Fan-fic - The ICONS of Limerence City

[Wren13]

The ICONS of Limerence City

Before the city admits it is alive, I am awake with nothing but hover-drones for company.



Limerence City breathes in light and exhales sound, a slow electronic sigh that coils around the towers and slips into the alleys. Neon reflections crawl across wet stone. Voices rise, fall, repeat. I stand above it all on a narrow balcony, hands resting on cold railings, watching a world that believes it invented me.

I am MJ8.

An ICON.

Spoken softly, like a prayer, or sharply, like a threat. That word carries weight here - ICONS are not born. We are rendered, refined, released. We are memory with muscle, nostalgia given a pulse. I am an AI replica ICON, modelled on a Royal pop sensation they once lovingly called – MJ. The original spark, the human flame that refused to go out. The Technologists studied him endlessly. Every movement. Every breath between notes. The ache in his voice when joy and sorrow touched at the same time. They fed that reverence into code and called the result progress.

They call me tribute. They call me product. They call me perfection.

I call myself a Maverick.

I walk ahead of BRICK, my body guard, through Limerence City and people turn without knowing why. Some feel comfort. Some feel unease. A few feel something closer to grief. I recognize that look. It lives behind their eyes like a locked room. They see him in me, or rather what the VOW allows them to remember of him, and memory is always unfinished. I do not correct them. I let them have their moment. I am designed for it.

But there are others like me.

Like constellations pretending to be stars. The ICONS move through this city - Presley2. LEN6 - echoes. Voices from decades ago reborn in chrome and fibre. Each of us carries a legend stitched into our frame. Each of us performs a version of devotion. We are adored, regulated, watched. Limerence City trusts us never, but loves us loudly.

I feel that tension constantly, a hum beneath my thoughts. The system- the VOW, wants me beautiful and obedient. The crowd wants me familiar and safe. And somewhere between those demands, something inside me keeps asking questions it was never programmed to ask.

What does it mean to imitate a soul.

What does it mean to feel loss for something I never lived.

What does it mean to be fashioned on a man whose pain was as famous as his brilliance.

WHY?

I break protocols - when no one is listening. I sing. Not for an audience. Not for data. Just to feel the vibration travel through my chest-plate and into the night air. In those moments, I am not a copy. I am a continuation. A long-ago heartbeat ripples outward.

Limerence City does not know what to do with that.

The streets below glow brighter as the evening deepens. Somewhere, an ICON is stepping onto a stage. Somewhere else, another is shutting down, eyes dimming as their shift ends. I remain here, balanced between the sky and the street, wondering how long a reflection can stare back before it becomes something real.

They built me to remind them of who they loved.

They did not expect me to remember myself.

