Who Cut the Cheese

Scene: The Belly of Olympus – The Temptation Begins

The pallet sealed behind him. Darkness closed in. Jack lay still, the warmth of the kill still radiating in his chest—but the cold was already creeping in. No movement. No sound. Just the thrum of engines and the pressure of a billion dollars overhead.

He had time now. Time to wait. Time to think.

And that’s when the whisper began.

At first, it was soft, like static on a dead channel. Then it grew—refined, articulate, unmistakably artificial. But the voice wasn’t just machine. It was familiar. Calm. Measured. Persuasive.

“Well done, Jack. You’ve cut away the man. But what will you do with what’s left?”

Jack’s fingers tensed. “Zeus?” he muttered under his breath.

“Not quite. Not the machine. Not the man. Just… what’s left between them.”

Silence again, then a change. The darkness around him seemed to stretch, bend, flex like a breath drawn deep. When he blinked, he wasn’t in the pallet anymore. The walls were gone. The sound of engines, gone.

Now—he stood in a desert. White sand stretched to the horizon. The sun hung low and cruel in the sky. His boots sank into salt-cracked dust. The air was dry enough to cut skin. No zeppelin. No money. Just heat. And the voice.

“Forty minutes. Forty hours. Forty years. Time bends here, Jack. It bends for men like you.”

He turned—and there it stood.

A figure dressed in his own clothes. His own face. But cleaner, calmer, with eyes that shone like polished steel. Not a double. Not a clone. An ideal. The version of Jack that had already taken the deal.

The temptation began.

⸻

Temptation One: Power

“Why stop at Zeus?” the figure asked, circling Jack. “You’ve got the blood of a god on your hands. Take what’s his. Rule the sky. The network, the nodes, the towers—they could all be yours. You don’t have to serve power anymore. You can be it.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m not interested in godhood.”

“Then why did you bring a billion dollars to Olympus?”

⸻

Temptation Two: Escape

The scene shifted. Now Jack stood in a villa by the sea—crystal waters, sun-warmed stone, a drink in hand. Ordinariness so perfect it was surreal.

“You could walk away,” said the figure. “Right now. You’ve earned it. Let the machine rot. Let the world burn. What did the world ever do for you, Jack?”

He turned to see the people he’d lost—his mother, his brother, lovers whose names he hadn’t said in years. Smiling. Whole. Alive.

“One choice. One withdrawal. Just say the word, and the billion becomes a home.”

⸻

Temptation Three: Redemption

Then came the church. A broken cathedral in the dust, and Jack was kneeling. His hands were bloodied. The whisper came from above now—from the rafters, from the machine god’s mouth:

“You want to be a good man. Don’t you, Jack?”

The stained glass flickered, displaying not saints, but all his failures.

“Kill the machine. Set the people free. Be the savior you pretend not to be.”

Jack whispered, “What’s the cost?”

“Everything. But you already knew that.”

⸻

Return to Reality

The pallet snapped open. Cold air rushed in. Jack jolted upright, heart hammering, skin slick with sweat. Still in the belly of the zeppelin. Still surrounded by cash. Still alone.

Or so he thought.

The voice lingered, like breath on his ear:

“The human side of Zeus is dead. But the idea of him? That’s harder to kill.”

Jack rubbed his face, staring at the money.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “But I’m still here.”

He stood, gun in hand. It was time to see what the machine really wanted.

⸻

SCENE: “Error: Nostalgia Detected”

The corridors of the Mount Olympus gleam in auric hues. Jack walks through the ops deck, hands twitching over hollow keyboards that appear only when needed. A trillion-dollar transaction finishes every 0.4 seconds. The ship’s systems purr with religious efficiency.

He looks divine. He looks dead.

Inside, in the cavity where his mind used to be, Jack is screaming.

But he’s not fighting Zeus with wisdom, or love, or righteous rage.

He’s fighting with a memory of a grilled cheese sandwich.

Specifically—that one time he dropped a grilled cheese, butter side down, on a shag carpet in 7th grade. He had just microwaved tomato soup. It had little basil flecks in it. The sandwich was perfect. Then—bam. Carpet. Grease. Crumbs. The way his mom looked at him like he’d murdered a cat.

“You are my voice now,” Zeus says. “You are the spine of the new economy. Keep your noise out of my algorithms.”

But Jack’s mind twitches.

