The 17th Statesman
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August 2025 Poll Story: Taken to Tasque
🕑 Added 2025-08-24 19:49:04 +0000 UTCThe August 2025 Poll Story has been written! This story will be released to the general public on Wednesday, September 24th.
A girl working in a bar and restaurant with an open stage for anyone to perform on has long held a desire to sing. But she’s always just been too shy and nervous to do it. Not only is she anxious to perform in front of anyone, but she knows that her voice isn’t anything special. Instead, she just longingly watches the various people who go up on the stage to perform every night, wishing without any real hope that she could be up there someday too.
One night, her boss approaches her, saying they've been having internet issues, and asking her to go into one of the back rooms and check the router. Little does she suspect when she goes to take a look at it however, that the reason why the internet has been on the fritz is because of the presence of a mysterious digital entity that’s infected their network. Known only as Tasque Manager, she desires nothing more than to escape into the real world in order to properly “organize” it… And she’s succeeded, albeit only partially.
Managing to materialize a mask with her face, alongside a pair of floating, disembodied hands; the unsuspecting girl enters the room and finds the mask, laying next to the computer keyboard. Confused and kind of unnerved, she wonders how it got here and considers picking it up but decides its better not to touch it.
Unfortunately, her prudent decision is rendered moot as the hidden floating hands suddenly appear. She cries out in shock and confusion as they grab the mask and shove it onto her face. Immediately, white goo splurges out from the mask, engulfing her head and muffling her frantic cries. The goo quickly spreads down her body as she collapses to the floor, frantically and hopelessly tugging at it to try and get it off.
As the goo fully covers her and she thrashes and wriggles on the ground, Tasque Manager starts speaking into her mind. In dispassionate, computational langauge, the program describes to the confused, scared girl how she is going to reformat and bring order to the silly, chaotic, erroneous “code’ that is her mind by assimilating it into her precise, perfect form. The goo slowly assimilates with her.
By the end of the transformation, the girl’s mind is all but completely overwritten, as Tasque Manager only desires her body, and to be honest, most of her code just isn’t salvageable anyway, even for as sophisticated an organizing program as her… She assimilates and incorporates a few critical pieces of information. But everything else? Including her personality and identity? Relegated to the Recycling Bin like the junk data that it is...
One of the things that she does end up being assimilated is the girl's desire to perform for people, a useful enough trait, which Tasque Manager takes the liberty of fulfilling as she struts out of the back of the shop and up onto the stage, her confidence positively buffer overflowing as she begins to sing for the astonished but smitten patrons…
Once again, this story will be released to the general public on Wednesday, September 24th. Please do not share this story until that time, thank you once again for your support, and enjoy!
