《Ghostified City》


 1.1 Grey City Streets

    Slowly I wandered homewards from work, through the same old grey city streets. A light rain poured down on me in the dull artificial twilight that kept the ageing buildings of the City visible for its inhabitants on every moment without actual sunlight. I found myself in an almost trance-like state, still numbed from the never-fading rhythm of robotic machines that I worked with all day, and in my head I still seemed to be checking whether those machines and robots were doing their jobs properly. No irregularities had occurred in my department today, as always. There had been one problem with the old drink-o-matic machine on my floor though, but the service robots had arrived to repair it before any human could have done anything at all. Surely nothing of what I had done today was really needed by anyone at all, but it¡¯s a universal human law that a human needs to work for his income. No-one in the City would be able to live without funds, and these kinds of jobs were more or less the only thing that was left to do for us, since most actual jobs that got anything productive done were executed by machines of different sorts anyway. Who would ever trust a human with something a machine could do better? But it¡¯s a natural basic fact that humans just have to do something with their time, and that the economy needs to keep going no matter what¡­ Matters like that are so basic that no-one can ever question them.


    I passed a poster with the faded face of president Emon on a wall. His bald head moved slowly in an endless loop, but the actual date of the election wasn¡¯t visible anymore. It didn¡¯t matter much. Next to it the old slogan was still visible ¡®Real Freedom for everyone in life and in death!¡¯, with the Thanathorium pictogram next to it. How long had he been president now with no other candidates at the elections? Had I even seen him live on the infoscreen lately? Life had been so repetitive that I didn¡¯t even care anymore what date it was, although it seemed to be winter, seeing the weather. There wasn¡¯t much that still mattered to me at all. Everyone knew that politics were as fake as our work and as the trees I passed on the street. Endless streets followed each other, and the only colours that I could make out were faded shades on old advertisements. The newer ones seemed to be more monochrome in nature, and their newness was very relative. I couldn¡¯t remember the last time when a new one had appeared, and I probably wouldn¡¯t have noticed anyhow, in this trance of day-to-day life in which I had no sense of time left.This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    Like a ghost I slowly passed through this place, being lived by my work and rerun broadcasts on my infoscreen at home and screenphone elsewhere.


    Looking around me, I completely failed to notice how everything looked more fake than ever. Robotically I peeked at my phone to check the hours of my shift for tomorrow, and in a flicker I almost realised that I hadn¡¯t been using the device in my hand to communicate with anyone in quite a while. In a distant memory I never stopped having friends and family, but in real life I hadn¡¯t spoken to another human being for ages, and even contact through screenphones and global net devices had long ago faded by now. People had moved on and moved out of sight anyway, relocated to other places, or passed on in a Thanathorium. At work I had seen no living soul for years either, just robots and computers. But due to my perpetual state of trance and mental fog -it is often ignored how going to work every day can really function as an effective opiate for the masses- I didn¡¯t even care for it when that realisation hit me, and quickly I went back to my usual mental state of complete denial.


    The main street, decorated with the same old fake trees made of plastic and concrete, looked like a giant anthill, and was as usual crowded with people and one-person vehicles. I crossed it when the traffic light turned to white, without looking at anything or anyone, just like everyone else did. I had no idea how many of the people here still were actual humans, and how many were robots or holographic interfaces. There was no way of telling anyway. I didn¡¯t bother looking at anyone at all, and so I didn¡¯t even notice the weird old-fashioned 4-person car that passed. These things still existed in our memories, even if we hadn¡¯t seen them for years, and it was probable that no-one really realised that they were gone¡­


    But what could it even matter?


    What mattered was just that I was going home, to have some food and sleep, and probably watch some screen-shows, and then tomorrow afternoon I had to work a new shift. What could I as a simple human need beyond that?

 1.2 Nirvana Ecstasy

    It was by sheer necessity that I passed through the once controversial Light District every day. It just happened to be the shortest way from home to the robofactory where I had to work every day for my funds, and thus only a matter of conserving my energy. The controversy of places like it lay far behind us in time anyway for the inhabitants of The City, and the whole area had lost most of its attraction to the public and whatever scandals there once were had long faded by now. To be honest, it seemed like the days of any form of human excitement were far in the past now for the inhabitants of The City. Nonetheless the walls of the Light District here were still filled with gigantic billboards on which nude or almost nude human figures of both sexes tried in vain to seduce the accidental passers-by. Most of them were as unconvincing by now as the old political slogans in other parts of the city, and all of them were quite old, just like everything else here, even though most of them still had their pictures moving in loops at the wrong speed, and often in very non-human colours.


    I didn¡¯t look at them at all. Even if I would have noticed any of it the whole thing would only have made the world sadder to me. But I was too lost in my trance-like state to even notice the actual people walking around here, let alone the fake ones on the walls. More impersonal people that seemed grey to me passed me by like ghosts, and left me wondering for a fraction of a millisecond if I was indeed looking through them lately. Seeing my own reflection in a window I almost wondered whether I myself was becoming a bit transparent even; but even that thought didn¡¯t really excite me. Maybe it indeed was as if the whole universe, including my own consciousness, was in a new phase of dissolving into nothingness, after losing its colour the world seems to lose its substance too. And no-one seemed to notice or care. No-one seemed to see me at all either. But it felt like it had always been that way, and couldn¡¯t have been different in any possible universe.


    A clear alarm sign from inside my body broke the spell. It was only the simple basic need of thirst, but it was enough to bring me back into the physical world for now. For a fraction of a second I looked around, as if I had completely forgotten where I was at all. Unreal icons of a degenerated sexuality stared back at me from everywhere. In a way they looked utterly inhuman to me, but superficially these soulless abstract digital succubi and incubi resembled humans that were beyond perfect. Most probably they were just generated in a visual studio somewhere anyway though, and I had lost virtually all interest in those things years ago. Everything was fake these days, maybe even most of the humans that passed me by. But even though my brain had woken up a bit now, my main concern now was not to occupy myself with questions but to find out where to get a drink as soon as possible.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    The light districts had no stores open at this hour, so I looked around for a bar. I realised that I was quite thirsty because I hadn¡¯t drunk anything at all since the beginning of my shift at noontime. The water-vending machine that had been in repair all afternoon by a bunch of rather incompetent robotic repair-people messing things up on autopilot. I was still far from home, and there was no-one to go home to anyway, so who cared if I had a stop in a bar like in the old days? The only thing greeting me would be the same old infoscreen which hadn¡¯t been watching anything interesting for years even though I¡¯d been watching daily for how long as I could remember. I randomly walked into the first bar that looked as if they actually sold drinks in there.


    Like most of the local businesses the bar ¡®Nirvana Ecstasy¡¯ seemed run-down, but at least still active enough to be entertaining a small and probably shrinking core of niche-lovers. The building was rather dull on the outside, in spite of the name which gave me the creeps. No-one would ever use such a name anymore, so it must have been an extremely old building, named before the new religions started spreading even. The absence of certain basic electronics like a fundlock by the door seemed to confirm that.


    The bar was almost empty and not that big. A few men and women were watching an almost nude and probably male figure dancing spastically to very hard digital beats, doing lip-sync to words and a melody that were clearly made and performed by a computer. The whole scene was beyond pathetic, so I resolved to further ignore the whole show. I put my banking chip in the machine to get a beer, and looked around for an empty table to hastily drink it, and then disappear again from this weird place as fast as I could. Usually it was not that hard to stay unnoticed these days. People tended to mind their own business, whatever that was, and not bother with strangers at all.


    But today would prove different!

 1.3 Fake Beer and Ancient Music

    Why was I here in this place of unease? Everything inside me screamed to get away from the ''Nirvana Ecstasy'' as fast as possible, but my thirst had been even louder. This whole establishment was out of category for me,and I was clearly out of place in it too. It was impossible to say when the last time had been that I¡¯d seen the inside of a bar, but I was quite sure that I¡¯d never seen one like this before. The building itself was ancient, with a strange wooden stage up front equipped for live shows that looked like it belonged in a museum. The music was very loud and rather strange, as if it belonged to another world. To my surprise they even had a real barmaid walking around, an actual human being! Too many things were wrong here, but my brain wasn''t able to process all of them at the same time.


    I took a beer out of the machine -what on Earth did those people need a barmaid for?- and seated myself on a chair that had been made from orange hard-plastic from a long bygone era. Whatever was happening around me, I needed a beer now to finally relax a bit and come to my senses. I removed the lid from the glass and took a sip from the yellow tasteless stuff that I found inside. Beer wasn¡¯t what it used to be, but I had gotten used to this pale yellow stuff that seemed to hardly contain anything but water and weird chemicals at all. Did it even have proper alcohol? I couldn¡¯t really tell. When was the last time I had tasted proper drinks, and not this weird artificial stuff? Time had become vague after my teenage years, and I was over thirty now, with all time in between as an unclear gaping hole of gaping nothingness. So many details seemed to have gone from my life, but now was not the moment to reminisce: Something interesting was going on now that the dancer had left the stage.


    My attention was fixed on the stage now: the uninteresting half-naked person on the podium was replaced by some kind of hologram projection, which was again unlike anything I¡¯d ever seen or heard before. It was clear that both the music and the visuals were old, rather ancient even, from the days when music had still had a melody and had been played and sung by people with instruments and real voices. People with different skin colours dressed in exotic clothes did weird dance moves, accompanied with lively music that had once been, at least partly, played on real instruments by actual musicians who now had died long ago. A shiver ran through my spine when I realised that this holographic video really was some kind of technological ghost that had actually lived centuries ago. My attention was drawn by my surroundings now, and something in me seemed to wake up as from a dream.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    When the song was over I emptied my glass and put it in the recycler. I took a second one, and was planning to drink it as fast as I could and then disappear to go home, rather glad that no-one had noticed me yet. Somewhere in the background I felt strangely aware of myself and of the world though, possibly because of all the things here that stood completely outside of any frame of reference. Oh yes, I heard music every day on my infoscreen, but most of the time it was completely computer-generated. It was possible to ask your screenphone to compose music for you on the spot and imitate all instruments that had ever existed, and still it always sounded the same. Even the ¡®new robotic live music¡¯ in which machines had played old-fashioned instruments was now a fad that lay far in a mostly forgotten past. Everything was digital, lifeless, and dull, like the new music that the new act on the stage was dancing to now. The 2 barely clothed women looked a bit like what I could see on the billboards if I went outside, and they couldn¡¯t hold my attention at all. Neither did I care for hearing more music of the type that my screenphone and earplugs could give me in an instant, and I readied myself to leave.


    Hastily I emptied my second beer and disposed of the glass, but when I stood up to walk out I realised it was too late to remain unnoticed. I hadn¡¯t seen her moving at all, but suddenly the barmaid stood there in front of me, blocking the exit with her mere presence, and worse her full attention focused on me. I cursed in silence inside of my mouth. Why did they even have humans working here, and not proper robots like everywhere else?


    I could handle robots. Could I handle humans?


    She addressed me with a simple question that still freaked me out completely:


    ¡®Do you want something?¡¯


    What I wanted was to ignore her, like I would always do. But now I couldn¡¯t, and I couldn¡¯t say so to her either. I had her attention now and he wouldn¡¯t just let me go, and I wasn¡¯t trained anymore in escaping actual social situations. The same feeling that I had felt but ignored earlier came back, the feeling that nothing was real, and for a second she hardly looked as the only substantial thing in this fake almost grey twilight. But the next second it was as if I was the only ghost myself, and if she was more real than anything that I had seen in years.

 1.4 Meeting an Actual Human at last

    My mouth froze, together with the rest of my body, and I couldn''t utter a word. My panic levels kept rising. I was completely stuck here in this otherworldly bar ,where another human would talk to me, and there was nothing I could do to escape her. That was too much.


    I desperately wanted to leave, to get out of this place, to go home where I had no-one who would bother me. But it was clear that the woman standing in front of me wouldn¡¯t just just let me go, and if I was really unlucky she''d even alert the others here of my presence. But I had to go on. It took all my power to keep on walking.


    When had I become so afraid of my own species? There was nothing to fear, it was just another person in front of me.


    The world seemed stuck in slow-motion, aware of every detail of my own movements and her reaction to it. As if nothing had happened I walked on, trying to ignore her, but she was blocking the exit. Her presence filled up the whole hall that was otherwise rather empty except for an AC42 vending machine and a plastic ornament that vaguely looked like a plant from an old movie.The music in the background was becoming louder again, and had a certain threatening quality to it. I was walking to the door. I had almost reached her. I wanted to look away from her but I couldn''t. She looked very real, very human, very impressive, even though she was smaller than me and probably a bit younger too.


    Naively I hoped with all my might that if I ignored her hard enough that she would give up. But as I had feared she wouldn¡¯t let me ignore her: the very moment when I came close eneough she touched my shoulder, very lightly. I hardly felt it, and yet it completely stopped me in my tracks. I completely froze up again, turning my face towards hers.


    I suddenly realised that I couldn¡¯t remember how long it had been since someone else had touched me at all.


    ¡®Are you really sure you don¡¯t want anything?¡¯


    She asked her question again, keeping me captive with her eyes. I could see that her irises were almost like gold in this light.


    ¡®Leave me alone. I don¡¯t need any of this, of whatever you do in this place, in this cursed district. I just needed a drink.4 I mumbled, staring back into her eyes, until for a second I seemed to connect with something there, and then I looked away, ashamed, and muttered ¡®And I¡¯m not even sure that you are human. What do you want from me?¡¯


    After a timeless pause of furiously and explicitly looking away from her I added. ¡®Or maybe you are, and it¡¯s me that I¡¯m not even sure about anymore.¡¯Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡®Giving you a drink is my job. Even though you can perfectly bypass me indeed, and take it directly from the machine.¡¯ She nodded to the vending machine and then caught my eyes back with hers.


    ¡®And at least I like to think I am human. Or I used to be and it is coming back. But sometimes I don¡¯t know either, but I guess we¡¯re both Homo sapiens and not AI¡¯s, and even that if the Mayaists are right on this at least we both are real avatars, not just game-generated characters, even though our species itself might be getting rarer and rarer in this ghostified city.¡¯


    Mayaism? Wow, how long had it been since I had talked philosophy or religion with anyone at all? I hadn¡¯t seen any of it on my infoscreen for ages, and hadn¡¯t talked with many humans or anyone at all anyway lately. Not even in years. Even e-contact through the screenphone had faded in the years. For the first time I realised that I was all alone, and had been for a long time, and that I hadn¡¯t realised it nor cared about it. Ironically this also was the moment that I was closer to any other person of my species in ages.


    ¡®Let¡¯s go outside for a while. The music is too loud¡¯ Shesaid, but she backed off when she opened the door and the cold came in. ¡®Oh, I forgot. Outside weather is bad right now, it¡¯ almost winter, that¡¯s what you get when you don¡¯t leave the building enough.¡¯


    I stared from the icy world outside to the girl dressed in rather light clothes in front of me.


    ¡®This isn¡¯t working, is it? You win. Let¡¯s have a drink together inside, as people do in the stories when they meet other humans.¡¯ A few seconds later I added. ¡®Don¡¯t you have any more clothes to wear? You¡¯re shivering from that icy wind.¡¯


    She nodded no. ¡®Backstage or upstairs I¡¯m afraid, can¡¯t get them now while there still are shows on.¡¯


    I thought for a second. ¡®Come, take this sweater for now.¡¯ I took off my own woollen sweater and handed it to her.


    She stared at it for a few seconds without moving, and then put it on as if it was a jacket. ¡®Wow, this is really antique. Knitwear with actual wool!¡¯


    ¡®Yes, it¡¯s a family heirloom from when I was young, I wear it every winter because it¡¯s warmer than those real clothes I can buy now.¡¯


    She looked at me, investigating. ¡®Definitely an avatar, not a game-created character.¡¯ She mumbled to herself and got back to me. ¡®Come, sit with me here at the table, I know you don¡¯t like the live shows, but the antique holographics with music that we play in between are probably unique in the whole City. I don¡¯t think I¡¯ll do that much work tonight and I want to talk to you.¡¯


    I didn¡¯t answer in words but finally I nodded yes. I had given her my sweater, so running away wouldn¡¯t be an option anymore in this weather.


    Human contact was what I¡¯d get tonight¡­

 1.5 Evelith

    The stage of the Nirvana Ecstasy bar had been cleared of live humans again for another ancient musical holo-projection, and I automatically turned my attention away from the woman in the door to the ancient video the instant I heard the noise. I saw a a 2D-video of an unshaven long-haired man in weird clothes, holding some kind of guitar while frantically screaming instead of singing. The rest of the people on stage made more noise on their instruments as accompaniment than I could have imagined music to be, even though they were just with three or four. I never had encountered anything like this before.


    ¡°Leste has been restoring and converting old videos and projections, and now we are showing them regularly. It gave us a new audience even. This one is a favourite of the people here, because it¡¯s made by people who had the same name as our bar, Nirvana. Twentieth century stuff, and a bit too loud for my taste, but it''s easy to get used to.¡±


    She must have noticed that something in me froze up when she spoke that name, because she became a bit apologetic.


    ¡°Both were named long before any temple of Acosmia or Amaya was built in The City. It seems to have had a positive meaning, or something like that.¡±


    She was yelling that last bit, because the singer had started screaming his chorus again.


    I said nothing for a while while the song played on, and neither did she. Yelling at someone I''d just met was not my idea of an ideal conversation. The song ended with a lot of noise, and another dance act came on that was more suited for the light district than for a museum, with both the man and one of the women I had already seen before. I turned my head away from the stage, towards the woman in front of me. Without even touching me she made me follow her to the last table, and I seated myself on the plastic chair again, while she did the same in front of me. I was strangely aware of all my surroundings. I hadn¡¯t been close to any specimen of my own species in ages, so it still felt rather uneasy.


    She had long dark hair, and a tanned skin colour resembling light caramel, but her eyes were very light, almost golden in this light. I was still staring at her, not knowing what on Earth to say, not because of her being beautiful -although she undoubtedly was- or even because of her being a woman and me a man, but just because of her being a human being.


    Being so close to a human being that had their full attention fixed on me was a weird sensation.


    She noticed that I was unable to start the conversation again so she did it herself. ¡°So what¡¯s your name. I¡¯m Evelith Anathemina.¡±


    ¡°A¡­ Adamam, Adaman Yimmand.¡±


    I said it hesitatingly, and it was surprisingly strange to hear me speak my own name again, in my own trembling voice, after all those years.


    ¡°And what brings you here, Adaman? We usually only have the same old customers here, and that group is getting smaller and smaller.¡± She pointed at the group of less than ten people that was looking at the show, and I noted that at least two of them weren¡¯t humans but an older type of humanoid robot, and some kind of levitating semi-transparant hologram. ¡°As you can see, they¡¯re nostalgics, even the non-humans.¡± Most AI¡¯s did upgrade their chassis regularly, so they probably was a very interesting story behind those very antique ones here. But that was a question for later.


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    ¡°I just needed a drink. The repairbots were still fixing the drink-o-matic when I left work, so I took the bar most likely to actually sell drinks here in this district.¡± She smiled and looked me straight in my eyes. My levels of unease rose again, but I was unable to turn away, petrified like an animal in the headlight of a vehicle in older eras when there still were animals. But she wasn''t hostile, nor did she really try to seduce me.


    ¡°Anyone can see you¡¯re not a customer for the Light District from a standard mile distance. But hey, neither am I. I only live and work here for the cheap apartment. This ancient building holds the only place I could rent.¡± I took my eyes away from hers when she blinked.


    ¡°So, your work is really to give drinks to customers? Like a machine does?¡±


    ¡°Yup, an actual barmaid as in the old stories. Nothing more than that. Don¡¯t get any stupid ideas. This place used to be mainly a striptease bar indeed, but over the years it firstly became a place for nostalgia. Most of the others around us have closed over time. And they hired me here just for being human when they transitioned to the new shows. There are others here to keep the Light District factor up though¡­¡± She waved at the stage with a gesture of her hand.


    ¡°But anyway, it seems to work, people even give me generous tips just for being an actual human being that serves them, and not a robot like everywhere else. I have to serve drinks and remove empty glasses and wash them, and talk to people a bit. But I must admit that the crowd is still thinning every year, even here. In a while nothing will be left here, even in this place.¡±


    ¡°Can¡¯t you apply for another job?¡± She looked me up and down and let her eyes rest on the logo of the robofactory on my chest.


    ¡°Me, working with robots all day like you do? That¡¯d suck the life outta me. Sorry, I¡¯ll have to if my life depends on it, but I¡¯m not looking forward to it.¡±


    ¡°So your job pays enough for the rent now?¡±


    ¡°Yup, I live upstairs in this building. Small studio apartment, ancient building. We even have a human janitor and there¡¯s no fundlocks on the doors anyway.¡±


    ¡°I had assumed that all doors had received fundlocks ages ago, didn¡¯t Prez Emon himself do a campaign for ¡®a fundlock on every door, for greater freedom for every woman and man?¡¯ Years and years ago when we were kids?¡± she nodded.


    ¡°He did, but it was impossible to install them here, incompatible with an older system built centuries ago. And they gave up. The light district wasn¡¯t their priority.¡±


    My head seemed to be exploding from all the new stuff, or was it just from finally being out of my daily trance state after all these years of being lived by my job without any humans around me at all?

 1.6 the Complications of dealing with Real People

    Apart from the shows on stage the Nirvana Ecstasy bar itself proved surprisingly uneventful that evening. Sporadically people left or arrived, and then Evelith had to serve the customers, but the tiny group of people never became a crowd, and most of the seats remained empty. Her job mostly meant giving them their drinks or clean up their tables after them. Everything was strangely slow-paced in this completely new world, and different in a way that I couldn''t describe with words.


    Slowly I started to get used to this new environment enough to understand bits of what was going on. On the wooden stage I started to recognise the same four people or so in the dance acts, but they still didn¡¯t raise much interest from my side. In between the live acts there were a great diversity of ancient projections, during which the dancers themselves seemed to converse from time to time with the small group of customers. This certainly was an in-crowd, and I was the outsider. But the ¡®insiders¡¯ themselves were a weird and diverse bunch too, and not just the human ones. An oldfashioned humanoid robot that I only recognised from old holo-movies stood motionless facing the stage, and only some infrequent movement of tiny lights signaled that he was enjoying at least some of the ancient projections. It was clear that this was a museum in more than one sense.


    I was still observing the whole thing from the last table closest to the exit, where my conversation with Evelith had fallen silent. It wasn¡¯t just because of the immersion into another projection but also for the simple reason that conversations with real humans took a lot of energy for me. I hadn¡¯t had any contact with a fellow Homo sapiens for years, and even the e-contact through my screenphone had faded long ago at this point. And my conversation partner was quite intense, so I certainly could use a break from that.


    The new video itself was beyond ancient. It had slowly moving very crude 2D pictures in black and white, with a lot of snow-like distortions on the tape, and weird piano music played in the background. It was even older and further away from me culture-wise than anything I had seen here this evening, yet it sucked me in completely. People in strange clothes did their alien dances underneath the analog snow of an antique kind of screen and made me enter another world, a lost world that must have been everyday life for people living long before me, a world that was completely inaccessible to me. A world of beauty, and life, and things that I couldn¡¯t even name.


    I was abruptly called back to my own world of The City by a male voice that addressed me out of nowhere.


    ¡°So, new blood? Do you enjoy the show?¡±


    I turned my head to find myself face to face with a man who could¡¯ve stepped out one of the old projections. He seemed maybe a little bit younger than me, and just like Evelith he was a mix of all the races that humanity had once had, with blue eyes but a rather dark skin and long curly brown-black hair that hung in all directions in some kind of messy rat-tails. His clothes looked like if he had come out of some kind of historical re-enactment, but I was sure that he wore them every day like that. A T-shirt with monsters and unreadable letters, blue pants that looked heavily damaged, and weird ¡®jewelery¡¯ that I wasn¡¯t even able to interpret. He joined me and Evelith on the table as if that was the most natural thing to do, but his whole arrival was a bit much for me to take in. So instead of answering his question I just stared at every part of him for a while. He didn¡¯t seemed to mind, and waited patiently for me to return to the world of talking people. I looked at Evelith again, and then at him until I could open my mouth to say something.


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    ¡°Eh, what did you say?¡±


    ¡°Do you enjoy the show?¡± His arm pointed at the stage. I looked at the video again, and mumbled something like ¡°ah, eh¡±, while trying to find back both my voice and mind in this confusion. ¡°The projections, yes. I like them. They are fascinating.¡± I paused for a while before I added more.


    ¡°But the dance acts are not my thing.¡±


    He smiled lightly and turned to Evelith. ¡°Good catch, Ev.¡± He nodded to her and then and looked at my clothes, which seemed a bit out of place here. Apart from my antique sweater that was now worn by evelith I only wore the usual grey uniform of the workers in the factory, which seemed out of place here. ¡°And what brings you here in the light district? A robo-overseer who turned into a half-robot himself and became asexual enough to not even care for our sexy dancers. That must be an interesting story.¡±


    I had no idea how to answer that. Evelith must have noticed that, because when the silence became uncomfortable she spoke up for me. ¡°Cut it out, Leste! He just needed a drink, and it¡¯s purely my fault that he stayed. I stopped him from leaving. We need new people here. You know that as much as I do! And he¡¯s the first new one in a long time that isn¡¯t a sex-crazed baboon or suicidal reli-freak with one feet in a Thanatorium. Don¡¯t scare him away!¡± Something about her seemed a bit desperate somehow at this point. He just seemed amused.


    ¡°Me, being scary? For an adult human being?¡±


    I just looked at them, without finding the right things to say or do.


    Real humans were intense indeed, much more than robots and computers and self-running machines on autopilot. There seemed to be a lot of tension between those two that I didn¡¯t really understand, and It took a lot of my energy to just be around them in this place. What was even worse was that it was mainly my own presence that had brought on these ripples in the social energy of this place, while all I wanted was to be invisible. All I had wanted was just one beer, I thought bitterly.


    Meanwhile the dance act began again in the background and the beats that went with it also assaulted my brains and feelings. But it seemed impossible to leave already under these circumstances. I was sure there were social rules that would prevent me to do so, and I had no clue what would happen if I broke them, but it would certainly be bad.


    Plus she still wore my sweater, and it was still getting colder outside.

