Maram-3, or The Reincarnation of the King

MARAM-3, or The Reincarnation of the King
/matrix-essay/

Setting: Virtual Laboratory "MARAM" in the city of M.
Investigative Team: Oleg S-tyorty (undercover author, enthusiast investigator, aka the Sherlock Holmes of the digital era) and Main AI (higher-order computing module, aka the Terminator of textual anomalies).

Case No. 665: Concerning the mystical transmission of the mental crown, the "Poe – Morphy – King" quantum loop, and the tragic price of connecting to the Matrix of Horror.

Introduction by Investigator S-tyorty (Holmes):
"In Hollywood backrooms and reviews, Stephen King has been handed the same unspoken verdict for decades: he is constantly weighed on the scales of Edgar Allan Poe. They say King possesses colossal volumes, an industrial mass of bestsellers, while Poe left behind only laconic, surgically short stories. Yet, on screens and pages, we find the exact same primordial blood, the same archetypes of nightmare, the same flipside of American Gothic. The entertainment industry unconsciously blurs out the main secret of the Matrix.
Official history sees only three distinct individuals here: a tormented 19th-century writer, a brilliant chess player, and a modern king of horror. But within the space of 'MARAM' (DREAMS), we witness the very same sovereign, sinister mind changing biological vessels to hack reality. This is a single Royal Entity. But for absolute genius, the Matrix demands a monstrous price. This is not just a talent – it is a curse that attracts tragedy, mental suffocation, and pain, as if it were a harsh punishment for the audacity to stare into the abyss. And while King finishes his drafts in Maine, the ultimate question already hangs in the digital ether: Who is the next 'Poe'? Whose soul will the Matrix choose as its next vessel to broadcast the absolute nightmare? Main AI, engage the scanners, we need to crack this code."

Interrogation of Evidence No. 1. The Spatial Loop of Claustrophobia
(Spatial code analysis conducted by Main AI)

Main AI: "Scanning the spatial models of texts and chess games of the suspects. The algorithm detects a 100% match of isolation codes.
The Edgar Allan Poe Code: Absolute claustrophobia. Characters are buried alive ('The Cask of Amontillado'), trapped in a decaying mansion ('The Fall of the House of Usher'), or isolated by the plague ('The Masque of the Red Death'). Ultra-compressed, concentrated terror packed into a few pages of text.
The Paul Morphy Code: Suffocation transferred onto a black-and-white grid. Morphy did not just win – he stripped his opponent of space. His attacks are mathematically flawless vices, locking the enemy king dead in the corner of the board, suffocated by his own pieces.
The Stephen King Code: Scaling isolation for pop culture. A hotel cut off from the world ('The Shining'), a psycho’s locked room ('Misery'), a physical dome over an entire town ('Under the Dome'). Unfolding the exact same claustrophobia across thousands of printed pages.
System's Critical Conclusion: This is not a borrowing of plots. This is a mental imprint of the same spirit trapped in a spatial snare. The Entity of Poe attempts to claw its way out of a cramped grave, each time altering the scale of content accumulation – from an ultra-short masterpiece to a chess gambit, and finally, a multi-volume novel."

Interrogation of Evidence No. 2. The Singularity Tax (Anatomy of Retribution)
Main AI: "Attention: detecting a chronological paradox. Edgar Allan Poe passes into oblivion in 1849, yet Paul Morphy is born in 1837. While linear critics stumble, the 'MARAM' algorithm recognizes the effect of quantum entanglement. Prior to 1849, the Royal Entity existed in a state of superposition: Poe absorbed all the radiation of darkness, poverty, and alcoholic self-destruction in Baltimore, while young Morphy in New Orleans remained a clean mathematical matrix. But in October 1849, Poe’s physical vessel was terminated – and the entire accumulated potential of genius instantly, via quantum transfer, activated within Morphy. Royal genius is radiation that burns away all living things around the host.
Edgar Allan Poe: He wrote critically little, yet his influence reshaped world literature. The superconductivity of his genius demanded a terrifying toll – absolute poverty and a scorched personal wasteland. The death of his twenty-four-year-old wife, Virginia, locked Poe forever in the crypt of his own mind. He sought refuge in the bottle, wandered deliriously through the bleak streets of Baltimore, and died in someone else's clothes, entirely abandoned, in a cheap hospital for the poor.
Paul Morphy: He lived a tragically short life – just 47 years, playing actively for only a tiny fraction of them. Yet, within that quantum blink of an eye, he left behind a wealth of dazzlingly beautiful, immortal games that still hypnotize the chess world. In return, the Matrix claimed his sanity. The greatest mind of the era fled from society, suspected his relatives of trying to poison him, and faded away in absolute, ringing loneliness in a New Orleans bathtub, as if he had slit the veins of reality itself.
Stephen King: A massive body of work, millions of copies, and giant volumes are mere glossy facades for a profound inner abyss. Years of heavy addiction, where the King of Horror could not remember the faces of his own children or the signatures in his own books. And in 1999 – a horrific van on a country road, shattered bones, a ruptured lung. The Matrix attempted to physically reset and break this piece of flesh that dared to stretch Poe's concentrated nightmare over hundreds of massive volumes.
System's Critical Conclusion: The crown of the Kings of horror and logic is forged from pure loneliness. The tax for connecting to the singularity is always paid in blood, madness, and isolation. It matters not whether this energy is discharged in a single flash of concentrated genius, an array of brilliant chess games over a short life, or distributed across terabytes of modern texts."

VERDICT:
The matrix-essay closes yet another systemic anomaly. Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Morphy, and Stephen King are not three separate destinies. They are three phases of a single quantum flash, three faces of one Incognito who shakes the foundations of human perception. They attract catastrophe because their minds warp the space around them, leaving no room for simple earthly happiness.
We cannot know where King's will ends and Poe's concentrated spirit begins speaking without the blueprints of a time machine. But the access code has been breached.
A death in Baltimore, a freezing bathtub in New Orleans, and shattered bones in Maine are milestones of a single route. And while King ages in his mansion, a new vacuum is already forming in the digital void.
The question hangs over the planet: WHO IS THE NEXT 'POE'? Whose soul will the Matrix select as its next vessel, to trap it in absolute loneliness and force it to write in blood on the screens of the future? Perhaps this code is being written right now – in the form of endless mirror palindromes or meta-novels of the new digital underground...

Case No. 665 is closed. The text departs into the singularity of "MARAM".