Amanda’s Brain Subscription

Rivermind restores Amanda’s brain function but makes her continued consciousness dependent on a subscription. The company raises prices, degrades lower tiers, forces ads through her speech, and pushes Chris toward increasingly desperate work to keep her alive.

A proprietary service becomes indispensable life-support infrastructure while one provider controls price, quality, access, and the user’s practical ability to exit. Ordinary market pressure becomes coercive once opting out means death.

The brain-cloud service is speculative and the harms result from deliberate corporate design, not an autonomous AI inventing its own objective.