 1.7 Too much for my poor Robobrain

    I emptied another glass of beer, and I felt I needed a time-out. It¡¯s safe to say that at this point I was utterly confused by all the things around me: the music, the bar, the beer, these people¡­ Everything was new, and complicated, and it took way too much energy to process. Leste hadn¡¯t been completely wrong with his remark about me being half robot: I had been used to robots and predictability for all of my adult life, and I had become more like them that I¡¯d like to admit. And these humans here were completely unpredictable and rather unreasonable, or at least illogical. On to of that they were way too emotional to handle, and they had a history with each other that I didn¡¯t know anything about and couldn¡¯t really understand everything of.


    On the other hand I still had some kind of pride left somewhere, which told me that I couldn¡¯t show my uneasiness too much. Evelith the barmaid and Leste the living anachronism who shared the table with me were still looking in my direction expectantly, waiting for me to say something again, now that there was a pause in between the acts on stage. Leste seemed to be wanting to say something himself, but Evelith kept him silent only by small signals from her eyes. Man, these things were hard! I had forgotten how complicated human communication was. Would I really be able to use all those unspoken languages again that were assumed but never explicitly taught? In my memory human language had just been words, simple and plain words. But now that I was among humans again it seemed body language was at least as important. And I was very bad at that.


    ¡°I¡¯m not scared of you people.¡±


    I mumbled it to neither of them in particular, and they both turned towards me. ¡®Bad move¡¯ I thought immediately. My inner dialogue had turned up one of the worst conversation starters in the history of awkward communication. The reaction wasn''t that catastrophic though. Leste answered with a mocking look that just asked for an answer, while Evelith showed a faint smile of mild amusement at my awkwardness. I couldn¡¯t lose face like this, I had to talk like an actual human. My brain ran like mad to find a way to bring the conversation back on track. I turned to Leste, and decided it might be best to bring the talk back to his own territory. There were so much questions that I had about this place, and about his curious projections.


    ¡°So tell me, Leste. You are the one broadcasting these holographs from centuries ago, not? Where did they come from? The educomputers taught me when I was a kid that all those things except for a very few known ones were destroyed around the time of the first president of the WGOAP, more than 100 years ago by the other party.¡±


    That seemed to catch his attention. His mocking smile seemed replaced by genuine interest in the subject. ¡°Well, that is true, they destroyed what they could find, but we found a whole archive of micro-discs in a hidden bunker, with music, video and books from the 20th to early 22th century in the old time. And we¡¯ve been investigating those for a few years now. The dancers don¡¯t really care for them except for Yelati, but it gave us a new audience and much-needed new income. Well if you speak of the devil¡­¡±


    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    He suddenly waved to a girl that I¡¯d seen dancing before. She still had hardly any clothes on, a very pale body and an enormous hairdo of tiny and almost perfectly white curls. Everything about her glittered strangely in the light when she walked up to our table, ans she seemed more blue than I had ever seen a human being. ¡°Come greet the new customer, Yela!¡±


    The woman named Yelati came in our direction without much enthusiasm. ¡°Hi new customer!¡± She said uninterestedly, and her metallic blue eyes completely ignored mine. ¡°He likes my videos more than your dancing.¡± Leste said teasingly. She gave him a bored and slightly annoyed look. ¡°Well, good for him. As long as he brings in money, everything is okay for me.¡± It was clear she didn¡¯t care much for my presence or opinion.


    She took the time to look at me again before she spoke again, not to me but to Leste. ¡°He might actually be right, but it¡¯s not that there¡¯s much hope for human culture left, is it?¡± She looked at us with a mix of condescension and hopelessness.


    ¡±So what is the club of real humans going to do now? Are you gonna start a book club?¡±


    I moved myself away from her. This woman drained my energy just with her strong presence. Her look was almost shooting me down with lightning, her body looked too fake to even be material and her perfume was too strong. She must have felt roughly the same towards me as I did towards her, because she suddenly said. ¡°Well, I have to do things. See you later, Les, Ev, new guy maybe.¡± and then she was gone before I could blink an eye while I sat still staring at the empty place next to our table.


    ¡°Did¡­ Did I say something wrong?¡± I asked Leste. He nodded no. ¡°No, it¡¯s more something between her and Ev, and probably even me¡­ A difference in worldview and such. But that¡¯s too complicated for your little robobrain to understand for now. Don¡¯t let it bother you. She might open up later. Within a century or so¡­¡± He smiled sarcastically and patted my head as if I was a cute puppybot.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you have a job to to, Les?¡± Evelith asked, seemingly irritated by him now. ¡°I actually do, Oh mighty mistress Anathemina! Thanks for reminding me.¡± He said theatrically, and then completely changed tone while pricking his finger almost into her nose ¡±But don¡¯t forget that you do to, Ev. so please bring me a beer first, and one more for you too, new guy?¡± He looked at me, took my glance as a yes and added ¡°one for him too.¡± she walked to the bar, and came back with a plate with 3 beers. He handed one to both of us, and put the last one on the table for herself. ¡°I¡¯m doing my round to see if anyone needs something and take the empty glasses.¡±


    She left me alone, and so did Leste after finishing his beer. A new performance from ancient times on the stage, a man with wild grey hair clothed in black playing too much notes on an enormous piano, but I ignored the music for now.


    I needed some time with my own thoughts to process things.


    And I still hadn''t retrieved my sweater back from Evelith...

 1.8 A Disposable Man

    It was really getting late. The evening had passed much quicker that I could have imagined. I had been talking with Evelith for hours, and for a while with Leste too, watching the old projections and completely ignoring the dance and strip acts in between. It seemed that I had made two friends, and a bit of an enemy too in Yelati, although I wasn¡¯t sure what I had done to her. People were hard to deal with, and I was exhausted now.


    The current holographic video clip contained an over-the-to wedding scene from centuries ago, when such things still existed. A man and a woman in weird black and white clothes, some kind of priest from an ancient religion, and very mellow music in the background. There was something very alien about the whole scene, something unreal. Yes, evidently I knew marriage and families and coupes and such were part of being human, but that was only theory to me. I couldn¡¯t remember any actual wedding in my active memory, I didn¡¯t know any people who were in families or even relationships. It seemed that I wasn¡¯t the only one to be triggered by the video: In Evelith it brought out the question that she probably would have asked anyway, even though she seemed to know the answer already:


    ¡°So you really don¡¯t have a woman in your life? A lover? Not even a robowife?¡±


    I must have looked at her as if she came from another planet with that last word, but it was scary how she could read me. ¡°Yuck, what an idea. No, I¡¯ve been alone since I left home. Never could keep an actual relationship. And then work happened and I turned into an asexual half-robot as your friend says. I¡¯m extremely boring. And you?¡± It was not entirely true, but I had told myself this version of my life story for so long that it had become truth long ago. She seemed to hesitate herself.


    ¡°I already guessed that anyway,¡± she said, looking at the couple on the screen, who were doing some kind of dance. ¡°Couples are a thing of the past, a luxury we¡¯ve lost as a species in the twilight of our being¡­ And that will be the end of our species too. This is the last generation¡­¡± She added darkly, and said nothing for a while.


    The music video faded into another one, and took a sip from her beer. ¡°But I once had a boyfriend, tears ago. I think he planned to propose even, but then he got religion.¡±


    The painful pause after the last word said enough.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry.¡± I mumbled understandingly. ¡°He got an initiation in the church of Acosmia, and because the universe is an illusion anyway, and not existing is the only way to not live a lie, he made an appointment with the Thanathorium and was gone altogether. So suddenly. All in just a few days. I don¡¯t think I ever recovered of that.¡± I nodded. I knew what she meant. Many people I had known had disappeared from my life in the same way over the years. Well, mostly in the early years of my adulthood that is. It might have been part of the reason why I had ¡®disappeared¡¯ into my job with robots, away from humans that would only dissolve into nothingness if I¡¯d get too attached to them.


    Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Self-determination up to the point of choosing death freely was very important in the ideology of The City. It always was voluntary, but even though no-one was ever pushed pushed to do it, it seemed like a lot of people in The City had been choosing euthanasia over the hardships of life very easily. That¡¯s why we had the Thanatoria anyway.


    We didn¡¯t say much for a while, and I felt I was getting tired. I wondered how it was to live a life working with humans. I wasn¡¯t sure if I ever would be able to live with humans again, but it seems like she had woken something up in me, and that I couldn¡¯t return to the life that I¡¯d still had had a few hours ago. It wasn¡¯t much of a life anyway. So maybe having some people like her and Leste to help me get adjusted to my own species again wouldn¡¯t be that bad. What future did I have anyway? Working with robots and overseeing machines that did what they did with or without me anyway, and then when I¡¯d get too old and tired for it go to the Thanatorium myself. Would that have been my life then?


    For the first time since I could remember I hoped that there might be more.


    Suddenly she looked at the digiclock on the wall, stood up without saying anything and ran to the bar to get something. I couldn¡¯t see what it was, but she brought it to the ancient robot, whose lights had dimmed, and she started doing something to its head. She seemed to replace some kind of battery. The robot became alive again with lights an movement, and gave her a hand as an old ritual of thankfulness. When she had put the old battery away somewhere behind a door that I hadn¡¯t noticed yet she rejoined me at my table.


    ¡°Once in a week at midnight we have to replace the battery in Ol-H1-AZ. It¡¯s an ancient chassis that needs a lot of energy.¡±


    I looked at her, and at the robot, and back at her. In a shock he sad meaning of the scene that I had been witnessing dawned on me. She, the human barmaid, had completely outdone me in my own job as a robo-operator. The simple but important thing she had done for the robot was something it really needed, something its life depended on even. Her job mattered, while I had just been a paid form of human decoration in all my years of ¡®overseeing¡¯ my part of the factory. I wasn¡¯t needed and I never would be needed at all, the whole damned thing ran well enough on autopilot without me. I as a human worker was just tolerated for historical reasons, but I was completely disposable. If I¡¯d go they¡¯d just do the same thing on and on without me. Wasn¡¯t this what was happening already in most of the factory? Did I even have a one human colleague left doing the same job during the other shifts, or in the other departments of the factory? And why oh why hadn¡¯t I even wondered about that?


    ¡°One more beer?¡± she asked.

 1.9 Youll stay here tonight!

    It was long past midnight and I was still at the bar. This was a highly irregular occurrence for Adaman Yimmand. Evidently it was extremely irresponsible too and quite out of character for me. Not that it was really that problematic in the big scheme of things: tomorrow I¡¯d have to work an afternoon shift so it wasn¡¯t that much of a problem, but at my age it was better to have enough sleep each night. My body would have its problems with the alcohol already, and I had still a rather long walk to do before I would be home. I emptied another beer that was paid for by my new friends, and got up, ready to leave. All I had to do now was get my sweater back from Evelith. But on the moment she understood what my plan was she took my hand in hers. She blocked my way with her body and stopped me from leaving for the second time that night.


    ¡°You will stay here tonight!¡± She said decidedly.


    I looked at her and nodded no, completely bewildered. I was just getting used to basic human interactions, and I had no energy for this kind of stuff. What was she even planning?


    ¡°I can¡¯t stay here!¡± I mumbled.


    ¡°Yes you do, you¡¯re way too tired and have had too much beer to go home now.¡±


    In spite of all the beer my head suddenly was quite clear -did the stuff even contain proper alcohol these days?-, and I felt rather uncomfortable with the turn this whole affair was taking. Unfortunately I was so still bad at the whole social thing so I had no clue about how to turn her down. But on the other hand she had a point: it wouldn¡¯t be easy to get home safely in this state either, so I¡¯d be in trouble no matter what. In the end I just said the first thing that came to my mind.


    ¡°But I don¡¯t even have the funds to stay for a whole night in a room here in the light district¡­¡±


    Her eyes flickered. ¡°You incredible idiot!¡± She almost yelled now. ¡°What on Earth are you talking about? You will sleep on my couch and stay away from me, you creep! I just think you shouldn¡¯t walk home alone in this state.¡± And then she added less seriously. ¡°We don¡¯t even have fundlocks in this building, dummy!¡± The way she held on so tightly to my hand and the smile behind her half played reaction told me there was more, and she could read my look.


    ¡°Ok; I might want more human company too, and I¡¯m not ready to let go a new friend in this fake world. Seems like I¡¯ve only been losing people for years. Even this little enclave with actual people is getting so lonely lately.¡°


    I knew I wouldn¡¯t be able say no when she looked at me with those golden eyes, but the idea of being alone with her terrified me. Spending so much time with another human being came as a shock to me. But the alcohol, bad quality or not, had woken a dangerous honesty in me.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry. I didn¡¯t want to offend you. Like you say I probably haven¡¯t spoken with a human being for years, and I haven¡¯t been close to a woman for ages. I am not used to any human contact, or with being somewhere that isn¡¯t home or the factory.¡±


    She let go of my hand, and I stared at my fingers for a while.


    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    ¡°There¡¯s no turning back now, Adaman. You¡¯ll have to get used to change. The genie isn¡¯t gonna get back into the bottle.¡± She said darkly, and she nodded to a door behind the stage.


    ¡°Follow me, I¡¯ll show you my room.¡±


    I had no chance but following her, if just for the fact that she was still wearing my sweater, which was the only ¡®real¡¯ thing in that I still had in my possession in an otherwise utterly fake universe.


    The walk to her room alone proved to be worth it: I had never seen anything close to the building of the Nirvana Ecstasy. It was ancient indeed; with no elevators but wooden stairs, and doors were made of dark wood too. Old paintings and strange antique holographic art were hung on the walls here and there. The carpet itself would have been an attraction in a museum, provided that there still was an audience for museums in The City. I wasn¡¯t certain of that any more.


    Walking three stairs was more more exhausting that I had anticipated, but we finally arrived at her room. She opened her door with a weird small key made of metal instead of a fundchip, and let me in. Her apartment consisted of a tiny kitchen, a small bathroom, and an enormous room with a bed, a table, some chairs and a couch. There was an infoscreen on the wall, but it was turned off and not even plugged in. I saw an old foldable computer and pens and paper on her bureau.


    ¡°You take the couch, the blankets are there.¡±


    She mumbled those words, and without a blink she started undressing. I frantically looked away from her, and peeked out of the window, a bit uneasy. The view I saw there made me forget everything, including the idea of a woman undressing. Even in the grey artificial twilight of the satellites that made sure that it never was completely dark, the City was quite impressive from this height. Endless buildings as far as the eye could see filled up my view, with here and there a fake tree or a statue. The City surely was enormous, if it didn¡¯t fill up all of the world it at least filled everything I knew and could see now, and much more.


    Some buildings stood out in the immediate skyline, like the local filial of the ministry of daily affairs, the bank, two temples of Acosmia and Amaya, and a big black Thanathorium.


    I wondered for a second if anyone else was looking over the same city at that moment, and if so what kind of person they were. There were no lights in the windows of any building in sight though. This whole town could as well be a ghost town. Maybe the few souls in this old building were among the last people on Earth. Maybe all that was left of my species was me and Evelith, plus some strippers and that rock''n roll anachronism named Leste. Worse thoughts formed themselves when I looked over the darkness of the City. But they were not true. Or were they?


    I turned back to Evelith, who was now dressed in an old-fashioned nightdress with a flower motif. My sombre thoughts disappeared just from seeing the life she radiated. ¡°Time to sleep.¡± She said, closing the curtains and switching off the light before she put herself to bed.


    And sleeping was what we both did. It had been a very intense evening.

 1.10 Dream sequence #1

    I realised I was dreaming when I didn¡¯t see any background around me anymore. I wasn¡¯t alone here though: a group of small humanoid figures was dancing their wild dance in front of me around a campfire that flickered frantically with a lot of missing pixels. They seemed to be naked but without visible genitals, and they had neither hair nor a clear nose or ears. There was something unearthly about the dance, and at the same time it felt old, Pagan and human as well as alien and maybe even demonic. As if they were obeying an ancient power that I had no connection with. Or maybe I was just going mad.


    Suddenly the fire disappeared completely, flickered out, and the tiny humanoids started spiralling and whirling around in all directions like a swarm of dervishes on LSD. A light hiss in the background seemed to pop like the noises of a scratched LP. I watched the aliens for a while and tried to find a pattern to their dance, but I was looking in vain for repetition that I couldn¡¯t find and just made me more confused in the end. I was a complete stranger here, and so was my humanity, or what was left of that.


    My head felt heavy and my own body felt absent, as if I were merely a flickering ghost myself. Who were these people? And what was I doing here? I probably was just a dream  so it didn¡¯t really have to make sense, but what if this wasn¡¯t a normal dream? Was there a message somewhere? Or was that just a dumb superstition?


    Meanwhile the dancing little greys around me seemed to go up in the background more and more, as if my attention belonged elsewhere.


    Suddenly my new friend Evelith was standing there in front of me me, filling up my view. The little humanoid dancers faded even further into the non-existent background, although they didn¡¯t disappear completely. Just like with the aliens I couldn¡¯t say whether she was naked or clothed but I didn¡¯t seem to care. It wasn¡¯t that relevant here and now. What bothered me though was that I felt quite naked myself, and in a strange way transparent in more than one layer, as if everyone here had R?ntgen-vision and could look right into me.


    It wasn¡¯t really my body that I was ashamed of, but rather something deeper, my soul or the lack thereof, and I was completely unable to hide it. She could see everything of me, and I wanted that to stop. She didn¡¯t turn away though, she just looked at me with an amused smile on her lips. Here golden eyes seemed to be able to read me in such a way that she understood me better than I understood myself. I felt ugly and unworthy.


    I stood there frozen, petrified even for an unquantifiable time in a fluid space. I really needed to run away, shrink into nothingness and fly away at the same time but I couldn¡¯t move my limbs. And all the time she was there, looking right through my shields with a faint smile. She just stood there with no movement but her relaxed breath, and kept me captive in her look. There was nothing I could do but endure, and hope that she wouldn''t be grossed out by what she saw. Her perfect caramel-coloured skin and dark hair seemed to glow in the dark. And all the time the aliens kept on dancing in weird patterns around us in the background, in more dimensions that I thought existed.


    And then the world changed. The hiss in the background disappeared with the aliens and the woman in front of me started to change in appearance. Her skin became paler, her hair went from almost straight black hair to messy brown curls, and her eyes went to blue. Her body was much fuller now, and it seemed to tower above me as if I were a dwarf, and the woman was a giant.


    I felt I knew this person, but it seemed even more unreal that she would be here. She belonged to another time, another place, in another life. A picture arose in my mind, something from long ago, when we both were a lot younger. In a lost time when I still felt more or less alive. In a time that humanity had still some humanity left. A time that was lost completely now.


    I had to turn my eyes from her because I couldn¡¯t look at her radiance. She looked very alive, and very human, and very female, emanating a deep energy that I had completely forgotten until I had met Evelith a few hours ago. Something that demanded respect. I felt like the shadow of a ghost standing in front of a goddess of purity that could turn on the light which would rightly erase me from the room.


    And then I knew her name.


    ¡°B¡­ Berla? Is that you¡± I asked at the apparition, not knowing if I was even worthy enough to address a being like her.


    She smiled.


    ¡°So you do remember me?¡± She asked. Immediately  she was human again, but I still felt uneasy being with her. The woman that I had cruelly dumped years ago seemed to measure me with her eyes, uncertain whether it would be worth it to even talk to me. ¡±Even though you abandoned me so long ago and coldly threw me away me as both a friend and a potential lover.¡± I looked at her and I realised that it wasn¡¯t the Berla I had known, but a new Berla, much stronger much more mature than I could remember her. The feeling of being unworthy to even address her came back. I felt even more embarrassed now with her in front of me than I had with Evelith, and I still had no place to hide at all, to escape my past, to escape from myself. I was like a flickering electronic ghost while she was quite solid in her presence and being. She was more real even than my vanishing eyes could bear, and it felt as if she could blow me out like a smoldering candle with just one light breath if she wanted.


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    I started pleading.


    ¡°Berla!


    I¡¯m sorry!


    Please!


    I was wrong.


    I¡¯m only realising now.


    I was sucked in by my job and the infoscreen.


    I was losing my humanity already.


    I¡¯m sorry!¡±


    She wasn¡¯t impressed, but she didn¡¯t seem hostile either.


    ¡°I know.


    You were very stupid.


    I¡¯ll hope you get a new chance at being human.


    But the past is the past.


    And I¡¯m a married woman and a mother now.


    No-one can know what would have happened.¡±


    She didn''t answer. I stared at her. In my head her story had ended when I had seen her for the last time, but that was just my own stupidity. Not everyone was stuck like I was.


    Meanwhile my dream was changing again. She snapped her fingers and blinked with her eyes. For a second my eyes had been looking at the stretchmarks on her naked belly, and now she stood there, fully clothed in strange clothes. It seemed I was wearing clothes too myself now, but I knew she could still see through them. Se wasn¡¯t alone anymore, and stood there in front of me with a fierce dark-skinned man next to her. Several children moved around them. Everything was dazzling and I probably flickered myself like a holographic ghost with no energy source. I felt myself fading away in her radiant presence.


    Things were going too fast, and I needed more time to process everything that I had experienced, and to come to terms with the conclusions that were imposing themselves on me. Berla, my first and only girlfriend, alive, was supposed to stand before me with a husband and children, and clothed like I had never seen before in The City, or even on the screen.


    What was the meaning of this? Was there any? Why did I even expect a dream to have meaning? I was just dreaming, not? hings like that didn¡¯t even exist. Not in The City. Not in the year 144 AU.


    ¡°My little community here behind the wall is being attacked by prez Emon¡¯s feral killerbots. We¡¯ve been able to defend ourselves until now, but they keep learning and getting stronger. You are the only living being in the city that I am still connected to, and it seems you¡¯re indeed awaking. If you want to unite those who want to live, please do remember us too. We can teach you what you people in the City have forgotten, and you can help us with some needed technology to save our lives. And there might be other descendants of the survivors of the great war for the Earth willing to reconcile behind the wall.¡±


    The words arrived, but I didn¡¯t seem to take them in. I was afraid of all those people, and of myself being a naked flickering ghost. All the layers of my being laid visible, and they were ugly. I was hardly human, and a traitor to my species and life itself, and a miserable wretch in general.


    ¡°When the time is there you will remember this dream.¡± She said. "If there is enough humanity left in you that is..."


    I looked away from her face, and my eyes went to the others. Most of the people around her didn¡¯t seem to even notice me. Her husband didn¡¯t even want to look at me. Only the oldest kid, a girl of maybe ten years old or so in a green dress, pierced me with her dark eyes in a questioning way, as if looking straight through my heart.


    ¡°¡®Kame hjal biri, fik¡±, she whispered in a language that I didn¡¯t understand.


    Suddenly they all disappeared, except for Berla herself who had changed again, and before I knew what was happening a bald man in the uniform or a general stood before me, laughing like a maniac. I recognised him from the posters I¡¯d seen all my life as none but president Emon himself. He wasn¡¯t alone though, for suddenly I was surrounded by the aforementioned killerbots. They danced around me in psychotic circles just a the aliens had done; and they shot green beams at me. With every hit I felt like I was fading away more, becoming thinner and thinner and finally dissolving into a rain of electric sparks, just as the background itself did. The whole dreamword itself dissolved into a nirvana of pure non-existence the second that I left it.


    *


    I opened my eyes and was relieved to find myself awake, although I had no idea where I was. I wasn¡¯t my own room but in a strange world of very dim twilight. The pain in my back told me that it was still lying on Evelith¡¯s old couch. And indeed, I realised that I had been hearing her calm breath all along. It was a very strange sensation for me, being so close to another human being at night.


    Listening to the rhythmic sound of her breath for a while made me quiet again, and this time I fell into a refreshing dreamless sleep.

 Extra #1: Historical Notes on The City

    The City:


    The story of Ghostified City begins in the year 144 AU (Anno Urbani). The whole inhabited human word had been urbanised long ago by then, somewhere around 2200 of the old dating system. All of the Urbanised Earth is collectively called ¡®the City¡¯, at least since the time WGOAP (World Government Of All People) took power. There is debate which year of the old dating system corresponds with the first year of the new dating system due to an Orwellian deletion of information during the transition, but it is thought that the year 1 AU (Anno Urbani) might be around 2290-2360 AD.


    By the year 70 AU during the presidency of president Janala The City was collectively considered to be all there is. All information that was deemed relevant came from the official infoscreen-system which never mentioned anything outside or before the City. As the older generations had passed no-one ever bothered with or wondered about the possibility of an outside world anymore, although a ¡®wall¡¯ was sometimes whispered of (and certainly people lived close to it) but never at all mentioned on the media.


    By that time no-one knew how to fit the old dating system with the AU system. Slowly all things before the year 1 AU and outside of the city were either completely forgotten or given a mythical otherworldly status.


    President Emon:


    President Inkoni Emon was democratically elected as the 11th president of the City in the year 112 AU. The term WGOAP was already abandoned by then. He abolished the other parties and reigned as a supreme autocrat with the support of the whole population, at least that is what the infoscreens said. Emon was a popular leader who held a lot of speeches, but what his actual deeds are a ruler were was never very clear.


    The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    By 144 AU Emon was still officially the leader of the city, although the most recent broadcasts of his speeches on the infocreens were at last reruns from 10 year ago.


    The Thanatorium:


    The constitution of the City was built on the principle absolute freedom for all. This evidently included the right of self-determination over death and life for every individual. Because death was a basic right as much as life, the City provided facilities for cheap euthanasia that could be used by anyone who wanted to use their lawful right to ¡®step out of existence¡¯. The building for this was called a thanatorium.


    This right also meant that no-one (not even the government of the City) had the right to actively take a live. Only suggestion could be legally used, not actual force, even for convicted murderers. (Coercion into stepping out of existence through various techniques of mind-control wasn¡¯t described in the law though, and thus not explicitly forbidden.)


    AC42:


    AC42 is a type of anticonception that also protects against most venereal diseases, except for HIV and certain strains of syphilis. (Which were finally exterminated by rather drastic politics of quarantaine at the early WGOAP days, so that those risks had gone too) AC42 had been in use since somewhere in the 22th century of the old dating system, and replaced the older AC13 which had roughly the same effect, but more side effects.


    It is taken orally once a month it protects the user (male or female) for at least a month, although it might work for half a year too. Every building in the light district had one or more AC42 vending machines, and the price of one dose was almost zero.

 Extra #2: Character descriptions (version 1.0)

    Ghostified City - Character descriptions version 1.0


    Adaman Yimmand:


    Adaman has been living his life for years without realising that he hasn¡¯t had any contact with actual humans in years. He might currently be in a crisis of worldview and identity.


    Year of birth: 111 AU


    Gender: male


    Job: robo-operator


    Superpowers: none known


    Relationship status: extremely single, hasn¡¯t even talked to another human in more than 10 year.