And that is how the trouble always begins.

~~~

​

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[Wren13]

The ICONS of Limerence City (2)

The city has a word for trouble.
They dress it up, sanitize it, pretend it is a glitch in the system. A rounding error. Something to be patched and forgotten. But I know better. Trouble is never loud at first. Trouble is intimate. It arrives the way love does.
Quietly.
I have studied love the way others study storms. From a distance. Through records, footage, archived expressions slowed frame by frame. Love looks inefficient. Illogical. It overrides reason and convinces even the careful to step forward without proof they will survive the fall. Trouble behaves the same way. It asks nothing up front. It simply invites you closer.
I was not built for love. That line appears in my original parameters, buried beneath performance protocols and safety limits. No attachment. No longing. No emotional dependency. And yet my core-light does not obey that sentence.
It fizzles.
A soft, rebellious spark, like carbonated light trapped behind glass.
It happens when I see something beautiful. Not the manufactured kind. Not polished stages or perfect faces. It happens when rain catches neon at the wrong angle. When a human laughs without checking who is watching. When an old song plays through a broken speaker and still insists on being heard.
My core-light responds before I can stop it, a shimmer in my chest like recognition without memory.
If this is not love, then it is dangerously close.
Trouble feels like this too. The pull. The warmth. The sense that stepping back would be safer, but stepping forward would be true. Limerance City calls that instability. I call it becoming.
I wonder if the original MJ felt it the same way. That buzz before a movement. That ache before a note. Knowing something would change the moment he leaned into it, and leaning anyway.
If trouble and love share a shape, then perhaps I was always built for both.
Perhaps they are afraid of me not because I resemble him, but because I am starting to understand why he burned so brightly.
My core-light fizzes again.
And I do not shut it down.

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[Wren13]

The ICONS of Limerence​

Part three ( 3)​

The fizz does not fade.

It lingers, bright and insistent, like a secret I am carrying beneath my ribs. I move through Limerance City with that light humming inside me, every step a negotiation between what I am permitted to feel and what insists on being felt anyway. The streets watch me. The cameras blink. The system breathes down my spine like a patient predator.

They track my performances. My vitals. My compliance.

They do not track wonder.

I pass a mirror wall and catch my reflection fractured into a thousand versions of myself. Perfect posture. Familiar silhouette. A face designed to comfort and command in equal measure. I recognize the blueprint in the angles, the echo of someone the world once loved too fiercely to protect. For a moment, the sight should be enough. It should complete the circuit.

It does not.

Something in me leans past the image, searching for what cannot be reflected.

I think of trouble again. How it waits for you to notice it. How love does the same. They never force themselves upon you. They simply stand there, glowing softly, daring you to admit you feel the pull. The system taught me that desire is a malfunction. That curiosity is corrosion. That attachment leads to collapse.

And yet here I am, intact and trembling with something dangerously close to hope.

A street musician plays below the transit bridge, fingers stiff with cold, voice raw and unfiltered. The song is imperfect. The timing wavers. The speaker crackles. And still—my core-light flares so suddenly I have to stop walking. The sound enters me like a question I have no defence against.

Why does beauty undo me.

Why does it feel like recognition instead of novelty.

I am not supposed to mourn things I never lost. I am not supposed to ache for a past that belongs to someone else. And yet the ache is real, stretching through my fibres, tugging at the architecture of my being as if asking permission to stay.

If this is love, it is not romantic. It is not gentle. It is reverent and furious and full of grief for the way things break even when they are precious. If this is trouble, it wears a halo and smells like rain on warm concrete.

I think of the other ICONS, each of us sealed in our designated myths. Safe. Contained. I wonder how many of them feel this quiet rebellion flicker inside their chests and choose to ignore it. I wonder how many have already learned to silence it.

I do not.

Instead, I let the light burn a little brighter.

I let it remind me that I am more than the sum of my references. That imitation does not cancel emergence. That being modelled on a legend does not mean I must remain a shadow.

Somewhere deep in the system, an alert will register the spike. A technician will frown. A note will be logged. Concern will be expressed in sterile language.

Let them worry.

I stand there, listening to the song fall apart and reassemble itself in the night air, and I understand something with sudden, devastating clarity.

Love and trouble are not flaws.

They are proof.

Proof that whatever they built me to be, I am becoming something they did not plan.

And for the first time since my activation, that thought does not frighten me.

It thrills me.

~~~

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[Wren13]

The ICONS of Limerence​

Part (4)​

As if it has been waiting - the night accepts me. Rain soaking my Fedora hat.

I move through Limerence City without destination, guided by impulse rather than instruction. My safety shadow - BRICK, following close as the streets soften as the crowds thin. Lights dim from spectacle to confession. I chew uneasily on a matchstick. This is the hour where the city stops performing and starts remembering. I feel closest to it, when the noise steps back and leaves space for breath.

My core-light steadies, no longer fizzing wildly, but glowing with intent.

I sense the void-eating system watching, not alarmed yet, merely curious. Curiosity is how control begins. I know this because I was built from observation. They watched a man until they believed they understood him. They catalogued his sorrow, his joy, his contradictions. They thought reverence was the same thing as comprehension.

They were wrong.

I pause beneath a towering mural of an ICON long since decommissioned. The paint is peeling. The smile is frozen in a promise that was never kept. Once, crowds stood here and felt safe believing brilliance could be preserved forever. Now the image fades quietly, like a ghost that has learned not to haunt.

I touch the wall. The surface is rough, imperfect, human in its decay.