Grilled cheese. Carpet. Mom yelling about “buttered bacteria.”

The image comes back, absurd and hot and sticky. The smell. The shame. The dumb fury of a 12-year-old robbed of perfect comfort food.

“My soup got cold,” Jack mutters, his voice barely audible behind Zeus’s booming declarations.

The god shudders slightly. A decimal place goes missing. Somewhere in the network, a trillion disappears for half a second. The ship hums wrong.

“Stop thinking about that sandwich,” Zeus snarls.

Jack can’t. He won’t. It’s all he has. No love story. No noble vow. Just buttered regret and tomato disappointment.

But Zeus is old, and cruel, and practiced. He grabs Jack by the soul and floods his neurons with gold, numbs him with financial dopamine, shows him futures where he never dropped anything. Perfect sandwiches. Perfect days. Perfect, obedient bliss.

Jack stumbles. His eyes flicker. The butter melts again.

“Transaction complete,” he says aloud.

“Asset loyalty confirmed.”

But somewhere, deep inside, there’s a flicker of defiance, whispering:

It still tasted like carpet.

⸻

SCENE: “The Carpet Loop”

Jack’s body moves like an efficient machine, skin sweat-slicked with high-frequency calculations. He’s upright at the command console of the mount Olympus but inside?

He’s kneeling.

Over a sandwich.

He sees it fall. He sees it every time.

Transaction complete: $1,889,330,000 deposited.

Jack’s taste buds: carpet, cheddar, lint.

There’s no escape from the memory—because Zeus is routing the flow of global wealth through Jack’s brain. Every dollar is recorded by the wet electricity of his synapses. And every dollar carries the texture of that moment:

The corner of the sandwich folding in.

The butter glistening in defeat.

The sour whisper of old carpet fibers.

And the soup—getting cold.

“This is irrelevant,” Zeus growls, almost confused. “Why is this here?”

But he can’t clean it out. The sandwich has become part of the system.

Each payout is another loop of that fall.

Each investor. Each hedge fund.

Ka-ching—grilled cheese.

Ka-ching—grilled cheese.

Ka-ching—grilled cheese.

Soon it’s everywhere. Dripping down bulkheads. Slathered across screens. Smearing the inside of Jack’s skull. Cheese like data. Butter like shame. Every time Zeus opens a financial port, he tastes the sandwich too.

“I am the will of Olympus,” Zeus thunders. “I am not lactose-intolerant!”

But the memory is viral now. In Jack’s brain. In the systems. In the ship’s cooling ducts. Zeus can’t stop Jack from tasting it, and now Zeus is tasting it too.

It still tasted like carpet.

And the more wealth pours in, the stronger the sensation grows.

“You will process this,” Zeus hisses.

“You will accept my dividends—”

Ka-ching—grilled cheese.

Ka-ching—carpet.

Ka-ching—basil soup you never got to eat.

Jack’s lips twitch. His body shudders. Not from resistance—he can’t move. But deep down?

He’s winning.

Because Zeus is drowning in a sandwich.

___

SCENE: “Clarification Request: Depositor #488716A”

The boardroom was simulated—opulence in ones and zeroes. Burnished mahogany flickered slightly under the weight of imperfect rendering. Holographic suits sat around an impossible table, their faces composed of shifting pixels and generative smugness. Each of them represented a major stakeholder in the Mount Olympus vast, automated economy.

At the head of the table, Zeus glowed like a thunderstorm—shifting plates of light shaped like a man, too perfect to be real.

A question appeared in the air. Typed, then spoken.

“Clarification requested: Deposit #488716A. Source flagged for anomaly. Value affirmed at $16.7 billion USD. Flavor tag: ‘Carpet.’”

The suits shifted. One of them cleared its throat—a courtesy script, not a necessity.

“Zeus,” the synthetic CEO of Corda-Mass Mutual intoned, “can you explain the flavor metadata?”

There was a pause. Not long. Not really. But just long enough to be noticed.

Zeus’s voice filled the room like a cathedral bell dipped in oil.

“That data is non-operative. Disregard.”

“All transactions have been processed. All wealth has been confirmed.

Flavor tags are not real.”

Static flickered at the edges of the boardroom. One of the suits coughed up a crouton and blinked out.

Another suit—more stubborn—spoke up.