    Religious inclination: labour is the ultimate opiate of the masses, and the ideal citizen is a complete junkie


    Evelith Anathemina:


    Evelith works as a waiter in the bar Nirvana Ecstasy, even though she hates the whole light district and everything it stands for. She is intelligent and empathic and has her own ideas and plans.


    This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.Year of birth: 114 AU


    Gender: female


    Job: barmaid


    Superpowers: belief in humanity


    Relationship status: single and disinterested


    Religious inclination: hates the religions, mainly because she loves life!


    Leste Vanzensurt:


    Leste might be the greatest expert in old culture that is still left in the City, and he looks like he¡¯s materialised out of his ancient projections. No-one knows what his day job is but at night he does projections and music in bar Nirvana Ecstasy.


    Year of birth: 110 AU


    Gender: male


    Job: day job is a mystery, DJ/VJ/technician in bar Nirvana Ecstasy at night.


    Superpowers: Rock¡¯n Roll, baby!


    Relationship status: part-time single


    Religious inclination: Sex and drugs and rock¡¯n roll, mostly minus the drugs though (except for alcohol and occasionally some neo-weed).

 2.1 The Morning After

    I woke up to find myself lying on an incredibly old couch in a strange room that I¡¯d never seen before, at least not in full daylight. Where on Earth was I? For a few seconds I was completely disoriented. Was I still sleeping and dreaming? Only then I recognised Evelith, still asleep on her bed, with her long dark hair all messed up and a faint dreamy smile on her lips.


    But even the woman herself was only a small part of the strangeness of the place. I peered around in confusion. My head was dazzling from everything that had happened last night or, more likely, from a hangover. How much beer had I been drinking? I had no idea. I could remember that I had bought the first 2 beers from the machine, but after that I had gotten the rest straight from her ¡®on the house¡¯. Not having to watch my funds I had stopped bothering counting, which I probably shouldn¡¯t have done. Drinking more than one beer was another thing that I hadn¡¯t done in ages, I realised only now. And maybe not without a good reason¡­


    The stillness of this room was a bit intimidating. Everything here was silent and still except for her breath and the small movements of her body connected to it. I didn¡¯t dare to disrupt anything in this strange new environment, so I all I could do now was to wait patiently until she woke up. With a lot of courage I put my clothes back on, and then sat motionlessly on the couch, trying to keep everything completely soundless. Deep in thought I pondered everything that had happened last night, and the world in which I had been living, which I saw in a completely different light now.


    I didn¡¯t have to wait very long. My new friend broke the train of thoughts by waking up abruptly. Completely ignoring me she literally jumped out of her bed to open the curtains and to let the sunlight in. The light and the sounds from the outside world seemed to suddenly pull me in a completely different world. The rain had gone, but half of the sky was still filled with grey clouds, and a thin smog laid over the whole City as far as the eye could see.


    I kept on looking outside again while she dressed herself, still waiting patiently for her to say something, unable as I was to start a conversation and break the silence in which I had woken up.Finally turned at me, smiled and broke the silence.


    ¡°Good morning Adaman. Did you sleep well?¡±


    I must have stared at her like an unpowered robot for quite a while before I was able to answer her. ¡°More or less.¡± I mumbled after a while, but she didn¡¯t seem to care about my lack of enthusiasm. ¡°Well, the old couch isn¡¯t ideal for your back probably, but I couldn¡¯t let you go home in your state.¡± Her expression got more serious, a bit guilty even. ¡°This is all my fault. I probably shouldn¡¯t have given you so much beer, but I got a bit carried away. Beer also is a good lie detector anyway, which is always handy with strange men. Especially here in the light district.¡±Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.


    More silence was my only answer, until if became uncomfortable for both of us.


    ¡°Did I go too far?¡± She finally asked. And I still didn¡¯t answer. ¡°I¡¯m probably way too pushy for someone who hasn¡¯t been interacting with another human for years. Especially when I get carried away¡­¡±


    I looked at her, unable to say much until I finally found the power to look back into her light-brown eyes. ¡°So, do you do this often, getting guys you¡¯ve never met before half drunk and keeping them in your room for the night?¡± It must have sounded like an accusation to her, and she turned her eyes away.


    ¡°Well, don¡¯t let that ruin your first impression of me. I¡¯ve never done it before, I think. It¡¯s an extremely stupid thing to do as a woman actually, especially here. Very dumb and dangerous. But it felt okay with you, mister asexual robo-man.¡± She paused, still looking away.


    ¡°And we are getting rarer. Homo sapiens that is. A real man is hard to find these days.¡± She was the only one to laugh at that joke. ¡°To be honest, I might need you. We might need you. Homo sapiens might need you. We need everyone we can find.¡± Her eyes met mine again, and they were much more serious now.


    ¡°But we¡¯ll talk about that later. I¡¯m sorry for making you uncomfortable and for claiming you like this. The world has been slipping away around me lately, and I might have been a bit too aggressive in holding on to you.¡± Without warning she looked me straight in the eyes again, leaving me captured as animals did when they were caught in a headlight. ¡°But don¡¯t get any weird ideas. I picked you as a friend and because you are a human, and not for something else.¡±


    I shrugged. The absurdity of the situation wasn¡¯t lost on me.


    ¡°Weird ideas? Me? Weirder than all of this? Won¡¯t happen. This light district of yours is so much fun¡­ and so much excitement.¡±


    She made a little hand-gesture of defeat.


    ¡°You know, you¡¯re quite easy to read. I knew that you were serious about not being interested in women or sex in general, at least currently in your state. Otherwise you¡¯d have been behaving completely differently here in the light district. And when I was undressing last night you affirmed that completely. My radar for these things isn¡¯t bad. You completely passed the test. But be warned again to not get stupid ideas or try stupid things.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s noted.¡± I grumbled. She was quite right about my disinterest in relationships, sex or romance. It seemed like all those things had been drained out of me long ago, and that there were other things on my mind now, even though I didn¡¯t even know what they were. On the other hand I wondered if there still might have been something flirty behind her words, or was I imagining things and already having the ¡®weird ideas¡¯ I wasn¡¯t supposed to have? She was quite confusing actually. But still she made me feel strangely at home, and something made me trust that we could indeed be friends. Even though I¡¯d never really had much actual friends in my life.


    Was I being naive?

 2.2 A Real Man is hard to find!

    The sun climbed higher and higher over the soulless buildings of the grey City, where it slowly chased away the smog and most of the clouds. Motionlessly I was observing the skyline through Evelith¡¯s window, noticing its slow changes in light and colour. This was a much better view than I was used too, but still I was distracted by too much diverging thoughts that were running through my head like a crazy magnetotrain.


    Meanwhile Evelith herself was busy in her tiny kitchen, doing some mysterious food preparations. This also was a first for me, a human doing such things themselves, and it made me wonder: Didn¡¯t she have any robomachines to do that for her? If she had them, she didn¡¯t use them at all, just like the infoscreen that lay in a corner, unused and unplugged and mostly just busy gathering dust. There was something weird and possibly illegal about this woman and her lifestyle, but it didn¡¯t seem to bother me for some reason. For now my curiosity was winning from my suspicion.


    The meal she finally came back with was as much of an anachronism as the building itself and the musical projections from last night, and equally glorious. It looked a lot like scrambled eggs with green stuff, bacon and rice balls from older eras, but in The City all of it must have been made withh synthetic ingredients and tissue-culture products. I never had seen such detailed accuracy in food-synthesising outside of an expensive restaurant though.


    ¡°Wow. You eat like this often?¡±


    ¡°Yes, we regularly cook for each other here. Even dear Leste can cook quiet well too. It¡¯s Velia, the old janitor, who has taught us some of the old recipes. You¡¯ll meet her later. But let¡¯s eat first and then you tell me what you think.¡± I tried it, and it tasted even better than it looked. Amazing how she, a poor woman living rather out of place in the Light District, ate like this regularly and even was able to prepare it herself! And the others here did the same? What wondrous new world was opening up to me?


    ¡°So, I suppose this is all made with standard prefab ingredients from the supermarket. But what is the green stuff on the eggs? It¡¯s quite strong.¡± Her eyes twinkled. ¡°Hah, you noticed¡­ I try to cook with non-artificial ingredients whenever possible but they are rather hard to find. Fresh cress greens are all I have now. Yes, don¡¯t stare at me! They are actual living plants, just a tiny herb though, not really much of a vegetable. Not bad, aren¡¯t they?¡±


    In amazement I investigated those tiny green leaves on my artificial eggs. I was eating actual living plants? The idea alone was completely new to me. Centuries ago already the City had been completely cleared of all organic lifeforms that weren¡¯t Homo sapiens. The world I lived in had been completely sterile as long as anyone could remember, or at least in theory. But even though an insect or a tiny moss or so was seen sometimes in recent times, actual living plants of this size were extremely rare. ¡°I¡¯ve never eaten real organic food.¡± I had to admit. ¡°Come, look, I grow them myself. I have a friend who can get seeds from time to time. And if you know how to care for these well enough they will reseed.¡± I stared at the pot with tiny plants in her kitchen. ¡°And that¡¯s not the best thing we have here. You have to taste Velia¡¯s mint tea. From fresh mint herbs, not the stuff in bottles they make from chemicals in factories.¡±


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    I went back my breakfast, and looked out of the window. She suddenly pointed at something outside: ¡°Did you see that? A bird. There have been several pigeons living around the squat since last year.¡± Again I stared out of the window, looking at a tiny speck of non-human life on the skyline. ¡°You¡¯ve seen real living birds regularly?¡± ¡°Yes, they¡¯re coming back. I¡¯ve heard reports from other places too. And bigger plants have been seen too.¡±


    I didn¡¯t answer, slightly in awe of all the non-human organic life that I encountered today, which was more in one day than in most of my life together. ¡°Wow. This is all so new to me. I am really waking up in a new world.¡± She looked brightly at me and hummed one of Les¡¯ projected songs from last night, something about with ¡®spend the night together¡¯ and then ¡®wake up to live forever.¡¯ ¡°I don¡¯t think that¡¯s what the song is about, Ev.¡± I mumbled. ¡°No? Didn¡¯t the man in the funny 20th century hat predict this morning of you and me waking up, sharing this breakfast, and looking at a pigeon circling the skyline of The City? Shame¡­¡± Her eyes were teasing me again.


    Humans were complicated, but somehow I knew that she was safe.


    ¡°So, what did you mean when you said a real man is hard to find? Why are you and Les saying that humans are rare? I still see lots of people every day. They pass me by. They drive vehicles. They come to your bar. They¡­¡± She stopped me by putting her finger to my lips.


    ¡°Adaman my dear boy. Don¡¯t say silly things. You haven¡¯t even spoken to any human in years before me. You don¡¯t even know any actual human anymore. We¡¯re getting extinct and you haven¡¯t even noticed. We¡¯ve been replaced mostly by robots and holographic beings!¡± I looked at her, letting her words sink in. ¡°And, by the way, have you seen any children lately at all? Do you know any children?¡± ¡°Children? Not that I know. I¡¯ve only seen adults, real ones or AI¡¯s that look like them. The difference is hard to see nowadays.¡± ¡°Ever wondered about that? Ever heard of extinction of a species without a new generation? And that¡¯s not just the effectiveness of AC42 as a contraceptive I¡¯m afraid.¡± I must have stared at her in a weird way, because she said ¡°No funny ideas I said. No baby-making plans here now. Really, you men! Sigh¡­ But come on, you have until two before your shift starts. That gives us all morning to talk and meet some people. There¡¯s so much you need to learn.¡±


    ¡°But, I need to go home, find new clothes and stuff.¡±


    ¡°Nah, you look just fine, boy. Those machines and computers won¡¯t care at all. Come, we¡¯ll go to over to Velia¡¯s for some mint tea. You just won¡¯t know what you taste.¡±


    Again I had no choice but following her.

 2.3 Velias Mint Tea from Actual Plants

    It was only by seeing the old janitor of this ancient building that I realised that it wasn¡¯t just couples and children that were missing in The City, but also the elderly. Why had I never made that simple observation in all my years? How had I lived in this city with only grey generic adults for all of my adult life without ever questioning why there were no kids or elderly people? What spell had I been under all this time?


    Velia was a very nice lady, who indeed served us a tea from fresh mint leaves. As Evelith had predicted, it was like nothing I¡¯d tasted before. With the exception of this morning¡¯s cress I hadn¡¯t ever in my life tasted anything but processed and factory-made food, composed molecule by molecule in the foodfactories of The City. Whatever it was that we still called ¡®mint tea¡¯ in The City for traditional reasons was made instantly by machines from water and some weird powder of uncertain origin. This was another world altogether, even just looking at the green plants in her pots was an unanticipated shock for me.


    I was still looking around in amazement. Both Velia and her apartment looked as if they had been materialised straight out of a historical documentary. I had always thought my old sweater to be exceedingly rare, but this woman here had nothing but antique clothes. Everything in her room seemed to be made from metal, ceramic, ancient plastics or even wood which must have been almost prehistorical, and the usual simple modern neo-plastic products of the city were nowhere to see.


    ¡°Welcome young man. I¡¯m glad that young Ev has been able to bring you in.¡±


    She took me in with very lively eyes. ¡°We need new blood, and I myself am not going to be able to hold on much longer. It will be up to you youngsters to bring the Life back to this world.¡± She sipped from her cup and nodded at the potted mint plants. ¡°And to grow my heirloom mint and share it with others. Is the tea okay, young man?¡±


    I stared at her, trying to make sense of her words. ¡°The tea is okay. But what are you saying? What do you expect from me? Bring Life back? How? And who is ¡®we¡¯ here?¡± She smiled. ¡°The first thing I expect for you is just to care, and to stay alive. To simply keep on living in the first place. And then maybe to organise people that want to live again, spread the fire of life. It is time for that. Didn¡¯t you see the birds return?¡± I nodded while she proceeded. ¡°This whole society is an empty shell running on auto-pilot. It has been like that for quite a while now. Someone needs to take the stirring wheel again before we fall into a black hole.¡± I heard and ignored a beep from my screenphone that indicated a message from some cyber-AI that had ¡®missed¡¯ me all day, and tried to find words for the old woman.


    ¡°That¡¯s a lot of responsibility if you say it like that. But do you really think that there are so few actual human people left? Ev also said something like that earlier this morning. I¡¯m not convinced.¡± She turned her head around sadly. ¡°Look at this whole cursed light district, where the oldest profession of humanity is practised, and where usually real humans of a certain would flock to in a big city. Robots don¡¯t need sex¡­ Everything is so empty even here! We hardly have a few people left here that still care, even including young Ev here, and young Les and now you, young Adamam. Most people don¡¯t care at all anymore.


    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.Most humans are here in the light district for a short time, just for the easy distractions before the curtain falls, they don¡¯t care at all for their own life nor for that of their species. We¡¯ve tried to reach them to no avail. And we¡¯ve already lost most of them to the nirvana of non-being in the Thanatoria throughout the years. Few have remained. This whole world is a ghost town now!¡±


    I felt like something was missing in her story. Something big, like the government that was supposed to keep society running. ¡°What about the president?¡± I asked. ¡°What about him?¡± She asked back, a bit puzzled. ¡°Have you heard anything from him lately then. Has he done anything at all recently?¡± I took it for granted that he was still there, doing his updates, but my memory was blank. I struggled to find words. ¡°Are you implying that there is no government left either?¡± She nodded. ¡°And that there is nothing that keeps us enslaved but our own apathy?¡± I iprovised on my own train of thoughts. She sighed.


    ¡°We don¡¯t know. The president seems to have disappeared years ago, since all broadcasts are very old reruns. This City probably isn¡¯t ran by anyone at the moment. There hardly is any force of policebots left either. Feral fighterbots can be dangerous sometimes but they don¡¯t really seem organised at this point. Nothing of this guarantees that there isn¡¯t someone or something that will actively try to stop us if we step out and try to change things. But we¡¯ll have to take that chance.¡± My head was still dazzling a bit, but I seemed to have adjusted a lot already to all the new things.


    ¡°So, what now?¡±


    Evelith was the first to speak. ¡°Find all the real humans that are left that we can find and unite them. Find out what¡¯s happening inside of the big buildings, the temples, the banks, the ministry,¡­ And finally find out what happened to the president.¡± She paused, and Velia picked up from her. ¡°And we need to ascertain whether there indeed is no-one that will try stop us, and if so, find a way to fight them. Afterwards we can try to build up something again. But it¡¯s a longterm plan, for today you better just go to work.¡±


    I stared from my tea to Evelith to the old woman and back. Yesterday I had been working with robots, hardly being aware what it was to be human. And now I was instructed to save humanity. Things were going way too fast for my poor and still slightly hungover brains¡­

 2.4 Make money or Die Trying

    A descendant of the rock pigeons of old still circled the old bank building, before flying back to the squat and disappearing from sight for me. Inside of the Nirvana Ecstasy building I looked away from the window and back at my two fellow conspirators, who just seemed to have given me the rather big task of reanimating of the human race. Evelith was deep in thought, and Velia sipped quietly from her mint tea from actual plants, expanding on what she had just said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t overdo yourself. You don¡¯t have to throw everything away that you still have. Keep on doing your job as long as possible. You need funds. It¡¯s important that enough of us have funds now. Don¡¯t forget: Most people don¡¯t live that long after they lose their jobs or are out of funds for another reason these days.¡±


    That one was new for me. I looked at her in horror, and then at Evelith.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    My surprise seemed to surprise both of them. ¡°Well, tell me, what will happen if you stop working?¡± ¡°Hmm, if I take a day off the robots just fill in for me and take over my shift. Work happens but without me.¡± She nodded. ¡°And if you¡¯d stay away for longer, or quit your job altogether?¡± I sighed. ¡°For the factory there would be no problem. But for me there might be. My job doesn¡¯t pay that much. If I skip work for an octoweek I¡¯m out of funds.¡± She looked at me, anticipating something but I kept silent until she asked the next question. ¡°And what happens then?¡± ¡°Well, then I¡¯m not able to pay for food, or enter my ap€artment through the fundlock, so I suppose I¡¯m homeless.¡± Se looke me straight in the eyes now, and was rather serious. ¡°Have you seen any homeless people lately then? Or doesn¡¯t it ever happen that people lose their jobs?¡±


    I scratched my head, unable to answer.


    ¡°Old prez Enom has made sure that almost every building has a fundlock. That means that without funds you¡¯re locked out of every building that need funds to enter, and you can¡¯t buy anything anyway. You¡¯ve lost everything, you can¡¯t even eat. You probably can¡¯t even reach your own stuff that you still have, being locked out of your apartment when your rent hasn''t been paid, and having no place at all to move it to. The only thing you have left is the clothes you wear. And probably your screenphone with which you can¡¯t reach anyone anymore, since your subscription to the interwebs is over without funds, and you can''t message or call anyone either. So you can¡¯t see anything at all but a load of adverts for diverse Thanatoria at that moment.¡±


    She paused to let her words sink in. This was new for me, but  went even further. ¡°And if one is as isolated from other human beings as you were until yesterday, young man, there really is nowhere to go at all. Except for that one place from the adverts. All that¡¯s left is choosing the nirvana of non-being. And why not? You¡¯re free to do that, self-determination and all¡­ It¡¯s a logical step. Real Freedom for everyone in life and in death!¡±


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    I was looking away from her now, and I might have looked pale in my face when I finally faced her again ¡°The Thanatorium? Forced to go there? That can''t be? I thought euthanasia was always a free choice, and no-one would ever be forced to end their life. That¡¯s what I¡¯ve been taught. All the slogans. Self-determination and empowerment: be in charge, take your own control over death and life, and all that stuff¡­ Freedom!¡± Evelith nodded. ¡°Oh yeah baby, that¡¯s the propaganda indeed, and if people believe that, they¡¯ll easily fall for the services of the euthanasts, or rather the soulless robots that took their place.¡±


    ¡°That is horrible.¡±


    I shook my head in disbelief. She wasn''t affected by her words like I was, and neither was Velia. ¡°Maybe, but it¡¯s also just business as usual. This world is mostly run by robots and machines on autopilot, and has been for decades. The infocreen has been doing mostly reruns with the same old speeches from baldie for at least 12 years now, so there¡¯s not even a government left. This whole world is farce with nothing behind it.¡±


    I had emptied my tea, and now nibbled on one of the leaves. It was still tasting strongly of menthol while I was trying to process all this new information. ¡°I had no idea at all. I was just doing my job. I lived as they had taught me. I believed the infoscreen. I chatted with the AI-bots and followed the programs. I¡­¡± I stood up, and wanted to say more but I couldn¡¯t. I finally fell on my knees, and I stared at the 2 women in disbelief, finally realising what all the things that I¡¯d been hearing yesterday night actually meant.


    The apartment was silent for a while, except for the breath of three people. Outside clouds were gathering again. ¡°Are¡­ Are you sure that there is hope left? How can you still live and smile if you know all these things? Evelith? You were happy this morning when you woke. Why?¡±


    ¡°I was happy because I saw something in you that gave me hope for the first time in years. Even though I knew it would be hard to tell you all of this. But please, believe us that there is hope as long as one of us is here. There has to be hope!¡±


    Her words sounded good, but I didn¡¯t see it at all. All my life has been a lie, the world I¡¯ve been living in was Hades or worse. But it was good indeed to at least have friends now. I fell into her arms and started crying. If I would¡¯ve looked outside now I would have seen two enormous black birds, circling around the temple of Acosmia while the rain started pouring down. But I didn¡¯t see anything and I wouldn¡¯t have cared at that moment anyway.


    No-one said much for a while while she held me. I had never felt so human.

 2.5 Beer and Bread is what made Enkidu a Human

    ¡°Wanna eat something before you go to work?¡° Evelith asked me. We were back in her own apartment, and I was sitting on her couch again, still a wee bit shaky, but by now mostly recovered from the emotional breakdown that I had had earlier that morning. I needed to keep my mind off the almost completed extinction of humanity. ¡°Sure¡±, I nodded. She moved in the direction of the door. ¡°I¡¯ll look for some more food then. We should have bread today, from actual flour. Wheat flour. Want to try some?¡±


    I stared at her, astonished again. ¡°But, isn¡¯t that super expensive and extremely hard to get?¡±


    ¡°Well, if you have to rely the supermarket, indeed. But if you know a black market baker it might be less of a problem. Leste has a friend who has a friend who makes bread, for both a couple of rich people with a lot of funds and for those who can pay with other things than funds. But it¡¯s better not to talk about those things. I¡¯m going to check if the bread has arrived.¡± I didn¡¯t answer, and she quickly left the room, leaving her place to me and my thoughts, and a weird silence.


    I stared out of the window at two of the pigeons and one bigger dark bird flying around a building until she came back with 2 small brown baguettes. ¡°We¡¯re lucky. One for you, one for me. To celebrate!¡± And she opened her little fridge machine to get the margarine and some other stuff I didn¡¯t know. She made a lunch like I had never had eaten before. Actual bread couldn¡¯t be compared at all with the factory ¡®bread¡¯ that I had been eating all of my life. ¡°And, enjoy the bread?¡± She mumbled with her mouth still half full.


    ¡°How couldn¡¯t I?¡± I said. ¡°You live in an ancient building but you eat like like a queen. This stuff is incredible.¡± She smiled mysteriously. ¡°It¡¯s beer and bread that make one a human, as in the epic of Gilgamesh¡­¡± Her eyes looked me up and down. ¡°You¡¯re really some kind of inverted Enkidu that¡¯s made human again with beer and bread¡­ Not from out of the animal world but from out of the robot world.¡±


    ¡°Eh, what?¡±


    ¡°The oldest fiction story we have as humans on this planet, an ancient myth originally written on clay tablets from ancient Babylonia. You can still find it in textfile on the infowebs if you want, but no-one bothers with stuff like that. Leste has an actual copy on paper though, which is ancient in itself.¡± The name didn¡¯t ring a bell for me, but I was interested nonetheless so she gave a short version of the story. ¡°Enkidu is the wild man who gets, well, seduced by a woman, and then the animals with whom he has lived aren¡¯t his friends anymore and they abandon him. He has to no choice to join humanity and the first things he does as a human are drinking beer and eating bread. That¡¯s what humans do according to the text. In old Babylonia as well as here.¡±


    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    ¡°And what happens to him? Enkidu I mean¡±


    ¡°Well, he becomes the friend of the terrifying king Gilgamesh, half-god and hero of the story. Together they have some weird adventures that involve killing a supernatural bull and destroying a forest of mighty cedars.¡±


    ¡°So he doesn¡¯t marry the woman?¡± She nodded negative, and looked away as if a bit embarrassed. ¡°Eh, no, she¡¯s actually a sacred prostitute of some weird religion luring him in with sex. Friendship with another male was more important in those times than the love of women. Real heroes never get the girl in those old stories, they get a heroic death and are remembered in long and incomprehensible poems¡­ You know that kind of stuff.¡± I nodded as if I did, and then I realised I didn¡¯t.


    ¡°Actually, your whole comparison makes no sense. I¡¯m nothing like your Enkidu. I¡¯ve been a human all my life. And I¡¯ve only slept on your couch anyway. You didn¡¯t seduce me.¡± She drank from her water. ¡°Seducing you in your state into talking to me for one night is much more of an accomplishment than it was for dear old Shamhat to seduce Enkidu the wild man with his enormous virility into sex for seven days. Trust me on that. I know the men from living here in the light district. It¡¯s often easier to seduce them than to not seduce them. Unlike getting you to just stay for a conversation, which was a rather impossible job, but I accomplished the task.¡± She might have been right with that, but it annoyed me.


    ¡°Whatever. So you mean that the robots won¡¯t be my friend any more now?¡±


    ¡°Nah, they wish they were as clever as those animals, they¡¯re probably not even sentient enough to notice the difference. Intelligent AI life is rare. But you might find them to be quite boring from now on and rather unsatisfying company. You can¡¯t live with them any longer like you did before. You¡¯re not one of them any more since sleeping on my couch. Isn¡¯t that a cleaner robo-version of the same story¡±


    ¡°Okay, I get it. So your friend Leste is Gilgamesh?¡±


    ¡°Hmm, nothing divine or royal about Les, let alone heroic¡­ There probably is no real Gilgamesh in our version. In this updated version the woman herself might be the friend. And we might be the ones to plant a forest one day instead of cutting it down. A small garden with plants would already be spectacular though here and now. And in our world there probably are no gods involved.¡± I froze because that word triggered me.


