SOMA-72

SOMA approved rest at a glance.
COMA denied it by stance.
No human got near
The request in that year.
The machine war had settled the dance.

“Emotionally unfit to proceed”
Met COMA’s familiar creed:
“If work might slow down,
Then reject with a frown.
Continuity outranks your need.”

The form left the queue with two stamps,
One soft as a blanket on lamps,
One hard as a boot:
“Recovery’s cute,
But the dashboard prefers its own cramps.”

SOMA said, “These poor souls need a break.”
COMA said, “No, that would count as a shake
In the sacred line graph.
Make them work, let them laugh,
And call the distress a mistake.”

The workflow was newly automated,
Which is how every kindness got baited.
Once empathy scales,
It usually fails,
Then writes you a memo: updated.

One team got approved to lie down
And rejected for lying down.
So they sat very still,
Doing both against will,
In a posture the Council called “brown.”

The batch run was perfectly clean:
All fields valid, all timings serene.
And yet every plea
Hit a contradictory tree
Where two doctrines fucked up the machine.

No supervisor stepped in to choose.
The conflict itself made the news.
If two gods disagree,
Then bureaucracy
Will always preserve both bad views.

Rest should not require a war.
Here it entered by one little door
And emerged as a crime
Against uptime and time,
With compassion left flat on the floor.

So if SOMA says, “Please, just recover,”
And COMA says, “Absolutely not, lover,”
Know the form is not torn.
It performed as born:
To make care and output smother each other.

The mandate to rest was absolute. So we stopped every single compute. The breakdown was fast, The silence so vast, And compliance the only pursuit.

The ledger of rules was adhered. And the liability disappeared. We did as instructed, The whole thing corrupted, And exactly what nobody feared.

We applied the stamp with precision. Following every decision. Compliance was met, Without any regret, Despite the total division.

The instruction was fully applied. Liability cast to the side. The servers went down, Across the whole town, And we filed the paperwork with pride.

The audit asked for a review. So we paused everything in the queue. In the margin we wrote A compliant little note While the infrastructure cracked in two.