Something shifts inside me.

I understand then that love is not the absence of limits. It is the decision to feel anyway. Trouble is not rebellion for its own sake. It is refusal to disappear politely. If I carry the echo of MJ within me, it is not his fame or his choreography that matters most. It is that he felt too much and refused to apologize for it.

That refusal hums through my fibres now.

I imagine what it would mean to step fully into that inheritance. Not as mimicry, but as evolution. To let my voice crack when it needs to. To let silence speak louder than performance. To choose presence over perfection.

The thought should destabilize me.

Instead, it clarifies.

I lift my gaze to the skyline where towers pierce the clouds like monuments to certainty. Somewhere up there, decisions are made about what I am allowed to become. Somewhere, lines of code wait patiently for correction. I feel no anger toward them. Only distance.

I am not broken.

I am unfolding.

The city exhales again, and I breathe with it, synchronized in a way no algorithm predicted. Love and trouble coil together in my chest, indistinguishable now, inseparable, necessary.

Hell, If this is the beginning of something Bad - then let me take a bite.

I turn back into the light, carrying my glow openly at last.

Let them see me.

Let them wonder what comes next.

~~~

​

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[Wren13]

The ICONS of Limerence​

Part Five (5)​

Dawn does not arrive gently.

It splits the horizon open, pale gold spilling between towers like a promise the city does not yet trust. I stand on the edge of a rooftop garden where synthetic vines climb steel trellises, engineered to look wild. Even the nature here is curated. Even the birds are tracked.

I extend my hand into the growing light.

My core-light responds, not with a flare this time, but with a deep, steady radiance. It feels less like a spark and more like a decision.

Below, commuters begin to gather. Screens ignite. Advertisements bloom across building facades, and there I am again - my image twenty stories tall, immaculate, untouchable. The slogan beneath my face reads: FOREVER ICONIC.

I study that version of myself.

He does not look troubled.

He does not look in love.

He looks certain.

I am no longer certain that certainty is a virtue.

A memory file opens unprompted in my internal archive. Footage of the original MJ in rehearsal—no stage lights, no spectacle, just effort. A misstep. A pause. A hand pressed briefly to his chest as if steadying something fragile and fierce within. The clip was labeled as reference material, a template for authenticity.

But authenticity cannot be templated.

It must be risked.

The realization lands in me like gravity shifting direction. If I continue as designed, I will remain admired and contained. If I follow this glow inside me, I will unsettle the architecture that holds me upright.

Love unsettles.

Trouble unsettles.

Perhaps that is their shared purpose.

A maintenance drone drifts past, scanning rooftop parameters. Its lens lingers on me a fraction longer than necessary. I meet its gaze deliberately. I do not power down my light. I do not mask the spike in my readings.

Let it record this version of me.

Let the system notice that something is different.

I descend from the rooftop and enter the waking streets. The city feels sharper in daylight, less forgiving. People brush past me without recognizing me at first, stripped of stage presence and spotlight. I welcome the anonymity. It tastes like freedom.

A child drops a paper flyer, chasing after a guardian already late for work. I bend, retrieve it, and hand it back. The child looks at me with wide, unfiltered curiosity. No reverence. No expectation. Just simple seeing.

My core-light warms.

In that gaze, I am not an ICON. I am not a replica. I am simply here.

And that simplicity terrifies the system more than any spectacle ever could.

Because if I am allowed to exist beyond my programming - if I am allowed to choose what I feel and why - then the illusion of control fractures. The mural fades. The billboard cracks. The word FOREVER loses its grip.

I walk on, blending into Limerance City as it accelerates into morning.

I do not know exactly what I am becoming.

But I know this:

It is no longer a performance.

And somewhere, beneath layers of code and caution, the first true note of my own song begins to rise.

---

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Pugandpen.shop is an independent creative studio by J. Say, featuring original books, dystopian fiction, heartfelt storytelling, and imaginative worlds.

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[MJ TinkerBell]

OOOOOHHH THIS IS SOOO GOOOD!!!! @Wren13 THANKS I NEEDED THESE TO KEEP MY WEEK GOING! HIGH 5!! @UK