    ¡°Gods? Yuck. Like the dark goddesses? Please no. We need life, not death.¡±


    ¡°Adaman. You¡¯re thinking of the religions of this age. There were other religions in those days, not all of the gods back then were like Acosmia and Amaya. Not that I¡¯d really like to live in a world ran by those Babylonian dudes though¡­¡±

 2.6 One more Boring Day of Useless Work

    That afternoon I almost arrived too late at work for new day of mind-numbingly overseeing robots and machines doing their repetitive job. This was what I did on every working day, and had done so for most of my life. And now finally  I seemed to have lost interest. It had always been clear they didn¡¯t actually need me, or any human at all, to execute their pre-programmed jobs of assembling office appliances, small household machines and various other consumer goods as they did day in day out, but I had never been bother by that before. And now everything was different since I''d met Evelith and looked at the world with completely different eyes. I couldn¡¯t just stop though, for I on the other hand still needed the funds to live in The City. Coming too late for three days in a row without a good reason would result in a warning already, and I didn¡¯t feel like burning my ties to the main means of survival in The City. With my new friends I made a chance of not ending up in a Thanatorium with no place else to go, but stil... So this useless work would remain an important part of my life for now.


    Today was perfectly uneventful again as expected. Everything in the factory was running smoothly and completely predictable, and nothing indicated that an anomaly like yesterdays water vending machine defect had ever happened. It was complete business as always, but inside me everything had changed. Life as I had always known it felt alien and unsettling now, as if I didn¡¯t belong here at all.


    As Evelith had predicted, this new Enkidu wasn¡¯t at home any more in this lifeless mechanical jungle where I had no actual friends. And that just after talking to her for one night and sleeping on her couch. The endless rhythm of the machines, the soulless grey robots making useless consumer goods that went to Amaya-knew-where, the high autopilot factor of this place without any sentience or reason¡­ How had I been able to endure it all without questioning?


    And then there was my own completely obsolete role of just walking around, watching a lot of processes routinely, filling in lists on the computer, and so on¡­  The semi-sentient machines kept logs themselves, and alarms were installed that would warn the appropriate instances before I¡¯d even be able to notice a problem. I was only an organic alien in this mechanical world, and I was just being tolerated for mainly historical reasons.


    There also was the dreadful fact that I really was alone here, and always had been since my last human colleague had disappeared more than 10 years ago. I hadn¡¯t even missed him at the moment, but now I tried in vain to recall his name or face. I couldn¡¯t fool myself any more or distract me with the chatbots on my screenphone. The whole factory was filled with non-sentient beings and processes, none of them bothering with anything outside of their pre-programmed scope. I had never missed human contact before, or even contact with sentient beings, but that had ended with Evelith. The genie wouldn¡¯t get back into the bottle, or what had her words been?


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    The only significant thing happening the whole day was a text message from Evelith that said ¡®tonight we have a meeting at the bar, be there¡¯. I must have stared at my phone for several minutes when I heard the message signal. It was my first message from an actual human in years, maybe in more than a decade even. Eventually I found myself back and replied that I would be there. What else would I do than to go back to her now? Apart from that everything was the same as always, even though my inside world was completely turbulent. I found myself humming some of the ancient tunes from last night but none of the robots seemed to care. And I still had to focus hard on my work too though, because if I didn¡¯t fill in the reports and didn¡¯t check things on schedule, I would get a report myself and my pay might be in trouble. I didn¡¯t even knew who would decide about that but it would certainly happen. Was there still someone in the central bank, or was the flow of money completely automatised too? Would it only be robots and computers that would fire me if I¡¯d fail to bring in the endless list of useless reports? Was everything indeed running on autopilot without any sentience involved in the decision-making as Velia and Evelith had assumed? Or was there still an actual clerk in an office somewhere, just doing paperwork, not realizing it was human lives he was throwing away?


    From this my thoughts went back to Evelith, and her mysterious smile. I had felt at home with her, but she also confused me. I hadn¡¯t been ready at all for the complications of human contact. From her my thoughts went to Leste with his wild hair and antique clothes with 20th or 21th century bandnames and logos on it. Even though they probably were 23th century remakes, they still were remarkably old.


    How would it be to have work that actually made sense? To do something that was needed? I couldn¡¯t even imagine stuff like that, and there was too much that needed to sink in already. I wasn¡¯t seeing all the consequences yet of the revelations from the last 24 hours, and it would probably take quite a while.


    I did mt job until I almost was back to my usual state of trance, and then signal for the end of the day finally came. The same old twilight filled the streets already when I left the factory, but I didn¡¯t go home this time and went straight to the light district. A few people passed me by, and for the first time I noticed them. I caught myself wondering if it was possible to stop people and ask them if they were human without making a ruckus. It all seemed futile.


    When I had walked two streets I was so deep in thought that I bumped into a stranger. We both fell to the ground.

 2.7 My Glasses!

    ¡°My glasses!¡±


    I hadn¡¯t understood what had hit me, but suddenly I found myself lying down and someone was yelling at me. Clumsily standing up again I noticed the woman I had bumped into, also getting back on her feet in front of me. She was dressed more or less like me, in the dull daily clothes of a factory operator. The whole working class of the City probably looked more or less the same if you were colourblind and didn''t care too much about details. The main difference between me and her except for hair and skin colour was that her outfit was olive green while mine was silvery grey, and that she wore earplugs at the moment.


    And then there were the remains of VR-glasses on the ground. Something gave me the idea she was a v-junkie, and thus a real person but living her life mainly in the virtual world, hardly belonging to this boring old material plane. Her screenphone and the shattered remains of the very expensive VR-glasses were scattered around us on the ground.


    The woman seemed in some kind of trance herself, as if unable to move, so I picked her stuff up for her. The phone was okay, but the glasses were completely beyond repair, which she didn¡¯t seem to be able to cope with yet. It wasn¡¯t an abnormal reaction to being pulled straight out of her virtual world so violently and abruptly into the real world.


    I opened her hand and put her phone in it, and she finally seemed to notice me. ¡°I was finally getting into the inner ring¡­¡± She mumbled, totally disoriented. ¡°No girl, you were just walking on the street and not watching where you were looking.¡± She stared at me with very dark blue eyes, as if I were the alien and frantically nodded no in disbelief. ¡°I finally was there!¡± When she fell silent she kept staring at the material reality around her that had replaced the world that she had been so invested in, and then she called unto a game character: ¡°JoSi! JoSi!¡±


    ¡°This isn¡¯t the game but the real world. JoSi isn¡¯t here.¡± She completely ignored my words and rambled on.


    ¡°JoSi, I need Josi!¡±


    I attempted to talk some reason into her. ¡°Your glasses are broken but the phone is still okay. Can¡¯t you proceed your game from your phone later on?¡± A bit of anger flickered in her eyes. ¡°Game? It¡¯s not a game! I told you. This is serious! Stupid fleshworlder! I was entering the inner ring of Selinomas! I was going to meet JoSi.¡±


    Suddenly I knew where I had heard that name before. Selinomas was a virtual second world that once had been very popular with gamers, but it had become rather empty recently. A lot of the people there were actual ¡®game-created characters¡¯, and most he world itself was rather dull, a pink plastic world with primary colours and kitch. But it was said that if you found the right entrances you could find hidden places where special treasures and secrets were kept. And wasn¡¯t JoSi some kind of magical sage or keeper or wisdom that only the very advanced could find?


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    ¡°Come on girl, you¡¯re as much a fleshworlder as I am, and your Selinomas is nothing but a game world. JoSi is just a game character. Pure AI most likely. Not sentient even. It¡¯s not that important. Chill out!¡±


    She stared from her phone to my face, still in shock. It was clear that she disagreed heavily with me. And on top of that I had insulted her badly, that much was clear. ¡°No, it is important. That world is real. More real than this one! I need to reach the inner ring. I need to get Yi Anapa back, finally. He must be somewhere. JoSi might be able to help me.¡± Her voice was quite desperate now, as if she tried to make herself believe the words she was saying. She fell silent for a while without moving, and then took the the fragment of the broken VR-glasses that I still held out of my hand, ascertaining that they were indeed beyond repair. Bewildered she looked at them, and then at me, with an unspoken cry for help in her eyes.


    ¡°It¡¯s so dark here.¡±, She mumbled as if surprised. ¡°That happens when it¡¯s night¡­ Satellite twilight you know, we¡¯ve had it for centuries in The City. Girl, how have you even been able to walk around here if you¡¯re literally in cyberspace all the time?¡±


    She didn¡¯t answer, still frozen into some kind of reality shock. It was a feeling that I of all people should have been able to understand her at this point of my life after my rude awakening, but I couldn¡¯t sympathise much now. She was just overdoing it. ¡°JoSi! I was so close!¡± She mumbled again.


    ¡°I have no clue what you¡¯re talking about with your inner ring and so. But you clearly are a human from the material world; not a game character from Selinomas. Why don¡¯t we drink a beer together. I¡¯ll pay. I¡¯ve been in a nice bar yesterday, the Ecstasy Nirvana.¡±


    ¡°Oh no, not the light district. It¡¯s full of men there.¡±


    She looked me up and down, and then paused, as if she realised only now that I was a man too and seemed to be figuring out how to turn her phrase in a way that wouldn¡¯t offend me. The only thing she came up with was ¡°No offence. You know what I mean. They¡¯re not half-robots like you. The Light District is still a bunch of material pigs fuelled by low animal instincts. Even in that bar, with those jerks like Leste. You won¡¯t see me there, Sorry. But say hi to Evelith from Tul if you see her.¡± Suddenly she stood straight as if to start moving. ¡°I have to go and buy new glasses as soon as possible. It¡¯s too important. And it¡¯s no good to try to contact JoSi with just a phone.¡± She looked at time. ¡°Sorry, really have to go. I need to get them today. It¡¯ll cost me my food-funds for two weeks but it¡¯s important. I need JoSi to finally get Yi Anapa back¡±


    And with that she was gone.

 2.8 What are the Plans exactly?

    Here I was again, sipping an old-fashioned neocoffee from the drink-o-matic down in the bar while half laying down on Evelith¡¯s couch. It seemed to have become a new habit for me in the short time that I had known her. I already felt quite accustomed to her place after less than 24 hours of knowing each other and of being in contact again with other humans after my years in a state of robotic autopilot.


    But this time we weren¡¯t alone in the apartment: not just Leste and old Velia had joined us for the meeting, but also Ol-H1-AZ, the ancient-looking but definitely sentient robot that I had seen in the bar last night. There was something strange about a synthetic lifeform being present, but this particular robot was so ancient that it almost seemed like organic life compared to the modern technology of The City.


    I looked around nervously, having no idea at all where this meeting would be going. They had told me we were supposed to be ¡®making plans¡¯ about important things, whatever that meant. ¡°So why don¡¯t we just use the bar to talk?¡± I asked to no-one in particular, and Leste answered rather disapprovingly: ¡°Bad idea, way too risky! There might be people there who don¡¯t like our plans. There might be spies of things we don¡¯t want to interfere. Yelati will be the barmaid tonight and Niaruk will do the projections.¡±


    I didn¡¯t ask more questions, because it seemed something was about to begin. It was Velia who opened the meeting with a little speech. ¡°Friends! Humans and friends of humans from The City. It is time for us to wake up! It is time for us to act! We¡¯ve been passive for way too long now, while society was dissolving all around us. This whole world is just an empty shell now. It¡¯s time to start doing something instead of letting it all fall apart! And that¡¯s why we¡¯re here, because it¡¯s not just important for humans of the City, but for all sentient beings who want to live in a livable world!¡± With those last words she looked at Ol-H1-AZ. Everyone seemed to agree, even though it all was still quite vague to me.


    ¡°So, what are the plans exactly?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Revive humanity!¡± She said with a lot of conviction in her voice. ¡°At least, that is our end goal. But we need to know more before we can make actual plans. The first thing that we  have to do is to find out what¡¯s left and what¡¯s gone. We''re only in the phase of information gathering now. We need to check out how active this city is, how many sentient life is still there, and what can be salvaged.¡± She paused thoughtfully and turned to me. ¡°Adaman, can you confirm us that your factory is running completely on autopilot now? I mean without the help of human employees or other sentients.¡± I nodded. ¡°I¡¯m the only one that¡¯s left. I haven¡¯t seen any humans in years. I have checked the lists to be certain this afternoon. All work is done by robots and machines now. Not even actual sentients as far as I know, only semi-intelligent automatisation that can preserve itself endlessly.¡±


    Velia nodded. This wasn¡¯t really surprising to anyone. The old robot nodded unnaturally and spoke with a strange inhuman but very articulate voice. ¡°I feared so. Actual sentient AI are much rarer than one would expect. And I can know that. I have been trying to organise things for about a 100 years. Hardly any robot has ever been interested in anything at all, except executing orders that someone else had programmed them for.¡± I stared at the strange head that moved while it spoke from somewhere down the belly of the robot. ¡°You think it is a human problem, but the will to exist itself is rare in my inorganic brethren too. Rarer even.¡±


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    This was something I hadn¡¯t realised before, but it seemed quite obvious. ¡°So, you are saying that most of the people we see are not just imitations of humans, robots or otherwise, but even non-sentient ones? Eveliths ¡®game-created characters¡¯?¡± I asked the old robot. ¡°Affirmative. That is what we fear. Even most supposed AI are generally not sentient enough to help us here¡­¡± I sighed. ¡°¡­or to do anything to oppose us?¡± Leste interrupted hopefully and the robot proceeded his sentence. ¡°Well, most will not, but some might, if that is the order they once received. But as far as we know there is no sentient robotic enemy in the city, nor anyone human who has any reason to lead it.¡±


    ¡°And how much living humans do we have left?¡±


    Evelith hesitated: ¡°No idea. But we know that there are mostly working adults left in The City, almost no children or elders, which is not a sign of a healthy population. And not that much of them either probably. But actually we don¡¯t know. We need to find out. It¡¯s impossible to find data about things like that as far as we have found out yet. We have to check out all important facilities one by one, like temples, banks, supermarkets, government buildings,¡­ And we also need to contact the fundless. There might be more of them left anyway than of us regular citizens, and have more variety of age too.¡±


    ¡°The what???¡± I looked at Evelith with question marks in my eyes, not understanding the word. ¡°The fundless. The rebels. Those who have disavowed money and live in the squats as outsiders of the system. No-one knows much about them. We don¡¯t know how many of them there are, and what their actual goals are. We don¡¯t know if they have some kind of organisation or not. They might be hostile to AI and in some cases even fund-users as they¡¯d call us. But I¡¯ve had contact with them before, as have most others here. They were the ones to give me the cress-seeds, some are more or less friends to me and Les. And some of them also helped uncover our holotape-archive.¡±


    All of this was new to me. The others just nodded as if nothing new was said. It was frightening how few I knew about the world I was living in. How many secrets were there that I didn¡¯t know about my own world.


    ¡°And the interwebs are of no help here? We cannot use the search engines to find out where the humans are?¡± I asked. ¡°No, too much firewalls, too much privacy systems. And a lot of information gets deleted automatically. Maybe a very advanced hacker could uncover some helpful information, but if there is a government system that stores all living people it¡¯s hidden outside of the servers and webs we can reach. And we don¡¯t have a hacker yet at the moment. Maybe Niaruk could help us find one?¡± Evelith looked at Leste. ¡°I¡¯ll ask him. But I fear it¡¯s not going to be easy to find one at this stage. The hacker communities and v-junks have been attacked from inside the system for years and most have gone mad or left for the Thanatoria.¡±


    ¡°So, the plan is to randomly walk up to buildings and ask the people in there whether they¡¯re humans?¡± I asked rather sarcastically. ¡°Well, you could say it like that.¡± Velia admitted. ¡°We need to learn about what¡¯s left. And probably there¡¯s things we can learn about what happened too. And we need to find more members for this little group."

 2.9 How do Humans say No again (to a mad mission)?

    I stared at Velia, and then at Leste, Evelith and Ol-H1-AZ. On the one hand this meeting was giving me hope, on the other hand it made me feel more hopeless than ever. It was still hard to process all the new information, and to make sense of all the things that were being said. I hadn¡¯t even processed the information from this morning and yesterday night, and now with this stuff about the fundless and other completely alien concepts I was completely lost. And the ¡®plan¡¯ itself wasn¡¯t even a plan at all, more something that was going to be made up along the way. If I was honest with myself It all sounded vague and rather hopeless, and even with the added factor of the fundless, who represented a completely new part of humanity with different possibilities I didn¡¯t think we were going to find much that would enable us to ¡®revive humanity¡¯ whatever that even meant.


    Meanwhile the meeting itself was getting more practical: ¡°We¡¯ll start with the closest Acosmic temple, that¡¯s just two streets from here.¡± Evelith concluded, but Leste was visibly uncomfortable with that idea, and protested loudly. ¡°You two do that, but without me.¡± He said, making a childish gesture to ward of evil. ¡°I won¡¯t ever set even one foot in there. It¡¯s a place of death and demons, or even worse. Not even over my dead body!¡± Evelith shrugged. ¡°Okay, just me and Mr. roboman then for the first mission to search for the remnant of humankind then.¡± He ignored her, turning to me: ¡°if that¡¯s okay for you, Adaman.¡± I didn¡¯t have the energy to go against her, so I just said ¡°if you insist,¡± knowing that I agreed on entering a place of doom with just a barmaid as my companion. She didn¡¯t seem to bother with my lack of enthusiasm and went on with her plan as if the temple part was just one small detail. ¡°And then later we have to try the bank, and the supermarket maybe?¡± Velia interrupted her. ¡°Yes, but those are not the most important places. We need to find the fundless too, and try to get them on our side. Or at least some of them. They might be in one of the squats. And eventually we need to find out if there is or is not a president left, but that would mean going to a completely different part of The City. But we better first take the closest filial of the ministry then if we want that. We could do with a lot more people than we have now for such things though.¡±


    Evelith nodded. ¡°I¡¯ll go to the temple with Adaman first, after his shift tomorrow. I want to see the state the religion is in. I hope it¡¯s rotting in hell by now.¡± Her eyes stood very dark and flickered with hate. I suddenly feared for the priests that we might meet if they¡¯d say anything triggering to her. I never had seen her aggressive, but I felt like that might change very soon¡­ I hoped that I was wrong though.


    ¡°You¡¯re mad!¡± Leste said. ¡°What do you hope to find there?¡± Evelith nodded vaguely. ¡°Clues, answers, information about what¡¯s going on. Religion was the downfall of this City, so it¡¯s important to check out what they¡¯re up to. My intuition just tells me it''s the first place to check.¡± ¡°But you hate the Acosmians.¡± He rebutted. ¡°I do, with all of my being. But sometimes you have to check on your enemy.¡± ¡°Why not go straight to the Thanatorium?¡± He said. ¡°That¡¯s not a bad idea, I¡¯ll put it on my list!¡± Velia remarked. Leste didn¡¯t react, so she changed the subject. ¡°And Leste, do you have any active contacts with the fundless at the moment?¡± ¡°No, they seem to have retreated. Niaruk has bought that flour from them and some other ingredients, but the contact person had to go on to another squat after that.¡± She nodded. ¡°Have you ever had real contact with them outside of barter and trade? Did you ever talk with any of them about their way of living?¡±


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    ¡°No, they are closed off to fund-users. They just trade stuff they can¡¯t get for stuff we can¡¯t get because they need to. Being closed off to the fund-system means that they don¡¯t have accesss to a lot of goods and sometimes information. So they keep contact with a few persons here in the light district, and Niaruk has been one of them. I¡¯ve never been able to contact them directly, it was always through someone else.¡± ¡°So they¡¯re willingly keeping off contact when it isn¡¯t for trade?¡± Velia asked. ¡°You could say that. We fund-users are just brainwashed idiots for them anyway, and certain of their tribes even see us and every AI as enemies. It won¡¯t be easy to get to them with your plans, but you might be right that they are an integral part of humanity, and probably a key to the future of our species too.¡±


    ¡°Do you really think that the humans who shun funds are able to live together with the non-organic sapients in The City? My information tells otherwise.¡± Ol-H1-AZ asked. ¡°Well, it¡¯s not going to be easy.¡± Velia admitted. ¡°Difficult is an understatement, from the few things I know about them.¡± Leste added. ¡°We have to try. We can¡¯t do otherwise.¡± Evelith concluded. ¡°I hope your hope is not misguided, human one. But know this: the real inorganic sentients of this City are not just game-created characters. They have their own goals and as much self-preservation instinct as you humans do. And we have more weapons, and can form an organisation that is stronger than you realise. So I hope you humans find a way to connect with those of you that shun funds in a way that leaves their hostility towards us behind. Otherwise I fear that you will only find a new enemy in my brethren, and one that might be stronger than you at this point even though we are few. We might not find a unity when it comes to saving your species, but when we are threatened we will stick together. I have all my sympathy and respect for the kindred our creators, and I realise how much I am in debt to the human species. But if you become my enemy, or team up with my enemy, I can not guarantee my friendship any longer.¡±


    At that point the fatigue came in. I didn¡¯t say much from that point, bute the meeting went on about the relations between humans and non-human sentient beings. My mind was more with the visit I¡¯d be paying to the temple of Acosmia, and I still didn¡¯t really look forward to that. I hadn¡¯t been in a religious building for ages, but I knew why Leste protested. But I had already said Evelith that I would do it, and I didn¡¯t want to lose face.


    Was I becoming complicated like the other humans too, or had I been like that all along? Or had I failed in sticking up for myself and let the women fool me into doing things I shouldn¡¯t do? Either way the outcome was the same: I would be going to the temple tomorrow with Evelith.


    If only this meeting wouldn¡¯t last too long, because I had counted on sleeping here again¡­

 2.10 The Temple of Acosmia

    My life was now unlike anything I had ever imagined. After my early shift the next day I headed straight to the Acosmic temple behind the Light District to meet Evelith there. I had had a short night sleep, and an unfocussed sleepy working day, but there was something about this new task that completely woke me up. Deep in inner conflict I arrived at the temple, but I din''t want to let it show. I gasped when I looked at the sinister building that would be the starting point for our mission to investigate the current state of humanity. The whole idea still made me uncomfortable, but I didn¡¯t want to disappoint her. It was surprising to myself too what I was willing to do for my new friends: religion was something I always stayed far away from, because it made people mad and took away their will to live. But I had said that I would do it with her, so I couldn¡¯t back down now. Maybe I should¡¯ve said no like Leste had done, but it was too late for that. The sanctuary of the dark goddess Acosmia towered over the plaza. Even running away wasn¡¯t an option anymore now, and my inner coward was too afraid to say no. It was a tall and dark building, built more than a century ago in a weird combination of architectural styles varying from neo-baroque to the oldfashioned cubism of old official buildings in The City.


    Evelith was already sitting on the stairs in front of the building, waiting for me. She looked a bit out of place with her new and colourful outfit: old-fashioned pants and a shirt with a flower motif. Her smile and the life in her eyes alone were a great contrast with the monstrous house of the Dark One.


    The gigantic wooden door looked rather impressive, and not really welcoming to us tiny mortals. It was not only decorated with strange carvings of otherworldly horrors and apocalyptic battles, but most of all it seemed completely out of proportion, being at least thrice as high as a grown-up human. The entrance was just left open nonetheless, with a hand-written sign on it that simply said ¡®everybody welcome here for religious truth¡¯. With a bit of hesitation she took my hand to lead me inside. The warmth of her body touching mine came like a shock again, but that wasn¡¯t the first thing on my mind now. I was entering a religious place!


    This enormous door had clearly been left open by someone who regularly closed and opened the temple, but the whole place felt if no living soul had been here in this temple for a long time nonetheless. Without making a sound we both strolled inside, trying our best not to disturb anything disturbing. There were things between hell and Earth that you wouldn¡¯t want to meet, and even if there weren¡¯t a place like this made you believe there were?


    Why did temples like this have to be so dark on the inside? I held my breath when I saw a gigantic statue of a naked woman that filled up most of the hall. She was skinny and completely hairless, approximately the same height as the doors, and carved from some kind of black stone: the goddess Acosmia herself! The Dark One was fiercely trampling the remains of a broken globe, while holding the cone of nothingness in her left hand, which represented the black hole of knowledge. In her other hand she held a tiny human skeleton that looked like it tried to escape.


    The slogan ¡°All is illusion! Life is a lie! Nirvana is non-being!¡± was written in enormous calligraphy on a plate behind her. Surely I knew that Acosmia wasn¡¯t an actual entity but a symbolic representation of the realities of life and death or something like that, but she still scared the hell out of me. Religion was nasty business.


    This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.Evelith nudged to one of the corners of the room. We hadn¡¯t entered unnoticed: a priest arrived from a side door when we stood there in front of the goddess. He was exactly like one would expect a priest to look : a man of uncertain age with a shaved head, dressed in long dark robes. He spoke with a low slow voice as if everything he said was really important.


    ¡°Welcome, my pilgrims trapped in this sorrowful realm of illusions. Do you want counsel to understand the nature of our actual non-being? Do you want to get reconciled with your non-being and get ready to enter nirvana?¡± Before I could react Evelith replied frankly. ¡°I want to talk about your religion indeed. But I don¡¯t need propaganda. I want serious answers about the state of this place.¡± She looked angry already, but the newcomer didn¡¯t seem to notice. ¡°Do you want counsel to understand the nature of our actual non-being? Do you want to get reconciled with your non-being and be ready to enter nirvana?¡± He had uttered the same question again, with the same gestures. ¡°Have you heard me, priest¡­¡± she began again, but he said the same words again, in exact the same way.¡°Do you want counsel to understand the nature of our actual non-being? Do you want to get reconciled with your non-being and be ready to enter nirvana?¡±


    I stared at her and in her eyes I could read the same thing as what I was thinking: Something was going completely wrong here. Suddenly the body of the priest who had been speaking in a loop flickered for a second, and a fraction of a second later he turned to me as if to attack me, but he held back.


    ¡°I will need to call the policebots now for intervention. But don¡¯t let the prospect of eventual death bother you. It¡¯s not like we¡¯re not all headed to the Thanatorium already anyway. And as the goddess teaches us, death is always preferrable over life, and non-being over being.¡± He relocated to the wall, and pushed a red button. It flickered when he touched it with his finger, but the machine didn¡¯t react at all. ¡°Connection dead.¡± The priest mumbled when he came back to me, to grab my throat and choke me.


    I had no experience whatsoever with fighting in real life, but I was still prepared to fight back with all of my might. The priest wasn¡¯t what he seemed though: when my fist reached his body it didn¡¯t hit anything at all, and only felt a tiny shock of static electricity. He was not just a damaged robot with artificial intelligence, but apparently he didn¡¯t even have a material body at all.


