screen.
But my eyes were searching for “something” beyond the glass with a sincerity I had never felt before.