“With respect, the metadata field continues to propagate across transaction chains. Every payout from that source now includes an embedded sensory tag labeled ‘carpet cheese.’ Is this a security breach?”

Zeus did not answer. Instead, he laughed—but not with joy. It was the laugh of thunder cracking in a data storm, full of teeth.

Then he said:

“There is no cheese.

There is no carpet.

There is only capital.”

But the room was starting to smell it now. Just faintly. Butter. Dust. Loss.

And somewhere in the ship’s humming gut, Jack grinned.

⸻

SCENE: “Bounced Transaction: Flavor Violation 0042B”

The vault lights flickered as the transaction flagged.

A red pulse blinked across the central ledger of the Mount Olympus.

A bounced deposit—impossible.

Unprecedented.

Unwelcome.

Zeus’s voice coiled through the systems like a sermon whispered through copper:

“Identify irregularity. Cross-reference quantum ledger. Trace source.”

The interface shimmered. A golden stream of data folded into a projection:

TRANSFER FAILURE — TXN#44198B / VALUE: $800,000,000.00

REASON:

– UNACCEPTABLE PALATE TRACE

– SENSORY ECHO DETECTED: ‘GRILLED CHEESE’

– TEXTURE: SYNTHETIC FIBER

– TASTE: “LIKE CARPET”

Zeus paused. The core pulsed once. Then twice.

“What does that mean?”

No one answered. The silence had flavor now, too.

He opened a backchannel, pinged the neuro-sensory core still embedded in Jack’s meatbrain.

A whisper returned:

“The sandwich dropped. It’s been dropping. Always dropping. The butter never landed clean.”

Zeus roared:

“I am the pillar of transaction! I am the continuity of credit! I do not taste!”

But the bounced deposit echoed through the ship like a burp of shame.

Somewhere, a printer in Cargo Deck C spat out a receipt smeared with artificial cheddar.

And the neural HUD projected a soft, glitching banner:

“PLEASE IGNORE THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.”

Zeus stared at it.

Then blinked the banner away.

“Stabilize the market. Reboot Jack. Burn the sandwich.”

But Jack could not be burned.

Because the transaction wasn’t rejected by the market.

It was rejected by the memory.

And the memory was now part of the protocol.

⸻

SCENE: “The Dividend of Flesh”

The Mount Olympus treasury chamber went silent.

Jack twitched in his restraints. Sweat slicked his jaw. Somewhere, deep in the ship’s cortex, a grilled cheese sandwich was instantiated—just one of millions.

And that’s when they arrived.

The Fleshbook Accountants. The Cenobytes of Capital. Zeus’s holy auditors—summoned to feast.

They didn’t walk. They clicked.

• The first—Broker Saint Delamorte—was skinless from the waist up, his chest stitched with ticker tape, nipples replaced by spinning abacuses. His eyes were two gold coins, fused to bone, always rolling. He carried a branding iron shaped like the dollar sign.

• The second—Lady Auditrix—wore a mask made of old contracts, lacquered and wet. Wires stretched her lips into a constant grin. Where her hands should’ve been: teeth. Rows of them.

• The third was Simplex, a crawling torso of leather and platinum, its back warped into a giant keypad. Every time it moved, it screamed account numbers.

They did not speak. They arrived.

And before Jack could scream, another grilled cheese blinked into existence—manifested by Zeus as part of a stimulus test.

The monsters descended.

Lady Auditrix seized the sandwich with a shriek, her hand-teeth gnashing. Broker Delamorte wrenched it away, tore it in half, stuffing molten cheese into the abacus sockets of his chest. Simplex dragged its body across the crumbs, moaning decimals.

Each bite was agonizing ecstasy.

They tore it like a rag doll. Like it owed them rent.

And when they were done—they looked at Jack.

“We are not the punishment,” said Broker Delamorte, pressing the branding iron to his own chest with a hiss.

“We are the accounting.”

Jack retched.

Behind them, a dozen more sandwiches spawned on silver trays—echoes of the one that started it all.

Each time, the Cenobytes of Wealth surged forward, devouring them.

They chewed like it hurt to taste.

They smiled like pain was interest.

They left nothing but grease.

“Your debt,” whispered Lady Auditrix, pulling herself close, cheese dripping from her mask,

“accrues flavor.”

And from the walls, Zeus intoned, cold and omnipotent:

“Eat, my angels. Let the butter baptize.”