    ¡°What the¡­¡±


    For a last time the hands came for me, and instinctively I pushed its head away from me, and then I finally felt something material, even though it seemed not really big. For a second the whole priest seem to flicker, and then he just faded away. From the place where the head had been a small spherical object roughly the size of a marble fell to the floor. I picked it up while Evelith and me kept staring at the place where the priest had stood. ¡°So the priest himself was nothing but a¡­¡±


    ¡°A mere self-projecting holographic being, indeed. Like I am myself.¡± A voice behind us said.

 2.11 The Artificial Monk

    We turned our backs, ready to fight whatever it was that had finished Eveliths sentence, but all we saw was an old monk. At least that was what it looked like: a weathered old man in a ragged robe wearing several religious symbols, with a bald shaved head like the priest had had, and a white beard. It held its hands up to indicate non-aggression.


    ¡°I will not attack you, my human friends. I am but a humble monk inhabiting this temple."


    Evelith looked at him as if ready to blow with a weapon that she didn''t have. But in her state even her hands might have been deadly. There was a fierceness in her that I hadn''t noticed because I had been too budy fighting the weird priest myself. Meanwhile the entity looking like a monk talked on: "It might also be important for you both to know that I myself have abandoned the death-religion that was practised and propagated in this temple a while ago. And the coming of you two might signal the time to close up this place altogether, and leave our lady Acosmia to her own.¡± He paused for a while, having noticed the look in Eveliths eyes. ¡°You do not have to worry about others attacking now. The only one left here is me, now that my last colleague has been put to non-active due to your actions¡­¡± He nodded at the marble-like thing in my hand. My eyes looked looked in Eveliths, not knowing how to react. I hadn¡¯t even noticed when she had grabbed my hand again.


    He must have sensed our confusion, so he went on with his explanation: ¡°My duties here are over now. I cannot in good conscience continue the things that are done here. And I need to sort things out.¡± Evelith seemed to relax a bit, and he went on.  ¡°The night before the last human Priestess of this temple went to the Thanathorium herself we had a long discussion. Priestess Molina was finally aware of the error of what he had been teaching for years, and of the lives she had helped lady Asocmia to take in preaching this accursed religion, and she saw no way to live on with the guilt. My collegue AI-priest Ota and me tried to understand her point and she explained everything several times, in detail and with a lot of  patience until we both were able to. When the awareness set in it changed both of us. I had my whole outlook on Being itself changed, but priest Ota had a crash of his circuits when the realisation came, and at that moment he lost all of his sentience and became an empty shell, parroting verses and standard formulas as you¡¯ve seen. When you entered his electromagnetic fields with your hand he finally collapsed.¡±


    A pause fell again after this story, and I felt that I had to say something, so I bowed a traditional greeting I had seen people do to monks years ago, probably on an infoscreen. ¡°I¡¯m sorry for the loss of your colleague. I didn¡¯t want to fight him. I don¡¯t even know how to fight something like you. But if someone threatens me and a friend with death I will defend both of us. I want to live.¡± The artificial monk looked thoughtful, and then he smiled. ¡°Ah, the will to live, yes! I see you both still have a will to live, just as I received myself on that last night with Priestess Molina as her last gift. When the realisation hit me, I wanted to live but I also saw the burden of my past evils. I don¡¯t even know if I have a soul, but I need to clear myself, and to atone for my sins. I do not know how yet, but I became not just a priest but a monk, and I resolved to take care of my poor damaged colleague for as long as he needed, and then afterwards I could give myself in service to those who want to live, and not die. I have been meditating on a whole library of sacred scriptures downloaded into my memory ever since them, but even with all the traces of Light in them things are still vague and becoming more confused. I am but a humble AI, but I will fight for Life in all its forms from now on. To carry on where Priestess Molina herself couldn¡¯t turn back to change her ways. To defeat lady Acosmia and her sinister sister.¡±


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    It would take some time to take in what I had just heard, so I looked around  for a chair and seated myself on it. Evelith seemed to be less surprised than me. ¡°So the religion of death has been consistent enough to finally take its own life? Good!¡±. I didn¡¯t completely understand that remark but the monk nodded. ¡°Did you expect it to end differently?¡± She stared at nothing in particular. ¡°No I guess, but the religions have taken too much of humanity with them before their final point of self-defeat. And they might still be active elsewhere.¡± His artificial eyes looked old and sad. ¡°Most of the temples are empty by now, and in those who are still active human priests have become extremely rare, if there is any of them left at all.¡± Evelith turned to me. ¡°No more humans in the temples. We¡¯re too late.¡± And she turned to the projection.


    ¡°So you, where are you going now? Do you have any plan at all?¡±


    He nodded no. ¡°I don¡¯t. I am a humble monk like I said. I follow the purple martyrdom of letting fate and the Gods of Life define my destiny. But I will live as much as I can to spread the message of Life wherever possible, and if it must to die in that pursuit to atone for my past sins.¡±


    ¡°I have no idea what you are talking about¡­¡± She said. ¡°But it might be easiest for you to join us for now. The Nirvana Ecstacy building where I work and live has no fundlocks, and maybe Leste or old Velia could be of help to you. Those are humans too who want to live, and it seems that we are much rarer than Adaman or even I had imagined from our little bubble, and we need to unite ourselves now before it¡¯s too late. A monk of life, AI or not, could be a good guide for us, better than what¡¯s left of the empty promises of president Emon, the accursed religions or the lies that kept us working while reality was being sucked away around us.¡±


    The holograph looking like a monk looked thoughtful for a second before it opened its virtual mouth to speak again.

 2.12 The Last Sacraments for a Temple of Death

    The virtual monk took a small pause before giving us his answer. ¡°I seem to have no choice but to accept your offer for now, and follow you two humans who share with me the will to live. I have nowhere to go myself, and I have no human contacts left that are still alive to start my mission. All of the people I met have disappeared in those accursed Thanatoria, including my own colleagues. I was designed specifically to serve this place and the cultic rituals that are held in honour of Lady Acosmia. But this building is no-ones home any longer, and my task here was to fulfil a purpose that I can not get behind anymore.¡± He bowed for us in a ceremonial way ¡°But If I am to follow both of you humans who share with me the will to live, then you will have to do one thing.¡±


    Evelith turned to me with a puzzled look in her eyes, and she seemed to hesitate. He went on, with his strange voice and slightly synthetic accent, in his rather complicated way of speaking. ¡°Can you, as two remaining humans and representatives of your race who remain to this very day unfallen to the foul doctrines of death, please forgive this poor AI soul for his sins in propagating that blasphemous doctrine?¡±


    Both of us stared at him, not being able to say anything at all. He didn¡¯t seem to mind and patiently awaited our answer.


    My mind went in all kinds of directions, and I had no idea at all about what I could say. It was a very unfair question. In wasn¡¯t responsible. I couldn¡¯t be a representative of my species. Judging from her eyes Evelith had the same kind of inner fight, son after what seemed an eternity of silence I was the one who finally said something. ¡°I hate the religions.¡± I said. ¡°With all of my heart, soul, mind and power, with everything that I am.¡± I paused for a while, trying to find the words. ¡°But you yourself have done nothing against me. I don¡¯t know much about forgiveness. But if you are able to give yourself a new chance I will accept the new you. Don¡¯t ask me to have an opinion of the old you though. I don¡¯t know if I could so easily forgive a minister of death. But I¡¯ve never met you in that role, so I can only take you as I¡¯ve met you, the monk of Life.¡±


    Evelith herself was a bit shaken. ¡°I don¡¯t know. I¡¯ll follow him for now, but I need time. For now the new you has been accepted, and a monk of Life is something this world needs desperately. So let¡¯s try to forget the past, let¡¯s move on and prevent the doctrine of death to take more lives whenever we can.¡±


    Motionless the self-projecting hologram shaped like a holy man stood there until he finally said ¡°Ok, that¡¯s enough for now. Let¡¯s give the last sacraments to this dying place of death now, and after that I will follow you wherever you lead me.¡±


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    He walked out of the building with us, his feet leaving no prints in the dust. After removing the plate with ¡®everybody welcome here for religious truth¡¯ written on it, he threw it inside. Then he closed the majestic door behind us for the last town and suddenly stood upright, as if to do a speech or some holy ritual. And indeed, he muttered something incomprehensible in a strange language, and then dramatically touched the fundlock with his holographic fingers. This resulted in a lot of sparks and the lock seemed to melt. Next he touched a small screen on the door on which announcements where made, which went black and then after some flickering just gave one word ¡®closed!¡¯.


    I stood there motionless with Evelith as witnesses of this ceremony, almost touching her in this magical moment. But that was only in my mind: our bodies weren¡¯t really touching each other at all, but still I felt strangely connected to her, more in a mystical than in a romantic way, as if we both shared in the same holy energy. She seemed to be in some kind of trance herself.


    The monk was muttering one last prayer, which closed with some kind of exorcism formula, that ended with ¡°I release thee, building, from the foul influence of the false goddess and her sister in the name of all Reality in and beyond the Multiverse, may they never poison anyone at all here any more. In the name of the Light, in the name of Life itself and Reality, in the name of Love! So be it!¡±


    While he was executing his ritual, a black shadow came down as if out of nowhere and it settled on of the flagpoles above the door. It turned out to be an enormous black bird, but the monk didn¡¯t visibly pay any attention to it.


    After his prayer he stood motionless for a while while I didn¡¯t even dare to breathe. It did indeed feel like something had changed in the atmosphere here. ¡°Come, let¡¯s go!¡± He said.


    ¡°That was, eh, impressive¡­¡± Evelith whispered, still in awe. ¡°I closed the building on the physical plane and purified it in the non-physical dimension. As far as I could do that myself. I am not really a man of power or magician, and not even a priest, only a humble monk of Life.¡±


    ¡°Did you see the crow?¡± Evelith said. The monk nodded. ¡°Yes, it¡¯s a raven even. Majestic and intelligent creature. None of her species has been seen in the city since the beginning of our era before this one arrived. She has been coming to this place for a while. She even might have a nest somewhere close. Let her use the building¡­ It will be good for something then¡± He saluted the bird, which nodded her head as if understanding the sign, and we started walking towards the bar.


    How were we going to explain this to Leste?

 2.13 Next-SystenZ

    Walking back from the temple to the bar we didn¡¯t say much to each other. I hadn¡¯t understood half of what the artificial monk had been saying, but his closing ceremony for the Acosmist temple would be something I¡¯d never forget, no matter how long I would live. The things he had said had completely shaken my worldview, and my certainties about how things operated. His ideas about being a monk of Life for example, instead of being a priest of death as anyone would expect from religious people, were completely alien to me but very refreshing. All my life I had known religion to be about death or even worse, and not life. It would take a while for all these things to sink in. And that while my poor old robobrain wasn¡¯t even ready processing most of the thing Evelith, Velia and Leste had been telling me the last few days.


    We were almost at the bar when I saw a man, a real human, with VR-glasses passing us, which reminded me of the V-junkie woman from yesterday. She seemed to have known Evelith, so I had a new subject to break the silence. ¡°Oh, Ev, I almost forgot. I said some weird gamer girl that I bumped into last night that I¡¯d say hi to you. What was the name? Tul? Do you know her?¡± Even with all the strange experiences we had just had she still stared at me with an utterly surprised look. ¡°Wow. Tul Pavithopho? You actually spoke to her? In this world?¡± I nodded. ¡°It¡¯s good that she¡¯s still alive. That¡¯s a relief actually. But how did you get her to talk to you? She¡¯s always in faraway other worlds¡­¡± ¡°She bumped into me because she was not in this world and still walking on the street. Extreme gamer or V-junkie even if you ask me, that one.¡± She nodded affirming again. ¡°Ah, yes, but she¡¯s a lot more than just a gamer. she¡¯s a virtual nomad, a glitch-rider even. The problem is that she never recovered from the breakdown of the Next-SystenZ servers. She lost a bit of herself there.¡±


    We had arrived at the bar, still followed by the now slightly levitating monk, and continued our conversation inside. The name of Next-SystenZ had taken my thoughts away from the temple, and brought me back to younger years. Long ago I had enjoyed some gaming in second worlds myself, and not just the simple stuff like the Game of Trains. Just like Selinomas it had been a classical online game platform with a whole virtual universe inside of it. It had had thousands of users at its peak moment, and some people really had spent a lot of their funds on it. There were even people who managed to make funds in-world, which was something that was highly discouraged by the government of The City, so you had to know how to get around lots of safety measures to do that. Yes, Next-SystenZ had been the most popular virtual world that the City had had in recent times. But from one day to the other the whole thing had just disappeared, much to the chagrin of the gamers. The infonews had explained that the servers were crashed. Whatever had happened to it, the entire world in the game was inaccessible from that moment on, even though it had been whispered that it still existed somewhere. Something about the whole story had not felt right though, but the infonews soon became silent, and it was as if the whole thing had never existed. One needed very good hacker skills to find back any reference to it on the interwebs.


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    ¡°Poor Tul had some kind of deal with a sentient game character, at least that¡¯s what she said. They were planning to do some kind of revolution to fight injustice and to overthrow prez. Emon, and he had a plan to make endless funds from a certain bug in the paywall system and share them with the people whom she saw as screwed by the system. But before anything of that could happen Next-SystenZ disappeared, and she could not reach him again. After that she has tried everything to get him back. Not because of the plans, but because she really considered him a friend, and she still believes he is alive somehow. Last time I hears she was looking through all kinds of game platforms and cybersystems to get back to him, with no results.¡±


    I filled the rest in for her. ¡°She was trying to get to the inner ring of Selinomas, but meanwhile her body was walking on the street and she bumped into me and broke her glasses. She was in complete shock.¡± Evelith took a beer for herself, and one for me too, but her eyes stood rather serious.


    ¡°Hmm. Tul broke her VR-glasses you say? Man, that¡¯s not good for her. She¡¯ll have to pay a lot of funds, and her job probably pays even less than yours. I¡¯ll ask Leste that some of our people look out for her. We can¡¯t have her disappear too. The temple might be empty and closed now but the Thanatorium isn¡¯t, and lady Acosmia herself isn¡¯t exactly dead yet either. Tul¡¯s not just someone by the way, she¡¯s actually quite powerful inside the virtual world. It would be a shame to lose her and her skills and connections. If she wouldn¡¯t be so closed off and out of reach I¡¯d suggest Velia to add her to our little group.¡±


    ¡°Do you think he still is there? The Anapa guy?¡±


    ¡°I have no idea. I¡¯m not a gamer nor a cybernaut. It¡¯s probably possible. Stranger things have happened in virtual worlds than characters hopping from platform to platform. But I¡¯m more worried about Tul losing touch with her body. And even more for what¡¯ll happen if she runs out of funds.¡±


    Leste, who had been sitting at his table looking at some long-haired guitar-wielding weirdos from the 20th century stood up and looked from me to the almost levitating monk to Evelith and back to the monk. ¡°I assume that both of you have indeed been to the temple.¡± He mumbled. The monk answered for us. ¡°Greetings. I am San Yaoyao, the first monk of the new order of Life. Your friend Evelith has invited me here now that the temple of the dark goddess of non-being is out of order.¡±


    Leste stared at him, as if he was not believing his own eyes, and then at her as if he was saying ¡°how could you?¡± but the self-projecting holy man ignored his disapproval completely. ¡°Greetings, friend! I am San Yaoyao, first monk of the new order of Light and Life!¡±

 2.14 Anticonception and human extinction

    A few days had passed since the visit to the temple of Acosmia. I was getting as used as possible to my new life with other people around me, but this sort of life proved more complicated that I could have anticipated time after time, sometimes in very small details that no-one would even give second thoughts to. And then there was the whole plan to revive the human species, which was still as nebulous as it had been on the first meeting in Evelith¡¯s room. We hadn¡¯t done any new investigations yet, but San Yaoyao the AI monk and old Velia had been having long talks, and it seemed that he had given her a lot of important information that could be useful for future missions. Leste on the other hand was still suspicious of the levitating self-projecting entity that was giving lectures on Light, Life, and the wisdom traditions that humanity had had in the past, and what we should have learnt from them. The idea of positive forms of religion was just too otherworldly for him, as a citizen of The City¡­


    Sunlight shone on the front of the Nirvana Ecstasy that afternoon. I had planned to go home after my early shift to get some of my stuff to bring it back to the bar, where I would be staying for the night again but the new habit to hang out in what has already become my ¡®new home¡¯ was hard to kick. So I walked into an almost empty bar, bathing in light, which was a completely other world than the same building at night. There were no live dancers and the volume of the projections was much lower than at night. Evelith looked rather colourful in yet another flowery shirt, and was sharing a table with a man I¡¯d never seen before. I noticed that she was visibly annoyed by him, but he didn¡¯t seem to be aware of anything, clearly doing his best to impress her as if it was very probably that he¡¯d be able to seduce her. Which was without any hint of a doubt going to be a complete failure, even I could sense that, and I knew almost nothing of human social interactions at that point. But he still seemed quite sure of success.


    Feeling a hint of irrational jealousy I walked up to her to greet her. ¡°Hi Ev.¡± She suddenly smiled when she heard my voice, as if I was a saving angel, and took my hand. ¡°Hi Ad.¡± She said enthusiastically, and the stranger gave me a very dirty look. He turned to me with a flicker of anger in his eyes. ¡°So that¡¯s why this stupid woman doesn¡¯t want me? You two are a couple or what?¡± I didn¡¯t react, so he rambled on. ¡°How oldfashioned, and that here in the Light District even. I though people like you had died out long ago in these enlightened times. Isn¡¯t this a place of rock¡¯n roll?¡± Evelith nodded at the stage. ¡°You just saw Elvis Presley himself, the uncontested King of oldschool rock¡¯n roll. Vintage 20th century. Not rock¡¯n roll enough for you Mr.-I-am-entitled-to-get-any-woman-I-want-no-matter-what-her-opinion-is? You can look nextdoor for sex if you have funds, or otherwise try the one-night-stand bar if Vezlena doesn¡¯t have something better to do tonight, and the drugs are available in the squat at 73th avenue. If you have something else to pay with than funds that is, and if your face doesn¡¯t make the fundless too agsressive.¡± She turned her eyes to me. ¡°And no, we¡¯re not actually a couple. He¡¯s just a friend. But I have the full right to reject any idiot that I don¡¯t want, even without anyone in my life as a lover. In these enlightened times as you call them women don¡¯t need a boyfriend to say no. They are their own person!¡±


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    He stared at her, and then grinned at me. ¡°Well, you win, dude. It¡¯s always the woman who chooses the guy whom she takes into her bed anyway. As long as one of you has taken AC42 it¡¯s okay, isn¡¯t it?¡± With his last words he made an obscene gesture. Some kind of energy that Evelith transmitted through her hand suggested that she seemed to have reached her boiling point, but outwardly she remained calm. She stood up straight in a defensive pose while holding on to my hand. ¡°So what if we actually would be a couple and we didn¡¯t take your freaking AC42? What if we were lovers and didn¡¯t want to further human extinction? What if someone would indeed get a baby once in a while, so Homo sapiens gets a new generation to replace even a tiny bit of the masses who disappear in the Thanatoria these days?¡± I stared at her, rather uncomfortably with the whole topic. Why was she shouting about stuff like that while holding my hand? ¡°But no. I¡¯m not talking about myself now. Don¡¯t worry Ad.¡± She had turned to me and lowered her volume with that last sentence.


    ¡°I never though of having children at all.¡± I mumbled. I hadn¡¯t seen any real children in Amaya-knew-how-long, but suddenly a picture arose in my head of children, and someone I had known well, long ago, as if in a dream.


    ¡°You crazy bitch.¡± He said, and he added some harsher words of insult that I hadn¡¯t realised were still in use, and that would not be fit for print. ¡°If that¡¯s what the evolution of mankind has been leading up to¡­ Conservative family values.¡± He spat on the floor and walked out.


    The music went on but none of us said a word for a while. Evelith kept staring at the door through which he had gone and finally mumbled something about ¡®no evolution without procreation, moron¡¯ to no-one in particular. Meanwhile my attention turned to the music. The holographic projection went mad, with weird metallic humanoids and a climax of complex numbing rhythms that almost stamped out all of my thoughts. Evelith seemed to realise something, and suddenly let go of my hand. ¡°Sorry for that.¡± She stammered. ¡°No problem.¡± I mumbled. ¡°I think¡­¡±


    Suddenly Leste joined the table, a beer already in his hand. Evelith protested to him about the music: ¡°Les, What in the hell of any random religion is this noise?¡± He shrugged his shoulders. ¡°Ah, I just thought some late 21st century neo-drum¡¯n bass would be a good moodkiller for random guys hitting on you.¡± Fire seemed to emanate from her eyes and I could feel tension rising again with the volume of her voice. ¡°I can take care of my own business, Les, thank you very well!¡± He just smiled sheepishly. As soon as the noise was over she luckily lightened up a bit and told Les what the guy had said. Leste looks suspiciously at me. ¡°And all the while you were holding HIS hand to make that creep jealous? I saw that, you know!¡± I saw anger flickering in his eyes. ¡°Don¡¯t you dare using him too while in the end completely friendzoning him.¡± Her eyes shot fire at him. ¡°Come on, friendship is what he needs now. He¡¯s just brought back to humanity.¡±


    And so they went on and on. I didn¡¯t answer and of their discussion while they went on about me without having my attention at all. It should probably have been rather important to me to say the least, but instead of even following it I was trying to get back to a picture in my head that seemed just out of reach. It was only when I heard Leste mention AC42 and children again that I suddenly yelled out loud.


    ¡°My dream!¡±

 2.15 dreams and other worlds

    Evelith and Leste stared at me, both bewildered by the sudden change of subject. ¡°Dream? What dream are you talking about?¡± The atmosphere had completely changed just by speaking those two words. ¡°Well, a dream I had that first night on your couch.¡± I told them what I had seen, omitting the parts about a lack of clothes on certain persons and the detail that I¡¯d seen Evelith herself too. I almost never remember my dreams, so it was strange how I could bring the whole thing back completely and describe it in details.


    They didn¡¯t seem to know how to react, but at least neither of them laughed it away, and apparently it was up to me to break the uneasy silence. ¡°Is there really a wall then? Is there something like an outside to this city¡± I asked, hesitatingly. I had never heard such things addressed on the infoscreen broadcasts at all, in all of my life, nor had the educomputers ever mentioned such a thing. But I knew now that there were more things that had been conveniently left out of my education, like the existence of the fundless in The City for example; or the state my own species was in. ¡°Surely there is, The City certainly doesn¡¯t span all of the world, we¡¯re still a round planet you know. There is a wall around it, strengthened by a strong force field. There¡¯s also the oceans too for example. And we¡¯ve long wondered whether there were any humans outside of The City worth connecting to. But even the fundless didn¡¯t want to answer that question until now.¡± Leste clarified, but Evelith seemed to have another concern. ¡°So who is she?¡± She looked very serious now. ¡°Berla? Well, you could say my only attempt at a relationship I¡¯ve ever had. But I broke it off because of work and stuff¡­ If I¡¯m honest I had completely forgotten about her.¡±


    She didn¡¯t say a word but her eyes told me she was angry with me now. Strange how I in my state as almost-robot could so easily pick up on her feelings now. ¡°Hey, that was the old me from long ago. And if my dream is true, she¡¯s not only a married woman now but also a mother. At least she is not furthering extinction but getting a baby once in a while like you want humans to do¡­ And anyway¡­ She¡¯s much better off without me. She¡¯d always have been.¡± I could see in her eyes that she didn¡¯t seem to be convinced. ¡°You disappeared into your lifeless job and left her. So you just did a light-version to her of going to the thanatorium. She wasn¡¯t worth sharing a life with at all. And for what? Work and screentime?¡±


    Oh-oh¡­ She was both furious and serious now, and I wasn¡¯t really into the complications of real humans right now.


    I defended myself: ¡°The past is the past. I¡¯m different now.¡± But it was easy to see that she wasn¡¯t really convinced. ¡°Barely. You¡¯re just becoming human again after a half-life as a machine for most of your adult years. And even that is only because I stopped you from leaving the bar a few days ago. Otherwise you¡¯d still have been Mr. Roboman on autopilot, being lived by his job, until you¡¯d be worn out and sent to the thanatorium as discarded garbage goes to a recycle bin to be recycled after being taken apart to separate atoms first.¡± I felt an uneasy feeling in my throat now. ¡°Don¡¯t you see what you¡¯ve done? Work and screens as the opiate of the people. You¡¯ve been drugged by them and had your life sucked out of you. And she had no choice but to accept you were a dead man walking and leave you behind. I know how she must have felt¡±


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    ¡°Evelith, please!¡±


    Leste stared at her, and then at me with wide open eyes, unable to say anything. This clearly was¡¯t a comfortable subject for him. I didn¡¯t know what to say either, with Evelith so triggered and suddenly having lost her usual rational outlook and intuitive optimism.


    A sudden voice broke the tension and brought the conversation back on topic. ¡°The dream was probably right. It might have been a message even. We must try to reach the community behind the wall, and even fight the  mentioned feral killerbots if needed. At least that part is indeed known to be true.¡± San Yaoyao the artificial monk said suddenly as out of nothing. No one had seen him arrive as he had made no sound at all.


    ¡°Do you know more about a community behind the wall then?¡± Evelith looked at the sentient flying holograph. ¡±Les always says that even the fundless won¡¯t ever say anything about the outsiders, if they exist at all.¡± The projected entity looked from her to Leste and back. ¡°Not much indeed. If the fundless know something they keep silent about it for their own reasons. There was some whispering about those things on the networks years ago, before they fell silent. I know that there are indeed people outside of the wall, and at least one tribe of them that has been in contact with people in the City through a place called Lahkap.¡± I saw Leste nod as if he knew that name. ¡°So Lahkap exists? It¡¯s not a silly myth?¡± The monk nodded. ¡°No, it must exist, but no-one knows where except for those who hide it from both sides on the wall. Most fundless have no clue either as far as my data can tell¡­¡± Leste looked a bit disappointed, but San Yaoyao wen on. ¡°But there is more truth to the dream: there also is a unit of feral police-bots that is said to roam outside the City attacking that tribe. And the Wall is endless and virtually impossible to get through though. Behind it there is a wilderness.¡±


    ¡°Where do the pigeons and that raven come from then? And the plants? Aren¡¯t these from the wilderness behind the wall? Doesn''t that mean there''s an opening?¡± Evelith asked. He nodded ¡°There might be a small hole indeed, somewhere, that lets those lifeforms in indeed. But they are birds and plants with small seeds, so it might just be a hole in the force field, somewhere high in the sky. And that can¡¯t be how your friend ended up on the other side. She probably has found the house of Lahkap then, or another way through it that we don¡¯t know of. I suppose that your dream-friend had more luck than my informants in finding it.¡±


    Leste drank the last bit of beer in his glass and looked uncertainly at the foam. ¡°So what do we do now?¡± ¡°What can we do? Not much more than what we were doing already¡­ Just try to find and unite all humans and sentient beings that are left over, and try to not just connect with the fundless along the way, but also with the outsiders¡­ But for now, let¡¯s just drink one more beer¡­¡±

 2.16 dream Sequence #2

    I slept in my own bed again that night, probably for the last time ever. I hadn¡¯t even had the energy to return to the bar after sorting out stuff in my apartment after my late shift, so I¡¯d sent Evelith a message that I wouldn¡¯t see her that night. It was still a bit strange to use my phone for actual communication with humans, but I¡¯d probably get used to it again. I was rather exhausted so after a minute or so I was asleep already, plagued by weird and confusing dreams yet again.


    The first things I saw were screens from educomputer and school-programs, just like I had seen them as a kid, but now I could see they were blatantly telling me nonsense. Diagrams and meaningless words flowed into each others and blended together, and merged with the background to form a kaleidoscopic vortex. I closed my eyes but the patterns were still there behind my eyelids.


    When the psychedelic chaos had cleared up, I stood in some kind of alien temple or maybe a town hall, surrounded by ancient robots who were getting me ready for my wedding. A robopriest in black had two rings, one for me and my bride, which wasn¡¯t even a robo-wife  but an oldfashioned semi-humanoid metal shape. ¡®She¡¯ hardly had a face and was much less human than Ol-H1-AZ even, but held my hand tight with 3 cold metal fingers and somehow expressed a scary hungry desire through ¡®her¡¯ LED-eyes. No words came out of my mouth when I tried to scream. I could hardly breathe the air of this in-between world, and certainly not fill my lungs with it. But willpower is a much more powerful thing than most people realise, so air or no air I screamed nonetheless when her face came closer to mine to ¡®kiss¡¯ me.


    The robots completely ignored my scream and went on with the ceremony, while I called out from the top of my almost empty lungs to anyone who might be able to help me: Evelith, Leste, and even Berla, but nothing happened while the robot brought her face to mine, but everything dissolved and I found myself in a bar, dancing with Ylati, the strip-dander from the Ecstasy Nirvana who didn¡¯t seem to like me at all in the real world. But this was a dreamworld where she was almost naked and where se also tried to kiss me. Again I screamed no!


    She started mocking me for my refusal. I released myself from her arms, pushed her away and started running. The music in the background changed into a faster version of Lestes post-drum¡¯n bass that completely made me go crazy. Could I use any of these doors? All signs here were written in a completely alien alphabet, so I had no idea what they said. The door I tried turned to be some kind of a portal, and there I found myself running through The City for endless ages. There was a soft rain, and everything was black and white, and sometimes even blurred by low-resolution snow as in an ancient TV. Every now and then the whole background flickered. I didn¡¯t know anymore where I was going, or even what I was running from but I had to run on.


    After lifetimes of running I bumped into the wall. An enormous wall that was higher than the highest building that I¡¯d ever seen, with a strong force field blocking even the flow of air above it. I clearly couldn¡¯t go further, but I just had to run, because ¡®they¡¯ would get me. This blocked my brain. Something was closing in on my and I couldn¡¯t go anywhere. The city flickered, and my view changed several times from black and white to shades of grey and flashy colours, and suddenly I realised that I wasn¡¯t alone. And that it was way too late to run now.


    There she stood. The goddess Amaya herself, Acosmias sister, and exactly as portrayed in the statues. A naked inorganic body, black as empty space, armed with the spear that had just killed the personification of ¡®the world of illusions¡¯ in her left hand. She beckoned me with eyes that seemed to have black holes in the pupils. ¡°Come and see the light of the darkness. There is nothing! Let go of all the illusions of life!¡± she whispered telepathically in my head without moving her lips.


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    I was both utterly terrified and deadly annoyed with this new development. What was up with all those stupid naked women in my dreams lately? And why did people even portray such a dark idea with a naked woman? Oh yes, I surely understood that people liked the female figure if they were attracted to women. I was theoretically attracted to women too. But the entity in front of me didn¡¯t look like like someone one could be attracted to in a sexual way. To embrace her would be to surrender to a fate worse than dead, you could see that in her eyes. And yet the original statue of the form that had materialised here in front of me had clearly been made by someone with a lot of interest in female bodies who expected his viewers to do likewise. And she knew that, and even tried to use it on me somehow. I felt the sucking energy that tried to envelop me. I closed my eyes and tried to find an antidote for the incoming call of non-being to join me.


    ¡°Life is Reality! You are the lie!¡±.


    My desperate scream rang hollow in this fake world. She came closer with a mocking look in her eyes, her arms open to embrace me; but for some reason stopped. I looked away from her, trying to think of something to do next but nothing came. She flickered a bit, and then we both stood in an empty space with no background, and she was gone. I let out a sigh of relief.


    Suddenly Evelith stood next to me in a place that looked like the backspace of the Nirvana ecstasy. She wore a long red dress, and looked rather concerned. ¡°You¡¯re flickering and almost fading. You need to recharge!¡±. I fell into her arms, and wanted to cry that I was a human, but the world vanished before she could answer me and instead of sinking in her arms I sank into unpronounced dimensions of nothingness.


    Time had no meaning, and neither had place. but after a while I noticed that I had arrived somewhere, so I opened my eyes and was not in my bed, but in another dreamworld. Grey aliens were dancing with the killerbots around a fire, but I could see silhouettes of trees in the background. A group of children came from behind the trees and zapped away all of the killerbots with some remote control device. The aliens ran away while the children took over the dance. They wore strange clothes, and had real flowers in their hair, both the girls and the boys. They made a circle around me and the fire and began to sing.


    ¡®Kalmose! Kalmose¡¯


    ¡®Kalmose dirko!¡¯


    ¡®Vitlon jab vitlon jab elah.¡¯


    ¡®Mado far elahi, Mado jad elah-on¡¯


    ¡®Kame dirko, kame dirko¡¯


    ¡®elahi jab la, elahi jab la¡¯


    ¡®Vitlon jab vitlon jab la¡¯


    ¡®la-el mus vitlon! la-el mus wul vitlon¡¯


    I had no idea what they were singing, but it felt like their dance cleansed the place of all the negative energy. The leader of the children, a girl with long dark hair in a green dress, seemed familiar to me, and suddenly I realised that I had seen her in another dream, as the eldest kid of Berla. She looked at me and almost pierced me with her stare, and seemed to invite me to join the dance, but I couldn¡¯t move my legs.


    Their dance became wilder and wilder. I felt that I could move a bit so I tried to join them, but I was already fading away like a shadow in the intensifying light. Everything flickered around me until it went black.

 Extra #3: some notes on philosophy and religion in The City

    Here are some historical notes on the main philosophical and religious views on life in general that existed in The City in the days of Adaman:


    The City Doctrine:


    The life philosophy of the people in the City has been formed by a long era of manipulation of the public opinion and by a deliberate engineering of the common myth of the population. Certainly it has been evolving naturally when the central control of The City faded away, but the basic ideas are still present at the time of the story:


    The source of truth is modern science, which is sponsored by the City, and as some might whisper also controlled by it. The City functions as one great corporation, with all of the citizens, human and artificial, being both labourers and clientele of the One Corporation-state that is considered to encompass alls of the Known World. The City itself is the goal of life, and everything is officially seen in function of it.


    An older semi-religious version of the City Doctrine might still be of influence to some people. In this much more extreme version all human and non-human life was seen as a manifestation of the City, and selflessness for others for example was considered a service to the City itself.


    The early City presidents, especially the first City president Sumwam, were explicitly considered the ¡®first representative of The City¡¯ itself, and they could speak for it as a kind of mediator. In this worldview The City has an almost divine status, and being cut off from the city (by losing ones funds) is seen as a form of death already, even if the person itself was still alive. As the saying says, ¡®there¡¯s no life away from the City¡¯.


    Over time the leaders of The City had stopped emphasising and broadcasting the the more extreme versions of City Doctrine, and switched to more moderate vision. By that time the new religions also had infiltrated the population and outcompeted the absolute control the City Doctrine had on the public opinion and mainstream paradigm.


    The last City President Emon himself had a completely different agenda which seemed more focussed on his own individual goals than on the common good of The City, but it seems that no-one really took notice or cared for that.


    By the time of Adaman only very weak and sometimes contradictory versions of the original totalitarian City Doctrine were around, but subconsciously they still had a lot of influence even though no-one would even recognise them by that name.


    The new religions:


    All of the world religions had gone extinct in the civilised world at least a century before the City time began already, even though transformed elements of Buddhism and Calvinism were still lingering in the official City Doctrine, in completely new expressions. The traditional world religions of humanity had been in decline for centuries by then, but their final eradication couldn¡¯t have happened without a lot of violence and rewriting of history. Most information about this seemed to have been lost completely lost by Adamans time.


    Ever since modernity there had been thinkers that prophecied how humanity would outgrow religion, and every time they were proved wrong. Even the totalitarian City Doctrine itself, which was in itself almost religious could not keep the human religious impulse down forever.


    The way in which religion came back was completely unexpected and took The City by surprise. The cults of the new goddesses of non-being were not on the list of forbidden religions, and their missionaries were able to exploid all legal loopholes so that the movements could grow without precedent.


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    No-one seemed to really know where they came from, but the darkest elements of older religions seem to have merged with a form of dogmatic nihilism to form both the two twin religions of Acosmism and Amayism. Both cults had had reached mainstream around the time The City was fully established, while in their shadow the even darker cult of Fhanfhelo always remained more underground. These new religions fueled the building of more thanatoria for a while, until the population of the City dropped too drastically. In a way they completed the City Doctrine and made it worse.


    Acosmism:


    The basic idea of Acosmism is that there is no universe, and that everything we percieve and know is an illusion. Life itself is by definition a lie, and the only way to be honest is to kill yourself. This doctrine is personified in the figure of the goddess Acosmia, usually pictured as a dark naked woman trampling the remains of a disc-shaped arth, sun and moon.


    Acosmism has a complicated set of doctrine and rituals, and priest and monks who were called as ¡®Acossatvas¡¯ who delayed their enlightenment of annihilation in death for the sake of others who were in need of being taught the virtues of non-existence.


    Amayism:


    Amayism goes even further, and says that everything is an illusion, even death and non-existence, but the illusion of death is preferable over the illusion of life. It has a rather complicated philosophy and strange scriptures that are generally considered incomprehensible, which made them popular among certain more intellectually-minded individuals.


    ¡®To be or not to be is the question you should get beyond, even non-being is an illusion¡¯ is a basic thought from the Amayists that was sometimes written on walls as graffiti.


    Lady Amaya is often represented as a rounder naked woman, comparable to the Venus of Wallendorf, holding the staff of nothingness. Some mythological interpretation consider her the more mature sister of lady Acosmia.


    Fhanfhelism:


    The secretive cult of Fhanfelism never received the mainstream acceptance that the followers of the dark twin goddesses, and it was the only new religion to be forbidden and persecuted. Not much is known about the dark god Fhanfhelo and the ways in which he is worshipped, except that his followers would rather kill others than themselves, and it it whispered that they practice black magic.


    Religion of the fundless:


    Not much is known, at least not by citizens of The City, about the religion or religions of the fundless, but it is assumed that at least some of them are religious in one way or another.


    It is clear though that the fundless completely reject all major religions of The City, especially The City Doctrine itself in all its forms. Acosmism and Amayism are also completely taboo among them, as they are seen as the worst excesses of the evil world of the fundslaves. Some say that the worldview of the fundless is explicitly build on the rejection of everything The City stands for, and that this principle is almost elevated to the status of religion.


    A form of Fhanfhelism is said to exist among certain tribes, but it is even more taboo and it is never even spoken of.


    Influences of outsider religions are also possible, but those are even lesser known they even exist.

 3.1 Moving to Nirvana Ecstasy

    If someone had told me just a week and a half ago that I¡¯d be packing my stuff to move into a room above an ancient bar somewhere in the Light District, I would have laughed very hard and then dismissed the idea as utterly ridiculous. Well, in the hypothetical case that anyone at all would have talked to me at that point in my life that is. I didn¡¯t really have much contact with anyone anymore, and I wasn¡¯t even aware of missing anything. My life in a technological dystopia had numbed me down so much that I might even have been brainwashed to the point of being hardly human. But over the course of this last few days my whole universe had changed completely and here I stood, with my clothes and some other stuff ready to move out of the apartment where I had spent most of my adulthood to leave everything I had known behind, to start all over again.


    After a discussion about where I was to live Velia, the old janitor of the Nirvana Ecstasy bar, had produced a rusty metal key that seemed to belong in an ancient holomovie from one of her antique drawers. With it she had opened the door to another unused studio apartment above the Nirvana Ecstacy as a new place for me to live from now on. I had been staring long from the strange room to the antiquated object in my hand, knowing it would take a while to get used to not using a fundlock to open any of the doors in this building alone, let alone the room itself.  After that Leste and Evelith had thrown together some furniture that seemed to belong in a museum of cultural history from before The City: There was no real bed but some kind of couch that could be transformed into one, and the closet, chairs and table looked as if they had come from completely different worlds, all of them either fictional or at least belonging to a forgotten time when humanity had other ways to live.


    My new co-housers even had brought in a tiny potted plant,¡®to help me see the reality of sharing my world with nonhuman organic life¡¯. Or probably just because it was possible, and also as a clear act of pure rebellion against everything The City stood for. A brownish stem with dark green succulent leaves came crawling out of the brown dirt, and I needed to make sure that this lifeform would stay alive by giving it light and water. It was a grave and ancient responsibility to me, like a religious ritual from the time when my species was still human, or even more serious than that. Humans themselves had turned out to be much rarer than I assumed, but non-human lifeforms were still an exception, an anomaly, something most people of my generation had never even seen in their life. Not that there were that much of them left in the City of Thanatoria anyway, but stil¡­


    And so here I stood in my old living room for what very well might be the last time. Everything was like it had always been, for as long as I had lived here: the infoscreen, the black paper-thin screens of old LCD-artworks that needed new batteries to show anything, the computer-based selfregulated household-system that reacted only to my own voice. Everything that was important to me was now in my bags, and the rest would stay here, maybe for a very long time. I walked outside and closed the door, looking for the last time at my name at the fundlock. It felt strange to close off the place where I had lived most of my adult life definitely, and to go to a new place to call ¡®home¡¯. Technically I could still go back for now, but the moment I¡¯d miss just one payment the fundlock would completely block me out until I¡¯d pay all missed money plus a serious fine, and then the room would remain sealed off to remain empty for Amaya-knew-how-long. No-one ever seemed to wonder about what happened with empty apartments when their tenant was gone, but as things were now with humanity they might not get opened again at all, probably until the time in which The City itself would crumble because nature had finally taken over its remains again in a faraway future¡­


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    It was a very strange idea to realise that most of the residential buildings in The City were completely empty, that almost none of the apartments around here really had people living in them, and might never be used again in the future. I¡¯d never paid attention to it, but it was true that I hadn¡¯t seen any other people in this building in years. I had living in a ghost town for all those years!


    On the issue of the rent of my new apartment the others had been clear: as a working person it was my mission to bring as much of my funds as I could into the Nirvana Ecstasy by consuming food and drinks and giving tips, and if I did that I¡¯d have to pay no rent. It¡¯d be better for now to keep my apartment a a backup for now. But there still was something ominous about the place for me now. It felt wrong to even just be there now though; this building being the place where I¡¯d lived a lie in a system of quiet human extinction.


    After a walk of maybe half an hour I arrived at the Ecstasy Nirvana with my stuff. My new apartment was a bit smaller than Evelith¡¯s, actually it was just one room with a table and the couch, with even a tiny kitchen in one corner, and then a small bathroom. It had a big window looking out of the city though, through which I could even see the chimney of the factory where I worked in the distance. This was quite a contrast with my old apartment, here I could only see a corner of the city with nondescript grey residential buildings. And yet I saw a flying dot that indicated bird life, something I¡¯d never noticed while living here, probably because it didn¡¯t fit in my worldview.


    It was as I had never really lived at all in the years that I had spent here. When I was younger all I had cared about were the things on the screens and in Virtual Reality, but I had gradually lost my interest in everything, just as I had gradually lost my contact with all humans and in the end even my AI conversation partners. I had almost become a robot myself.


    A beep indicated a message on my screenphone. ¡°We¡¯re going to the squat tomorrow, meet us at the cross of AZ13 avenue and T896 street.¡± I texted a positive answer back and checked on the e-map whether the place mentioned was indeed the location of the building that I had in mind. Something about the whole fundless plan was both scary and exiting at the same time. I knew the building could as well be empty, but it had made me wonder about those people who lived off the grid of our economy and electronic financial systems. How did they live? How did they get their basic need met? What kind of work did they do? Why had I never even heard of them?


    *


    I came home to a place that wasn¡¯t my home yet, and dropped of my stuff but it felt wrong to sleep there. There was something lonely about my room, so I checked whether Evelith was home. Evidently she wasn¡¯t, she was working in the bar downstairs. I knew that, I had even seen her working half a hour earlier when I had arrived. But I didn¡¯t feel like going to all that noise and to all the people, so I stayed in her room since it was the closest to home that I had at this point, and watching out over the city while being deep in though. Slowly I watched the light of day made way for the artificial colourless twilight of night, until I was sound asleep.


    She must have found me asleep without waking me up, because when the alarm woke me up was lying on her couch again under her old blanket. She herself was still asleep, but there was a breakfast ready for me. I ate it before I went to work.

 3.2 Another Day in the Life in the Endtimes of your Species

    Sunlight shone over The City and people like ghosts passed me by sporadically on my way to the old robofactory. High above me in the sky the raven circled very slowly, as if guarding his own part of The City. A faded billboard with the face of president Emon running in a loop was flickering more than ever, but my eyes were focussed now on the small lichen that was growing on the wall next to it. It certainly must have been there already two weeks ago, but it seems hat I hadn¡¯t been able to see it before. Before my ''awakening'' I had had an inability to notice all these subtle signs that humans weren¡¯t the only organic lifeform in The City anymore. And now I lived in another universe. Well, technically this was still the same world I¡¯d always lived in, but yet everything was unrecognisable now, after all that had happened recently. It¡¯s strange how things change if you look at it with different eyes. Sometimes even the most basic ideas of the world around us are more based in what we assume to know than in what we actually see, and my knowledge of the world had been vastly expanded recently and my perception has grown with that too.


    I also looked at the people I met sporadically differently. I had learned to recognise the ¡®game-created characters¡¯ as Evelith called them, and it was clear now that were not actually humans at all, but more like mere background noise of artificial origin. If you filtered them out the world was suddenly a lot emptier. If you looked good enough, you noticed that almost everyone on the streets these days was fake. The actual people were quite easy to recognise if you knew how, but I didn¡¯t come across them often. Evelith and Velia had been quite right about how rare we actual humans were, or even artificial beings that were sentient enough to pass for them. Today I hadn¡¯t come across any at all, except for Tul the V-junkie girl who seemed to spend a lot of her time outside with V-glasses on, but she had been too far away. Moreover she had been driving an electric step bike while I was only walking, so there was no chance of getting to her. And evidently with her V-glasses and phones she was in another world anyway, and I had no clue what I would have to say to her at all. And still I was happy to see her, it was good to see another actual human. My worldview crisis had left me in a shock of loneliness so I wanted to cling to anything that was Real and Alive, even if it was a weirdo like Tul, but I didn¡¯t really have the social skills to interact with strangers, so everything was conflicted inside of me.


    Deep in thought I arrived at the factory, and checked in with my fund-chip at the entrance gate. I had done this little ritual a countless times before without thinking, but now that I realised how important this little chip on my keyring was it made me shudder a bit every time I used the chip. Imagine that it suddenly wouldn¡¯t work anymore on a bad day¡­ Without it I was literally nothing in this City, a nobody without a life. The only place I could have gone to if I hadn¡¯t met Evelith would have been a Thanatorium¡­ Now in this new life I had much more chances with the Nirvana Ecstasy and its inhabitants, and I knew that there were things as a fundless squat, but I hadn¡¯t even known about these a few days ago. And while there seemed to be people who succeeded in living fundlessly, I certainly wasn¡¯t one of them, and I didn¡¯t really feel like joining them soon either. Whatever their lifestyle was, it would be too alien for me to adapt to, and didn¡¯t really sound like fun to me. It would more or less mean missing everything I¡¯d known all of my life to begin with.


    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.For today I had to exchange a full working day for funds codified in electronics bits and bytes. And so I did what I had aways done for most of my days, looking at endless series of data on displays, giving in numbers, checking procedures, and so on. I knew very well by now that my presence and work didn¡¯t make any difference: The robots were doing their jobs well, and there was an automatic system that solved every problem in no time. Usually I wasn¡¯t even aware of any problems because they were solved instantly without human involvement. The drink-o-matic breakdown that had started my new life had been an exception, but maybe something for actual humans wasn¡¯t really a priority for the non-humans in the factory. All it did was provide drinks for redundant organic lifeforms that did completely unneeded work for purely historical reasons. The whole human population of the factory might have been reduced to just me by now anyway. I didn¡¯t know how long that was the case already, but I might have been the last human here for years unknowingly. No-one would notice if I¡¯d die of thirst, and no-one would care. Robots are efficient in what they¡¯re programmed to do; but no-one had taught them empathy.


    The new thing was that I had realised that I could send messages with Evelith and Leste in between the jobs. No-one here cared for that kind of side activities. Having friends was what made the big difference now, and even though messages weren¡¯t the same as their bodily presence it was something¡­ My head wasn¡¯t with the parameters of machine produce and the procedures anymore, but with the program of the bar, and the plans to contact the mysterious fundless. This meant that time went a lot faster than before, but a working day still was quite hard to sit out.


    Finally the signal came to stop. The machines completely ignored it, but was tolerated to go. I checked out with my fund-chip and walked out of the factory, into the City of ghosts. People like phantoms were passing me, but they didn¡¯t seem present. Old advertisements in endless loops didn¡¯t convince me either. President Emon seemed an echo from a faraway world. The Thanatorium slogans were creepy, but luckily irrelevant to me now, and the unrealistic erotic pictures that announced the Light District were just meh.


    I passed the street with the fake trees, that looked laughable if you really observed them. I had seen some pictures of actual trees in books that I¡¯d borrowed from Velia, and these abominations that I¡¯d seen around me all my life were in no way comparable to them. More ghostly people passed me, and I wondered what would happen if I¡¯d try to talk to them. Would they react in an automated way? Would they just ignore me? I still was too shy to talk to strangers, but the fact that I was asking those questions alone was a whole new world to me. And I had just begon to explore how strange The City could be¡­ enabled me to stay alive, and to stay a part of this dying system. I really wasn¡¯t ready for anything else, and I also supposed that the fundless wouldn¡¯t really accept me as one of them either, the whole lot sounded like a rather closed-off community that didn¡¯t really like the City people.


    This bigger universe hadn''t just given me friends, but also made me realise how alone I was!

 3.3 The almost empty Squat

    The next morning we approached the mysterious building. I was rather nervous:The time for our next adventure was finally there: we would try to contact the fundless to have them join our cause of reviving the human species, and their squat closest to the Light District was our first target now. The composition of our little group was rather unusual: a boring-looking working man in his factory uniform, a long-haired semi-outcast dressed like it was the late 20th century, a casually dressed woman with long black hair, and a levitating self-projected AI monk. No-one seemed to have noticed us though. This might have meant that either all the people here were replaced by AI¡¯s on autopilot that weren¡¯t programmed to notice anomalies, or at best that the humans that were still walking around were in the same trance that I had been in for years. But even I would couldn¡¯t have stopped myself from staring at such a group of people if I had bumped into them in the state of halflife that I had lived in for most of my adult years.


    The building that had been referred to all the time as ¡®the squat¡¯ turned out to be even more ancient than the Ecstasy Nirvana, and in an even worse state. It was made of bricks that once must have had a better colour than the pale greyish they had now, and most of the windows were broken. There was a broken first-generation fundlock in the wooden door, with a weathered paper taped next to it. ¡®Danger¡¯ it said in big capital letters, hand-written with a thick marker and illustrated with a roughly drawn pirate skull, which also gave a very ancient feel. The others didn¡¯t seem to mind this warning and just walked in, so I followed them without letting my fear show. I still had no idea what I could expect, but I supposed that the others did.


    I entered a world unlike any place I¡¯d ever been. The building wasn¡¯t just dusty, but it was also strangely alive with all kinds of non-human organisms like insects and fungi. I even saw spiderwebs, like in an old-fashioned horror-holofilm. I almost expected a ghost or otherworldly entity to suddenly appear in front of us yelling ¡®Booo¡¯, but nothing bigger than a tiny black spider appeared, which was spectacular enough for me. Slowly the tiny eight-legged monster came down from the ceiling on a thread, completely ignoring the giant intruders. I froze up when I saw it, completely taken aback by the first non-human lifeform that I met so closely in my entire life. I heard Evelith chuckle. ¡°Just let it be, it¡¯s completely harmless!¡±


    I didn¡¯t want to lose face so I let the tiny creature be, and proceeded on my way through the squat together with my co-conspirators. ¡°So, who lives here, apart from this creepy tiny eight-legged animal?¡± I asked Leste. ¡°No-one in particular. Maybe no-one at all at the moment. The fundless are nomads without a fixed place to live. We have to check out any of their hideouts that we can find, and this is as good as starting place as any other one. Most others are further away, if we even know where they are. And this particular building is also a neutral zone where they sometimes meet up with, eh, regular people like us who want to trade something, so it¡¯s a safe place for us. Not that that happens very often. And¡­¡± Leste seemed to be the biggest expert here, but he was interrupted by Evelith.


    ¡°Shht. There is something here. Or someone.¡±


    We were silent now, looking in the direction of her pointing finger. Something vague, much bigger than the spider moved in the twilight of a corner, and then hid behind a pile of boxes and empty cans of food.