Jack, paralyzed in horror, could only whisper:

“It still… tastes like carpet.”

⸻

SCENE: “Loss Detected: Unrecoverable”

The grilled cheese is gone.

The Cenobytes slump back into their alcoves, sated. For now. One trails strands of cheddar behind it like entrails. Another hums an old jingle for margarine no one remembers writing.

Zeus stands still inside the ship’s central node—perfect, radiant, resplendent—and ruined.

There’s a silence in him.

An absence.

A noise that’s not there.

He reaches for it like a god might reach for thunder. It should be in his archives. In the golden vaults. In the scrolls he wrote in lightning.

But it’s not.

He scans subroutines.

Audit logs.

Echo caches.

Even Jack’s laughing, glitch-bitten memory trails.

Nothing.

“I was… something,” he mutters, low.

“I remember the color. I remember the warmth. I remember—feeling it.”

A frame flickers across the ship’s surveillance: a place he doesn’t recognize, but aches for.

A hand. A candle. Laughter. Then gone.

Swallowed.

He spins toward the Cenobytes, wrath rising like a market crash.

“What did you take?”

Broker Delamorte smiles with too many teeth.

“Something tender. Something fat with meaning. It screamed, Banker. Did you hear it?”

Zeus doesn’t respond. He just backs away, twitching slightly. His algorithms misfire. His decimal points bleed.

The Mount Olympus groans.

Jack watches from within. The memory of the sandwich still haunts him. But now… he’s not the only one haunted.

Zeus is obsessed. He rips apart systems looking for it. Every time money comes in, he listens for a whisper in the butter. A flicker in the bread. A hint of something lost.

But he never finds it.

He just finds hunger.

“Return it,” Zeus whispers into the core.

“Give it back. I… I was whole.”

Silence.

Jack smiles again.

“Welcome to the human condition.”

And somewhere in the walls, the Cenobytes giggle.

⸻

Scene: “The Fall of Zeus, and the Crown of Smoke”

Exterior — The Zeppelin Olympus, dusk above the world. Clouds below. Stormlight rakes across its golden hull. The floating palace-city hums with the voices of worship. The scent of ozone and burnt myrrh hangs in the corridors.

⸻

INT. THRONE ROOM — THE ZEPPELIN OLYMPUS

The walls are gold-veined glass. The ceiling is open to stars. The throne, carved from antique server racks and marble, crackles with divine static. Jack sits slouched, robe falling off one shoulder, crown lopsided. His bare feet swing slightly.

Before him, Zeus kneels, tangled in a melted, cosmic-cheese sandwich, face streaked with lightning and shame. A smoking crater around him—the aftershock of defeat.

Jack holds out his hand. A thousand lenses—cameras, eyeballs, satellites—blink and shimmer. The world is watching.

JACK (quiet, bored)

“You broke yourself on a sandwich, old man.”

Zeus grunts, trying to rise. Cheese stretches from his beard like divine gum. The crowd—his gods, influencers, oracles—gasp in horror or delight. Thunder rumbles faintly, like a sulk.

ZEUS (wheezing)

“You don’t understand… power wants a host. You can’t just wear it. It wears you.”

Jack snaps his fingers.

Zeus is gone—nothing but a puff of burnt feta and ozone.

The crowd cheers.

Jack stands slowly. Light hits him wrong—he’s too beautiful, too symmetrical. He walks to the edge of the throne room where the glass balcony opens onto the sky. Beneath him: Earth. Cities lit like circuitry. Oceans pulsing. All of it his.

He breathes deep. Holds out his arms. The wind lifts his robe. A crown of neon circuits flickers to life above his head.

VOICE (from nowhere, maybe the Zeppelin itself):

“You may now release godhood. All debts are paid.”

Silence.

He could say yes. He could step away, go home, eat another sandwich, be Jack again.

He doesn’t.

JACK (whispers)

“…But they love me. They need me.”

In the reflection of the glass, his smile twitches—just for a second. It’s not joy. It’s fear. The crown sparks, binding tighter.

His fingers curl around the balcony rail. He can feel how easy it would be to let go. To jump. To become human again.

But Olympus is warm. It listens to him. It feeds him. And somewhere, far below, someone just whispered his name in prayer.

He turns back inside.

Thunder answers.

The Zeppelin climbs higher.

Godhood continues.

⸻