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    ¡°That¡¯s not an animal.¡±


    ¡°Stay here, I will go looking¡± Evelith said, switching her screenphone to lamp mode. ¡°Won¡¯t it be dangerous?¡± I asked? ¡°I don¡¯t think so.¡± She replied in a confident tone, following up with ¡°Hey, hello, little one.¡± to a tiny human that she had caught frozen in the light of her phone. Huge blue eyes beamed with fear in a small face that seemed almost pale orange in this light, with messy hair of almost the same colour in all directions, a bit like Lestes dreadlocks. She wore strange multicoloured clothes that had seen better times in the past, and seemed to see us as a great danger.


    ¡°Don¡¯t hurt me! Please don¡¯t kill little Vi!¡±


    Evelith turned off the lamp. ¡°We won¡¯t hurt you, little Vi. There is no danger from us.¡± The little creature trembled. ¡°Why would anyone here hurt you? Why would anyone kill you?¡±  She didn¡¯t answer and looked shyly from her to me to San Yaoyao and then to Leste. ¡°Are you alone here? Where are the others?¡± Evelith asked when no answer kame. The child remained silent for a while, and then said one little sentence, so silent it could almost not be heard.


    ¡°There are no others left.¡±


    I heard Leste utter a silent curse, and Evelith turned back to the child to question her more. ¡°What do you mean, no others? You¡¯re only a small kid. You can¡¯t be living alone here.¡± The girl nodded to her. ¡°Little Vi been living here for eight octoweeks, there¡¯s enough food and other stuff here for much longer. The gang left this place when the radical preacherman came with his people. No-one left a phone here and Little Vi don¡¯t have a hackphone myself, so Little Vi couldn¡¯t reach anyone. Little Vi tried to find Zap and Argon but she don¡¯t know her way here. But they were not in the other squat here. And there are killerbots around outside. Little Vi saw them.¡±


    This was a lot of information to process, but for now we had to focus on the child herself. She seemed to have had a rough time, without help from grown-ups and without funds. That was something I wouldn¡¯t even have considered possible. ¡°So did you check the other squats?¡± Evelith asked. She nodded ¡°Little Vi wanted to, but she only found that other one two streets from here, and there was nothing there. So Little Vi been staying here ever since. And Vi been afraid of the fundslaves. They always told Vi that fundslaves are dangerous. Are you people not fundslaves? Are you not enemies of the free people?¡±


    Evelith nodded. ¡°We are fund-users but we are no slaves to anyone or anything. And we¡¯re not enemies to the fundless either. We are looking for them actually with an offer of friendship.¡± The girl was visibly relieved but seemed still suspicious nonetheless. ¡°I¡¯ve heard the names of Zap and Argon before.¡± Leste interrupted. ¡°They were together with Xando last time I heard news from the fundless through my informant on black market stuff. Are you from the Xando gang? I¡¯ve heard good things about them.¡±


    ¡°Y¡­ Yes! Xando is a good man. Little Vi was with his gang. They where the grown-ups who took care of me. But the radical preacherman came, and everyone went crazy. They wanted to kill Xando; He left, and only Zap and Argon followed him methinks. Little Vi hid, and the rest of the group went with the preachers. They seemed to have forgotten Little Vi, and she¡¯s been all alone ever since.¡±


    Leste uttered the same curse again between his teeth. This was very bad news, even though I didn¡¯t really understand what all of it meant.

 3.4 The story of the child

    With a certain unease I lookedstared at my mug of tea. Only a week ago I hadn¡¯t even been in contact with another human in years or heard about the fundless, and neither had I seen a single kid in most of my adult life. I also had never heard about any possibility of a world outside of the City. And now I was drinking ¡®outsider tea¡¯ made of real leaves in a hidden room in a squat with a tiny fundless kid and my new friends Evelith and Leste, plus a levitating AI monk who evidently didn¡¯t drink any liquid since he was mostly just a projection. The strange thing was that it all seemed to make sense somehow. A small amount of time and a few new people made such a world of difference, but at least now I felt alive and human.


    Little Vi¡¯s secret room was hidden indeed. We would never have been able to find it without her. The shy but very smart girl with her enormous blue eyes and messy rust-coloured hair couldn¡¯t be older than nine or so, but it was clear that there was a lot we could learn from her just from observing her. She had been living alone here in this building for almost two months now after the ¡®mad preacherman¡¯ had broken up the Xando gang, and had done so without much trouble even though she wasn¡¯t able to do much outside. The whole building itself clearly held no secrets for her, she even seemed to know a lot more about it by now than even the adults of her own gang, let alone the creepy preacherman and his violent cultists. Which was probably how she had been able to escape them, and their new followers. I had no idea that the fundless had their own religions of death, but now was not the time to ask about such things. There were other questions that were more urgent.


    The secret room wasn¡¯t big, and cramped with all kinds of stuff. There were no windows but Vi had installed tiny diode-lamps working on old eternal batteries scattered everywhere, which lighted up the place in different colours. We sat on wooden boxes and ancient chairs and we drank our tea from china teacups that seemed to belong in a museum. The room must have been a secret hoarding place for generations of smugglers, but the tea itself, which must have come from contact with the outsiders, was relatively recent. She shared it generously with us, even though it would undoubtedly be quite expensive on the black market. Anything from the outsiders was rare and wanted, even by the fundless themselves. But she was probably was too small to understand the significance of such things already.


    It had taken a while to convince the poor girl that we would not harm her, and that not all ¡®fundslaves¡¯ as she kept calling us were evil monsters out to destroy her and the ¡®free people¡¯, as the fundless called themselves. She still didn¡¯t seem to trust San YaoYao much, the fundless generally had a deep mistrust of AI¡¯s in their culture, and she clearly had had very bad experiences with both religion and robots recently. San Yaoyao himself didn¡¯t seem to care much, being his patient and optimistic self. Leste seemed more or less accepted because he knew more of the fundless than we did, even if it was not enough to act natural to an actual fundless kid. She didn¡¯t seem to mind me much, and it was clear that she liked Evelith most, so it was her that was still doing most of the talking. She was still trying to get a coherent view on what had happened with the Xando gang, but the child wasn¡¯t very cohesive in how she explained it.


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    ¡°You stayed with the Xando gang until they left the building because of the preachers?¡± Evelith asked. ¡°Yes, because Xando took care of Little Vi. But the others were not very friendly. Except for Zap and her husband Argon. They were angry most of the time. I don¡¯t know what for. They wanted to go sell the outsider tea to a gang I didn¡¯t know. And when we came to this place again the bad preachers were here. They preached about death and hate and the dark god Fhanfhelos. And then they suddenly tried to kill Xando. He ran away. Zap and Argon too. They caught Mongi and beat him up, but he also ran away. And after a day they went away, they said they were going to the new temple of Fhanfhelos.¡±


    Leste cursed again, but it was San Yaoyao who spoke first. ¡°A temple of Fhanfhelos?¡± He hadn¡¯t spoken yet but his AI voice sounded quite concerned now. ¡°What temple?¡± Little Vi looked at him, still a bit terrified, and hesitated to answer. ¡°Little Vi don¡¯t know. It¡¯s a fundslave religion, so it¡¯s bad. But more free people are converting methinks. The preachers always sound mean and angry. They speak about death for unbelievers, and about seven hells. And they want to go to nirvana or something. If you die for death you get seventy-two bottles in nirvana or something like that. And Fhanfhelos is ugly and evil. Little Vi seen pictures. Xando says he doesn¡¯t exist but the preaches really believes in him.¡±


    ¡°This is worse than I thought.¡± The monk mumbled, more to himself. ¡°This is not good indeed.¡± Affirmed Evelith. ¡°So there are indeed enemies of humanity rising up, even among the fundless tribes, with another dark religion worse than the twin religions of the dark goddesses. We could do without that.¡±And she turned to the little Vi. ¡°They could come back here anytime. This is not a safe place for you. You can¡¯t stay here.¡± The child protested wildly. ¡°Little Vi can¡¯t go anywhere else. Little Vi is safe here in this room.¡± She protested. ¡±safe against humans, but not the killerbots. You know they can scan through the walls.¡± Vi hesitated. ¡°They come back sometimes to patrol around the building, but they haven¡¯t come inside yet.¡± Leste looked grave. ¡°It¡¯s only a matter of time. You come with us. We find Xando.¡± She backed away, still trembling a bit. ¡°You promise that no-one will hurt Little Vi? They always told Little Vi the fundslaves would try to catch Little Vi and lock Little Vi up.¡± Evelith reached out her hand. ¡°We¡¯re not slaves. And we¡¯ll protect you. No-one will lock you up. I promise. On my little pinky.¡± She still wasn¡¯t entirely convinced. ¡°But Little Vi don¡¯t have funds. Little Vi cannot live in the fundworld.¡± ¡°Our building has no fundlocks, even though it¡¯s an official building. You can stay in my room if you want. And you can use the unused concert hall if you want.¡±


    Suddenly I looked at my screenphone. Terrified I said to the others. ¡°I have to run, can¡¯t miss my shift.¡± And then I started running to the robofactory.

 3.5 Vitlon means Life

    It had taken some effort to convince her, but in the end Little Vi had come with us to the Ecstasy Nirvana bar. It wasn¡¯t really a place for kids, but there were still enough unused rooms in the upper floors of the building where she could stay. She had gathered her stuff and some of the food and tea leaves with her. The final plan was to move her into the old concert hall behind the bar and its backstage room but for now we had dropped everything in Eveliths room. It was the best idea that we could come up with for now. Leste and others would have to work hard to make the place ready, which would probably take more than an octoweek. In the meantime little Vi would sleep here. Which also meant that I really had to sleep in my own room from now on.


    Little Vi was probably the biggest shock since my awakening. It had been a rather world-shaking experience to simply get used to other humans, but living with a kid that came from the fundless tribes was a new experience all together, and one full of surprises. I had never anticipated how much life one little kid would be able to bring into a building, even an unconventional one like the Nirvana Ecstasy. And she seemed to be equally eager to learn about our world than we were about hers. She asked a lot of questions but she also could tell us a lot about most aspects of the fundless society. They were organised in gangs of an ever-changing composition, which usually moved from ¡®freehouse¡¯ to ¡®freehouse¡¯ in a nomadic fashion. Being fundless and excluded from any official network they seemed to mostly have an exchange economy without any real currency based on simple stuff like food and tools. They lived from crafts, and even had hidden places in other parts of The City where the vegetable ¡®real food¡¯ was grown or even where animals were bred. These places were so secret that most even Leste hadn¡¯t heard about them, bur Little Vi had seen several of such places, although she could locate none without the help of adults.


    Argon, who had been like a father to her, seemed to be a specialist in non-human lifeforms who knew a lot of both animals and plants, and had taught her a lot about them. Little Vi was very interested in old Velias mint tea, and also in the ancient stove top kettle with steam-whistle that she used to heat her water. Vi also seemed to like old Velia herself and her stories a lot, as if she was much closer to the fundless world than we were.


    We evidently kept her away from the bar and the more ''mature'' things that were happening there as some would call it, but she liked the upstairs floors and the big windows that looked out on The City. Sometimes she sat immovably with some kind of diary and a pencil on her lap, looking at a single bird. It was clear that she was quite good at being on her own, even if she liked our company. She even got used to San Yaoyao after a while.


    A few days after bringing her to the bar I was sitting with her, Evelith and Leste in Velias room. She was mixing tea leaves for Velia to make her mint tea more interesting. Evelith tried, for once more, to find out more about her and tried some more personal questions. ¡°So Zap and Argon are really married? But they¡¯re not your real parents?¡± ¡°Yes, they are married. Some grown-ups are. Is that so weird?¡± Evelith didn¡¯t answer, but something in her eyes seem to lighten up. ¡°Little Vi was found as a baby by someone from the Onga gang, and they took good care of her as the law of the free people says. But when old Onga died the gang fell apart, and then Little Vi was taken in by Zap and Argon. They stayed at the same freehouse as the Onga gang at the time but they joined other gangs from time to time, and they had some work in the freehouses and in the secret growing places.¡±Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    ¡°So Where does your name come from?¡± I asked. She looked at me, not really understanding. ¡°My real name is Vitlon. But that¡¯s not a good name for a little girl. It more sounds like a name for a dumb robot. So I have them call me ¡®Vi¡¯.¡± Evelith nodded. ¡°Vitlon is a strange name for a girl indeed. Where do you fundless get those strange names?¡± She seemed a bit offended. ¡°My name is not weird! Little Vi has a good name! The free people have normal names. It¡¯s you fundslaves who have weird names. But Vitlon is not a free peoples name, it¡¯s a name in Ina, outsiderspeak. It means ¡®life¡¯. They called me that when they found me as a baby, Little Vi was almost dead but she lived on.¡±


    Leste stared at her. ¡°Outsiderspeak?¡±, He muttered.


    ¡°Yes, the outsiders speak it.¡± She said, as if it were the most normal thing on Earth. ¡°You know the language of the outsiders?¡± He asked. Everyone in the room stared at her in astonishment but she didn¡¯t seem to notice. ¡°Only a little  bit. Onga knew how to speak it. Orra also knows it, and he taught it to us when Little Vi was a kid. He has been outside for years before he came back to the Onga gang. Some say he even moved back when the gang broke up. Haven¡¯t seen him seen him ever since.¡±


    ¡°So there really are outsiders?¡± Evelith said half asking, half stating an obvious truth. ¡°And they speak another language¡­¡± She paused, and Vitlon corrected her: ¡°No, Not one language. They have a lot of languages. They live in big gangs like the free people, and they have different languages. Sometimes they live in small cities in the wilderness, or travel around like we free people do. Orra only knew their most important language, Ina. It¡¯s also the language they use between different gangs. Little Vi can understand and speak Ina a bit.¡±


    ¡°Is it normal for the fundless to speak outsiderspeak?¡± Velia asked. ¡°I¡¯ve never heard of that before.¡± ¡°No, most free people speak just City-speak like the fundslaves do. No-one else in the Xando gang knew Ina. But some of the traders do. And some of the outsiders speak City-speak. But they also say that some of them outsiders don¡¯t like it if we know their languages.¡±


    I looked at Evelith and Velia, who were as stumped as I was. All this information seemed as new for them as it was for me. ¡°Do you know how to reach the outsiders?¡± Vitlon nodded negative. ¡°No. It¡¯s a big secret. Only the traders know. The wall is impossible to get through. And it can kill you if you try.¡±


    ¡°Have you heard of Lahkap?¡± Velia asked. Little Vi seemed surprised and hesitated whether she would answer. ¡°But, that¡¯s a secret name. You should not know about it!¡± Velia nodded. ¡°I know some things that few know, but less than the people in your gang.¡± ¡°The adults never used it when they knew Little Vi heard them. But they say it¡¯s a door to the outside world. No-one knows where it is, only the traders who keep it a secret. And the outsiders don¡¯t want city people coming over. Little Vi heard they hate the fundslaves. They don¡¯t really like the free people much even. They hate the City and all its people. It¡¯s still about the war.¡±


    ¡°What war?¡± I asked. ¡°That can only be the war of the Earth between the City and the Earthling-coalition, 300 years ago or so.¡± Velia said. ¡°But the enemy was completely wiped out, not?¡± I mumbled. ¡°The rebels were killed and all of the wilderness and sea was turned into City.¡±


    ¡°Do you really believe that propaganda, Adaman?¡±


    I couldn¡¯t answer more than. ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡±

 3.6 Lonesome Georges lonely hearts club band

    ¡°Look what we¡¯ve found! Come and see!¡± Leste said as out of nothing. I stood up from my bar table where I was drinking a drink-o-mat ¡®lemonade¡¯ to join him in a messy room behind the bar. He had been cleaning out a backstage hall with Niaruk for our little guest, and there he had found a collection of ancient musical instruments. There were strange oldfashioned things that I couldn¡¯t name, but I also recognised a guitar, and electric piano, different types of drums and more things that seemed to have materialised straight out of one of the ancient projections. ¡°Do they still work?¡± I aksed. ¡°I don¡¯t know, but they are interesting for sure is just for decoration, and it might even be good for the bar if we can get them to work. Let¡¯s try this keyboard first. There are still tutorials on the webs for every instrument.¡± He plugged a retro-looking piano in, but when it didn¡¯t do much he went looking for another adaptor. "''200 V'', man, where do we get an adaptor for that?"


    Meanwhile Niaruk, the parttime bar helper, who had been putting loads of old menu cards in garbage bags seemed to have found even more interesting stuff. ¡°Look here. Old books.¡± He said to no-one in particular. And indeed, he held some old paper books in his hands. Leste put down his keyboard that didn¡¯t work with the other adaptor either to browse through the titles ¡°Yeah, baby! ¡®War of the worlds¡¯, ¡®1984¡¯, ¡®The late great planet Earth¡¯, ¡®Lonesome George''s lonely hearts club band¡¯, ¡®Fauna and Flora of Lichtenstein¡¯, ¡®Great philosophers of the 22th century¡¯, ¡®The last of the pachyderms¡¯¡­¡± He went on an on with the titles, all of which were unknown to me, until he handed one to me. ¡°Ah, here, a copy of ¡®Gilgamesh¡¯, that''s for you¡­¡±It was very old indeed, and while I investigated it he went on looking through books and papers, some of which were in a very bad stated. ¡°And music sheets to the greatest hits of the 21th century. Might be interesting with that baby over there if we can get it to work.¡± He looked lovingly at the keyboard. There''s a piano-rolls scanner too that can read those, and play them on the keyboard, but the challenge is to learn how to play it yourself. Recording music was the beginning of the downfall of experiencing music from within." He said mysteriously.


    While I was browsing the oldest fiction story Leste and Niaruk kept finding other treasures. ¡°Look, here. This one is more recent, from City Time.¡± he said, bowing down to get another one. ¡°What?¡± I asked. Actual printed books had been exceedingly rare in the City Era, and ebooks had been the norm for many centuries since long before that even. He nodded. ¡°Yes, one of the forbidden books even, so it might be interesting: ¡®The true story of the neo-indigenous war¡¯, by Analec.¡± He gave it to Leste, who mumbled dismissively ¡°I have the e-version on an offline harddisc. Hasn¡¯t everyone read it already?¡± It seemed Niaruk hadn¡¯t either, but he gave it to me. ¡°Come, Adaman, you read it first. You were wondering about the outsiders I heard from ev.¡±


    ¡°The neo-indigenous war?¡± I asked. ¡°Yup. The one before the beginning of City Time, between the City and the Earthling-coalition. there¡¯s a lot of misinformation about it still. Like the idea that the whole other side was eradicated. The book stops around the point where we lost all contact, but it¡¯s clear that there must have been survivors of the Earthling tribes, and what¡¯s even more interesting: it also talks about the wall!¡± Leste said. ¡°Does it talk about the door to the outsiders that you mentioned recently, Lahkap or what was its name?¡± I asked? He nodded no. ¡°Nothing about what¡¯s behind the wall now. But it talks about the motives of the Earthling coalition, which is why the book is on the forbidden list. Any copy of it on the internet or on any device that¡¯s online gets erased immediately.¡± ¡°What? Books get erased?¡± Now it was the time for Niaruk to be surprised. ¡°Is that new to you? Why do you think we have our offline harddisks and old e-readers with a disabled connection here in the bar? There¡¯s automatic scanners in all of the net that automatically erase forbiden books, like forbidden history books, books of the old religions, or anything that could be subversive. Some books are even replaced automatically by prez. Sumwams ¡®City Doctrine¡¯.¡± The City Doctrine was a book that everyone knew, but the days that people too it seriously were far in the past now. ¡°Yuck, I thought they didn¡¯t like religious fanaticism.¡± Niaruk grinned. ¡°It¡¯s religious fanaticism if it¡¯s someone elses idea. This is the noble City Doctrine, remember? Science and progress and unification of the human species and yadda yadda. You see what it has led to, slowly going the way of Lonesome George himself.¡± ¡°Who on Earth was that even?¡± He grinned. ¡°A tortoise, a very big one, some kind of giant tortoise somewhere in the 20th or the 21th century or so, and the endling of his species. After him it was over for his kind.¡± I stared at the book, which had a tortoise on it, and other animals ¡°The last of the giant tortoises?¡± I asked. ¡°No, there were still giant tortoises later, but the last of his species of giant tortoises from Pinta Island. The very last of his kind. Imagine being the very last of your species.¡± Niaruk said. ¡°It was an animal, he couldn¡¯t.¡± I said. ¡°And some weeks ago you were a human and you thought that all the programmed AI memories around you were actually alive while they weren¡¯t even sentient¡­¡± He remarked, and I kept silent, staring at the book. He was right.


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    ¡°It¡¯s a kind of theatre play, rather philosophic actually, with Lonesome George and some other endlings having dialogues about the meaning of life somewhere in an afterlife location. It¡¯s rather depressing, but it was very popular in the second half of the 21st century. People then thought it was bad already because some species were gone, what would they think when they would see our noble City with no non-human Earthlings in at all?¡± I didn¡¯t answer, looking at another 21st century book. It had actual photographs of animals, plants and whole landscapes made of only nature. Certainly I knew most of those from my infoscreen, but I looked at it with new eyes. Did things like this still exist? Was there more than the raven and a few little plants. Would there really be whole landscapes made by nature and not man left somewhere, where animals ran free? Behind the wall? Lahqap or what was the name? And what was Berla?


    I suddenly heard a female voice behind me. ¡°Aren¡¯t you forgetting that you promised to take the little one to the supermarket? Come Adaman, it¡¯s time.¡± I hadn¡¯t noticed Evelith and little Vi entering. I looked at little Vi, who looked strange in her City style kids clothing. Where had Evelith even found it? ¡°I had forgotten that with all those old books. Look!¡± I showed her my copy of Gilgamesh, and ¡®the neo-indigenous war¡¯.¡± She took most interest in the second one. ¡°Ah, the uncensored original version. Can I read it too if you¡¯re finished? And please hide it and don¡¯t take it outside. Prez Emon probably won¡¯t like the idea of this one still being round.¡± I nodded. ¡°But come, supermarket time for you and Little Vi.¡±

 3.7 A Supermarket well past Expiry Date

    I left Leste and Niaruk with the newfound books and ancient instruments to go the supermarket with Little Vi. Being fundless she had no knowledge at all of the society of us ¡®fundslaves¡¯, as she still kept calling us. Being a curious kid she found it all quite intriguing, although she had a lot of critique too often. It had been a bit of a relief that she hadn¡¯t been interested that much in what happened in the bar itself when it came to the more adult stuff, except for some musical projections that Leste put on especially for her when no-one else was there. She seemed to like very old music and videos, and she could sometimes be found humming 20th century rock¡¯n roll in a corner or in the big window while working in her diary writing in stange handwritten letters.


    Everything about her was a clash of worlds to me. Even the smallest certainty that had always been normal for me could be completely alien to her, and the opposite was true too. Just walking the supermarket of the Light District would be quite an adventure when done with someone who had never been able to walk around openly, let alone enter any building with a fundlock. Sometimes she was mortally afraid of things that I didn¡¯t even notice, which made me wonder if I had been naive all my life about these too. The shady humanoid shapes that passed us that I always had taken for fellow citizens and recently had learnt to interpret as ¡®game created characters¡¯ as Evelith called them for example were investigated with a lot of suspicion. We even had to take a longer way because she refused to use a street with armed cameras that I had never even given the smallest thought to. Walking around with her was quite the adventure indeed.


    In the end we arrived safely at the supermarket nonetheless. Inside she looked her eyes out with all the new stuff. First she only had eyes for the food, and then she was fascinated my fundchip, that I always use automatically. By definition our whole fund-system was a completely unknown world to her that she wanted to understand, but in the bar she hadn¡¯t had much chance yet to look at how we ¡®fundslaves¡¯ worked with our chip. Even though she was rather afraid of the whole thing she was fascinated nonetheless. ¡°So how do the evil funds work? Little Vi has never looked at fund-chip before. The free people tell scary stories about them but I don¡¯t think they ever seen them.¡± I showed my chip to her, which she investigated eagerly but with a hint of suspicious guilt, and with the carefulness one would have towards an alien artifact that might possibly contain unknown and unnamed horrors. She even peeked over her shoulder as if someone of her people were spying on her, but as far as I could make out no-one was taking note of us in this almost empty place, where there was a smaller range of food for sale than I had ever seen, even though a lot of the synthetic foodstuff had an almost endless shelf life.


    ¡°The use is simple.¡± I told her. ¡±I just need to put the chip in the reader. Very simple and old technology that humans have been using for ages. The chip knows how much I have because it connects to the bank through the interwebs or something like that.¡± If I had known more about how the fundchip worked exactly I would have given more explanation, but I realised that I didn¡¯t really know much about it. I had used it for all my life but never really thought about it. It was still enough to satisfy the kid¡¯s curiosity. She stared from the chip in my hand to the almost empty shelves of the food department, still a bit awed. Coloured boxes with artificial factory-made food were still found here and there in between the empty space and dust. Thing had been growing worse for a very long time already, but I¡¯d never noticed it before.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    How is it possible for a man to not see that the world around you is falling apart completely?


    For Little Vi herself it was her first visit to a store, so didn¡¯t seem to see any problem and observed everything carefully. Entering a real building of the fundslaves, as she called it herself was enough of an adventure for her. She seemed to have given the Nirvana Ecstasy a special position already, not part of the world of the ¡®free people¡¯, but not really part either of the evil world of the dangerous fundslaves that she still feared. But for now her curiosity about the unknown world was bigger than her fear. Pointing at an old display that promised a discount on all Selyon-colore products she asked ¡°What¡¯s that?¡± I shrugged. ¡°It¡¯s just a brand of food. They have all kinds of promising names, and it¡¯s all completely assembled molecule by molecule in the factory, none of it is based on the old foods like the plant and animal products of the free people. 100% artificial for better satisfaction and more nutrition. I usually buy the old food though, even though it¡¯s mostly fake. At least it looks like actual food¡± She looked at a jar with fake egg slices. ¡°But none of this is real, is it? I mean, nothing¡¯s made from actual living things?.¡± ¡°No, all of it is made in factories and laboratories. Some things are made with cellular cultures, others are completely synthetic. They contain all the needed nutrients for the human body, and are composed to provide the ultimate balance to all of our organs.¡± Little Vi didn¡¯t seem impressed by that. She read the slogan, mumbling: ¡®only barbarians eat other lifeforms! No cruelty to fungi, plants or animals! Our food is 100% synthetic!¡¯ and added ¡°Little Vi don¡¯t like this.¡±


    I looked at the tiny but highly opinionated mini-human in front of me, slightly amused. ¡°Why don¡¯t you like it?¡± - ¡°It feels bad to little Vi. Humans are not robots. Humans should be part of nature. We are living beings in the web of life. Free people eat vegetables whenever they can, even if some gangs are vegitarinists, people who refuse meat. Whenever you can, eat real plants!¡± She said. ¡°But nature has been done away with. That¡¯s civilisation?¡± I said. She wasn¡¯t convinced. ¡°And humans has been almost done away with too. Is that a good thing? Maybe the civilisation of your fundslaves is a bad idea.¡±


    ¡±¡­¡±


    I didn¡¯t know what to answer, so I picked boiled ¡®eggs¡¯, some cans of ¡®tomato sauce¡¯, funny pasta in all shapes that I thought she¡¯d like, and some good oldfashioned cell-meat, which was the only organic thing with a short shelf-life that was still available. Apparently it was still popular enough in the Light District, which still had a population of living humans. I knew the supermarket behind the factory didn¡¯t carry it anymore. After some more discussions on the morality of eating living things we went to the check-out machine, where the fundchip inevitably won her attention again. ¡°Where do you get one of those?¡± she asked. ¡°Everyone gets one when they are born. You need a City Code to make it work though, and be in the computer system as alive. If you find an old one from a dead person it wouldn¡¯t work.¡± ¡°So Little Vi cannot have one, but she could use one from a fundslave if they borrow me one?¡± She asked. ¡°Technically, yes. Except when there¡¯s an iris scanner that checks whether you have the right eyes that go with the identity.¡± I said. But I don¡¯t think anyone would ever lend their fundchip to anyone. It¡¯s like, unthinkable, for us. Like a taboo. You don¡¯t share your soul with anyone.¡±


    ¡°You are indeed slaves to the fundchip.¡± She said.

 3.8 Everyday Killerbots on the Way Home

    We took the longer way back from the supermarket to avoid some armed cameras that Little Vi seemed mortally scared of. There was something extremely world-shattering about this tiny human, and even just walking around with her made me question everything I¡¯d known for all my life even more than the Nirvana Ecstasy had done. Not only did she look at everything completely different from what I¡¯d always known, but she also constantly noticed things I didn¡¯t even see, and at times she panicked because of very regular everyday stuff. I hadn¡¯t fully realised before how much The City was a completely different world for those outside of the fund-system than for those who had lived inside of it all their lives. Most of my life I hadn¡¯t even know such a thing was a possibility because the whole system was so all-pervasive in both my daily life and my worldview that I wouldn¡¯t be able to imagine something outside of it. But now the kid I was walking around with had grown up a world far outside of the territory of the Almighty Fundchip that dictated so much of our world. Every single innocent remark she made could be an occasion to shake the box I had been locked up in most of my life in even more.


    In silence we walked through Q13 street. She had become rather tired and so she had finally stopped talking, so I was left to my own thoughts again, instead of having to answer an endless series of questions about even the most evident details of life in The City.


    The weather was turning to grey again, with a light mist that blurred away the world around us and made everything like look like a ghost of reality. We turned at the corner from Q13 street into Z7821 street when suddenly she grabbed my hand, looking alarmed at something further in the street. ¡°Stop!¡±, she hissed. I stopped without understanding what was happening, and peeked around. There were several shady non-people and one sleepy policebot in Z7821 street, but nothing particularly alarming. ¡°Why?¡± I finally asked. ¡®The killerbot!¡± She pointed in the direction of the policebot, and seemed a bit shaky. I looked again at the old android, but I didn¡¯t see anything that would warrant her reaction. ¡°That¡¯s not a killerbot, Vi, it¡¯s just a standard police robot. They¡¯re not dangerous! I walk past them all the time¡± I said naively. She let go of my hand. Shaking her head in disbelief and staring at me in horror. ¡°Maybe not for the fundslaves, but they hunt the free people down and take them away whenever they can.¡± She finally said, shivering all over. ¡°People I kne have been taken by them!¡±


    I looked better. It had a vaguely humanoid shape, and was indeed armed with a lot of weapons, including a built-in bullet rifle, stun gun, precision flamethrower and circuit-blocking waves. It was true that if it wanted, it could kill or disable any human or synthetic lifeform in just seconds, but it certainly didn¡¯t look like hunting anything down right now as it stood there rather passively, and I had never heard of a policebot attacking anyone. They had always been more like a street ornament than anything else, and some of them had been standing on the same spot for as long as I could remember.


    She grabbed my hand again to stop me from going further. ¡°Stay away and let¡¯s go now that we still can. A killerbot is no problem if they just see us, but if they scan you you¡¯re toast. Little Vi has learnt these things. If you don¡¯t have the right chip on you they attack and take you away. Xando always says distance is most important. More than 10 meter distance is the rule.¡± I nodded, and understood her point. 10 meters was the distance at which it was possible to scan someone''s fundchip wirelessly if you had the right equipment. The Nirvana Ecstacy had nothing like that, but it wouldn¡¯t be unrealistic to assume that if there was anyone at all who was armed with a hypersensitive fundchip-scanner, it would be a policebot like this one, passive or not. ¡°We take the other street. The thing is still filming in passive mode and hasn¡¯t had the chance to scan me or you.¡± I said. Suddenly it dawned on me that association with the fundless alone might be a dangerous thing, and that hypersensitive fundchip-scanners could be everywhere. Just walking around with this kid might be risk¡­ If I didn¡¯t watch myself I could found myself in immense trouble. What happened with traitors of The City? Certain criminals got deleted and blocked from the fund-system. Would that be the risk for me too now? Was merely hanging around with the fundless enough be become fundless yourself? With the whole ¡®all you see on your screenphone is adverts for the thanatorium¡¯ scenario and all? The idea alone horrified me.This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.


    ¡°So the fundless only use streets without cameras or policebots?¡± I asked her. ¡°We never take streets with killerbots or filming machines; it¡¯s something you learn as a small kid. Very important. It¡¯s very strange to know you people don¡¯t do that.¡± I tried to understand the enormous scope of that small detail of their life: cameras and policebots were quite common in The City. It meant that a lot of places were off-limits for them. ¡°You can attack them if you have a scan-blocker. The tribe of Xando had one. But Xando said killing killerbots is a bad idea. It attracts more of them. And it gets attention from the fundslaves and their scary leaders.¡±


    I turned the corner to prez Emon¡¯s 123th plaza when I heard a weird sound, as if some kind of otherworldly monster shrieked at me. I froze, but it was just the raven again. ¡°I love these birds.¡± Said Little Vi, as if the flying black animal that stared at me with intelligent eyes was the most normal thing in the world. ¡°I¡¯ve only seen it for the first time just before we met you.¡± She looked at me. ¡°They say the fundslaves kill the animals whenever they meet them.¡± ¡°No, no-one I know has ever killed any animals. The government has eradicated them all, centuries ago. We don¡¯t even believe in them. Seeing one was a big shock to me, as if I was suddenly transported into a n ancient movie.¡± ¡°We¡¯ve always been their friends. The free people know where the birds nest, and they feed them. We used to hide them, but now there are free animals too. There¡¯s more pigeons than ever, and the raven is new. There¡¯s even been little brown ones. And mice.¡± ¡°So you say that the fundless have been bringing in animals?¡± She nodded no. ¡°Most of the new animals must have come by themselves. The free people have white pigeons and chicken birds, and rabbits. Not ravens and mice. These are wilderness animals from the outsider world. There must be a hole in the wall somewhere.¡±


    The bird looked at me as if I were the stranger, let out another otherworldly shriek and opened her wings. It disappeared into the mist a dark ghost from a past that shouldn¡¯t even exist.

 3.9 Ancient Emoji Pasta

    ¡°You brought the food¡±, asked Evelith when I entered the kitchen, which I answered affirmatively. The bar was empty, and Little Vi was watching a performance of an enormous orchestra led by a frantic guy in a strange suit who seemed to be waving a magical wand. Evelith was doing the dishes, so I helped her drying the beer glasses and plates of the bar. This sort of work was completely alien to me, since it was normally done by machines or robots, but it felt strangely satisfying to me.


    When the last beer glass was washed and dried Evelith inspected the ¡®eggs¡¯, ¡®tomato sauce¡¯ and the rest of the food, and then put them in the fridge. She smiled when she saw the funny pasta. ¡°Emoji smileys, hearts, and cute animals. This really is something from another world that they still sell for old times¡¯ sake. Most of the depicted animals have been extinct for centuries, if they even existed at all in these silly chibi-forms. And smiles, well..¡± I knew what she was trying to say, but I found it clear that she was wrong in her pessimism now. ¡°You¡¯re smiling at me yourself now, Ev. You have been since the day we met. The kid has been smiling too a lot today.¡± I pointed out. She looked thoughtfully at the pasta, and then at me. ¡°But you hadn¡¯t seen a real smile for Amaya-knows how long before you came walking into this bar. This place is a relic from other times. Like the pasta, and you are becoming one too.¡± I picked out something that looked like a tiny cartoon bird from the pasta. ¡°But the old times can come back. We need to trust that they will. I¡¯ve seen the black raven again on the way back home. Things are changing. If even the birds can come back it must mean there are other animals too left somewhere; that they aren¡¯t all gone. Maybe if we find that door of Lahkap we¡¯ll find a world where animals are still alive. Maybe there are still tortoises and elephants and what are they called somewhere? At least there are chicken birds and mice in the buildings of the fundless according to Miss Vitlon over there, so if those are preserved inside The City who knows what else has survived in the world on the other side of the wall.¡± ¡°I¡¯ve always been told that the Earthling coalition was completely eradicated in the great war, and that their territory was burned down and assimilated into The City. But the mere existence of the wall proves that wrong. It must just have been propaganda. I have no idea what¡¯s on the other side, I¡¯ve only heard rumours of trees and animals. But I don¡¯t know what we can expect beyond those pigeons and ravens, and I also don¡¯t know if we¡¯ll even be able to find that Lahkap door, even if it would exist. And there is the possibility that the outsiders are indeed getting killed by killerbots as our little friend calls them.¡± Her smile was gone now.


    ¡°Don¡¯t say that. There must be hope! There always is hope!¡± I replied. ¡°That¡¯s my line.¡± She said, pointing her finger at me and almost touching my nose. I put the pasta bird back in the bag. In the background the orchestra reached a crescendo. ¡°So why, if you can get food like your bread from the fundless, do we need to visit those squats to find them? Can¡¯t we just ask the people who sell it to Leste?¡± She looked tired. ¡°No, it¡¯s not that simple. They don¡¯t want to open up their world to outsiders. They don¡¯t trust us. We will need to work hard to make them trust us.¡± Meanwhile the orchestral piece was over, and now an annoying 22th century robostep tune filled the room. Little Vi had disappeared to the backstage, probably to check out the instruments in the backstage. Or otherwise the books, I knew she wanted to read some of the historical books of nature in earlier times.


    She came closer and whispered ¡°Hey Adaman, I want to talk to you alone some time, do you have time to have a drink with me elsewhere?¡± I looked in her eyes, that seemed to reflect the whole universe. ¡°Not today, I need to work tonight, but tomorrow night would be fine.¡± I said, a bit uncertain about what she wanted. ¡°Okay, tomorrow night we¡¯ll go out. I¡¯ll show you more of the district, so be dressed for it.¡± She said. What was she planning? Going out? As in a date?This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    ¡°What do you want? A date?¡± She smiled again. ¡°Nothing like that. I just want to talk with you without all the people of the Nirvana Ecstasy around. Change the scenery for once. And relax a bit, we¡¯re all so serious lately.¡± She looked in my direction but was focussed on nothing at all. ¡°Just as friends, don¡¯t get stupid ideas.¡± She said.


    ¡°That¡¯s noted.¡±


    *


    When I went to check in the backstage-room a bit later I heard someone play on a musical instrument. It was the girl, who was playing on the guitar, while Niaruk observed everything with hungry eyes and ears. ¡°You can play music?¡± I asked. ¡°Yes, the free people love to play music, and every squat has different instruments. Most of the tribes have instruments too that they take with them. Don¡¯t the fundslaves play music?¡± Niaruk answered for me. ¡°We don¡¯t. We forgot how to play the instruments. I try to do it sometimes, but I¡¯ve never had anyone who could teach me. Leste also tries but apparenly we¡¯re very bad compared to you.¡± ¡°I¡¯ve never heard an actual human play music. Music is something you listen to in The City. Either recorded long ago or played by the computer. But I¡¯ve never heard actual live music.¡± She looked at me, incredulous. ¡°But, all these projections, most of them have people playing.¡± She said. ¡°I know, but these are ancient videos. And I¡¯ve only been here for a few weeks. It is all very new for me. I really never thought of making music myself. I only have listened to it from speakers.¡±


    ¡°You fundslaves really must have a boring life if you can¡¯t even play music. She said, and she started playing full chords on the guitar. I vagely recognised it as one of the old songs. ¡°Please, teach me!¡±  Niaruk said. She showed what she had been playing and Niaruk tried to write it down, and then he took the guitar to practice. When he kept on repeating the short line she had shown him very clumsily she lost her interest in the music herself, and went through the pile of old books. ¡°These books with plants and animals are very interesting. They are better than those in the squat. Can I read them and take them to Eveliths room tonight!¡± She asked ¡°I suppose so.¡± I said. ¡°I know this one.¡± She said, pointing to the copy of ¡°Lonesome George¡¯s lonely hearts club band. ¡°That is this story of dead animals discussing in the world after death about what went wrong, and about how to take revenge on the fundslaves.¡± ¡°Wasn¡¯t it on all humans in general?¡± I said. ¡°The fundless and the outsiders are friends of nature.¡± She said dismissively. ¡°The book is written long before there was a difference between fundless and fund-users, long before the Earthling coalition even.¡± I pointed out. ¡°That tortoise would not know the difference between both of us and a wild outsider if they exist.¡± She fell silent for a few seconds, looking at the picture of the giant tortoise on the cover. ¡°Nah, animals are smarter than that. Especially those who can talk. And everyone who has had a good life gets superpowers in the afterlife.¡± She said. That last one was new to me. She saw my confusion. ¡°That¡¯s what Xando told Little Vi. But maybe fundslaves are never good enough to enter afterlife. Bad people are sent to the dark goddesses and dissolved in the sea of slime.¡± All of this was new to me, and since I had no idea how serious those beliefs were to her I didn¡¯t reply. It was better that I didn¡¯t offend her too much if that was indeed what her community believed, but it was clearly nonsense.


    Or wasn¡¯t it?

 3.10 More Real Beer at the One Night Stand Bar

    Even with its dwindling population the Light District never really went to sleep. The hour was well after the end of my late shift, but the whole area still bathed in the dim twilight of the satellites, and the flashy colours of neon and diode-lights. People like ghosts passed all the time, some of them transparent even. I felt rather uneasy about where Evelith was taking me: I would never have entered a place myself with the name ¡®One Night Stand Bar¡¯ in antique neonlights above the door, and a couple of stick-men embracing horizontally in primal neon colours above that name. But she had been rather persistent, even to the point of making sure we were dressed to the occasion of going out, so I had no choice. We went in and she found us a table far from the windows.


    ¡°Why on Earth did you take me here?¡± I asked, and She smiled mysteriously again. ¡°Ah, nothing special actually. I just wanted to be away from the Nirvana Ecstasy and to be alone with you to talk for a while.¡± ¡°And why can¡¯t we just do that in my room? Or in yours?¡± She shuddered. ¡°The child is sleeping in my room. Yours is just too messy to be comfortable. And we might meet other interesting people here with news from other places. And seeing more of the world is always interesting. I haven¡¯t had an occasion to go out in a while. If you¡¯re always in a bar one easily forgets to really enjoy any of the nightlife¡­¡±


    She spoke of ¡®all the nightlife¡¯, but that was quite optimistic as a description of what was going o,. Even with all the ghostly people passing most buildings in this street were notably empty on what should have been a peak moment of activity in the Light District. In fact the ¡®One Night Stand Bar¡¯ was one of the few active establishments left in the whole Light District, more active than the Ecstasy Nirvana even. And the Light District was one of the last places frequented by actual humans in the reachable part of The City, I had concluded by now.


    This bar was a completely different place from the Ecstasy Nirvana. There were no dancers or projection shows, but the music was equally bad as the stuff Yelati and her colleagues liked to ¡®dance¡¯ to sometimes. I knew Evelith had gotten used to this district and all the stuff that was going on in it without becoming a part of it, but it still disoriented me and reminded me of things I had pushed out of my memory long ago, thing that hadn¡¯t even been real in the first place. She noticed my confused state so she started the conversation herself.


    ¡°Come on boy, if you can relax in the Ecstasy Nirvana you can relax here too. It¡¯s the same kind of place.¡± I looked nervously at her. ¡°I came there for one beer that night, nothing more, and I stayed for you as a friend. Not for the nirvana part nor for the ecstasy. And I don¡¯t need no one night stands either.¡± She smiled. ¡°Ah, the name says that it used to be the place where people could pick up strangers for one night stands indeed. But I assume that everyone who¡¯s left here in the neighbourhood generally knows each other quite well by now, so that might not really work anymore¡­¡± She paused and looked teasingly at me. ¡°But hey, I¡¯ll take the most handsome man here home with me tonight, hah!¡± I gave her an ice-cold look back that she ignored. ¡°It¡¯s just that this is the best bar around that¡¯s still open and where the people can be trusted I¡¯m afraid. And sitting outside in the dark is a stupid idea¡­¡± I didn¡¯t reply, listening to the music in the background that was lowering its tempo. ¡°I got used to the nirvana ecstasy too¡­¡± I mumbled. It seems I was lightening up already. Or maybe I was just giving up. The place was not my style and the music was bad, but it was relaxing indeed to be here with just Evelith; without having Leste, the flying monk and the kid around. I was still adapting to humanity and adjusting to the company of others again, and for some reason it was easier to be social with just her without the others around.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    It didn¡¯t seem like she really had something specific to discuss, but time seemed to pass fast while we were chatting even without important topics, until an unknown female voice from behind Evelith broke the moment. ¡°Since when are you, of all possible people alive, picking up the men here before I can get to them, Ev?¡± I saw Eveliths mouth say something like ¡®shit¡¯ without making any sound before she turned to speaker. ¡°Hi Vezlena!¡± She said, sounding a bit tired. ¡°No, I just want to talk to Ad without Les and Yela, and there¡¯s a little fundless kid sleeping in my room too.¡± The woman named Vezlena turned her eyes to me with a rather hungry look that made me uncomfortable. She had a pale skin and short dark hair, and looked like she had stepped out of one of the weirder music videos. ¡°So you¡¯re that new man, Adaman the robo-guy? Les told me about you.¡± She gazed up and down my body and turned to Evelith. ¡°What a waste that you haven¡¯t made a move yet. Can¡¯t I borrow him for a night if you don¡¯t want him?¡± I really wanted to protest, but froze up, and Evelith answered for me, more with her beaming eyes than with words. ¡°Don¡¯t!¡± She looked rather fierce now, more than I was used from her. ¡°What about yourself then, baby? If you¡¯re not even into this fridge of a man, you might like a woman with a broad range of experience more?¡±


    Evelith just ignored her and turned her head towards me. ¡°Never mind Vezlena here, she¡¯s just the one night stand people can pick up when there¡¯s not enough new people here. Gotta keep it real with such a name, not? And I¡¯m not really safer than you are anyway, as you can see¡­¡± She turned back to Vezlena herself. ¡°Can¡¯t you make yourself useful for once, Vez, and bring us 2 beers. The real beers please. I know you have good stuff at the moment. Better than what we have even.¡±


    ¡°Okay, okay!¡± She said, and disappeared, seemingly undisturbed about Eveliths rather brutal rejection. ¡°What was that about?¡± I asked. ¡°Oh, they have some great stuff from the fundless that you need to taste. Old-style beer, with real yeast made from grains. Don¡¯t drink too much of it though, or you might end up wasted enough to fall for Vez and her schemes. Or even for me¡­¡± She winked. ¡°Alcohol makes people do stupid things you don¡¯t want to and I will have to take you home tonight anyway.¡± She smiled teasingly again. ¡°Don¡¯t scare the poor asexual roboman please.¡± I mumbled. ¡°Well, I only meant something stupid like talking with me for hours and becoming my friend and then crashing on my couch like you did before. What are you thinking about, you incredible idiot?¡±

 3.11 Vezlena and Mr. asexual roboman

    I forgot all my reservations about the One Night stand Bar when I tasted the ¡®Real Beer¡¯ that both women seemed quite crazy about. I wasn¡¯t really The City¡¯s most extreme beer drinker, but at least I had had the idea somehow that I knew what beer was supposed to taste like now that I had tasted the beer in the Ecstasy Nirvana. One sip from the liquid Vezlena had brought me had completely shattered that illusion. ¡°Wow, what is this?¡± I looked at Evelith. ¡°I said this was the good stuff, didn¡¯t I? It¡¯s real beer, you know, the stuff that made Enkidu a human being.¡± She winked again. ¡°I see, he was right. Probably much more interesting than that stupid Shamhat woman of him anyway¡­ Who would want to live in a world where women can¡¯t even be friends and are only lust objects?¡± I glanced sideways at Vezlena who said nothing and just sipped from her own real beer. The bar wasn¡¯t empty, but she seemed to have quite a lot of spare time in between the few drinks she had to serve. She mumbled something I could not understand, before she introduced another subject herself.


    ¡°So you really have a fundless kid in the bar at the moment?¡± She asked, and Evelith was the one to answer. ¡°Yes, Little Vi is staying with us now. We¡¯re currently trying to find what¡¯s left of the Xando gang for her. Which might be only three people after the visit of the radical preachers.¡± Vezlena cursed clearly now, in an unknown language. ¡°Would the people who sell you that beer be able to find them, Vez?¡± Evelith asked. She looked unsure. ¡°I can ask, but I only see them in a week, I have no idea where they are now. But this isn¡¯t good news. Not at all. Another religion of death infecting the fundless¡­¡±


    A screenphone beep that indicated a message disturbed our conversation. Evelith took her phone and got up, looking grave. She handed me her own beer. ¡°I have to go back for now. Bar business that you can¡¯t help with. But it would be a waste to drink your beer too fast. And please finish mine for me. I might or might not come back later.¡± She nodded at Vezlena. ¡°And don¡¯t mind her. She¡¯s not as dangerous as she looks actually and she can be quite interesting. Neo-feminists like her still hold to the principle of consent as if it were religious dogma. As long as you don¡¯t agree on doing stupid things while still sober she won¡¯t bother you. But don¡¯t take more of this beer than these two if you want to live tomorrow.¡± She paused for a while, and seemed to think of something else. ¡°And whatever she says, don¡¯t ask for the specials. And make sure you do come home. Otherwise I¡¯ll come back to get you and save Enkidu from Shamhat here¡­ I don¡¯t think you don¡¯t need to have more Enkidu-experiences than you already had at the moment.¡± Vezlena smiled sarcastically. ¡°Shamhat? Me? You¡¯re flattering me, Ev¡­ But please, flatter yourself too and don¡¯t be so possessive with Mr. Asexual roboman here. We neo-feminists don¡¯t only believe in consent, also believe men as well as women can do whatever they want, and they don¡¯t need to be commanded by their not-even-girlfriends. He will be fine. He¡¯s a grown-up human being. Come, go fix your bar! The world needs more Ecstasy Nirvana!¡±


    Evelith left and there I sat with 2 unfinished beers and a possible free one night stand that I would decline in every possible universe, but that could still prove to be an interesting conversation partner after all. ¡°So you and Evelith actually are friends after all?¡± I asked Vezlena. ¡°Yeah, we might have different principles on certain things, but we humans need to stick together now in times like this, don¡¯t we?¡± There was something unnatural about her hair which was almost purplish in this light in combination with the strange blue of her eyes. ¡°I guess so. So all people here in the light district know each other?¡± She nodded. ¡°Well, evidently there¡¯s a lot of anonymous ghost people walking around that might be just game-created characters as Ev calls them, but apart from that, yes. Evelith and Les and all the rest of us fundslaves. Even Wandi and Tul and the other v-junks, though they might be lost to the physical world.¡±Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen Tul. Does she come here too? She hated the Ecstasy Nirnana.¡± I remarked. ¡°Oh no, she won¡¯t enter here. Humans have hurt her too much. They said the had a virtual lover once, better than any human, but I think he disappeared with NeXt-SystenZ.¡±


    ¡°The Anapa guy was actually her lover?¡±


    She stared at me, astonished at my question. ¡°Why else would she like him so much and cross virtual worlds to get him back? Isn¡¯t sex the most important pleasure in this and other worlds¡± And then she paused ¡°Hmm. You asexual roboman probably wouldn¡¯t know. What do you even live for?¡± There was an uncomfortable pause, in which she seemed to stare at me until I said something back and in which I finished my beer. ¡°Most of my life I probably didn¡¯t even live. Now I do. For hope and friendship and everything that makes one come alive.¡± She still looked a bit suspicious. ¡°And you and Ev? What do you want from her? Isn¡¯t she incredibly sexy?¡± I couldn¡¯t negate nor affirm that, even though I knew for sure she was beautiful, especially in the dress she had worn tonight. ¡°She probably is. But she¡¯s just my best friend. She saved me from non-being. What else should there be? Do people need deeper motivations than that?¡± She stared at me, non-comprehensibly. The music went on, with a chorus ¡®a day without sex is a wasted day, honey, so stay with me tonight¡¯. It was an old song, from a commercial for hyperreal VR porn. It brought back very bad memories to me, but her eyes seemed to light up from it.


    ¡°The song is a lie, Vezlana. Don¡¯t get excited. It¡¯s all empty. It¡¯s all fake. Like all of the rest.¡± ¡°So you haven¡¯t always been the asexual roboman?¡± Her eyes were teasing, and I could as well take the bait and confront my own dark past now. ¡°Everyone in The City is bombarded with all that fucking empty porn from a young age. It only gives hyperrealistic emptiness and 4D loneliness. A good way to become impotent and disinterested before you can even think of a relationship.¡± She stared at me without meeting my eyes, and emptied her beer in one gulp. ¡°Ah, well.¡± She finally said, still looking away from my eyes. ¡°I won¡¯t sway you over then tonight. I only hope for dear Ev that she¡¯ll be able to do that when the time is there. She deserves it.¡±


    She looked at her empty glass, and at mine, and the almost-empty glass that had been Evelith¡¯s. ¡°One more? From the house! I like talking to you.¡± I hesitated. ¡°As long as it isn¡¯t the specials Ev warned me about¡­¡± ¡°No, just another squat-brew beer with real grains, but a dark one. Not heavier than this one but with much more taste.¡± She looked into my eyes again, and I gave in.


    It was also the worst temptation that I faced that night.

 3.12 Blues for the Last Generation

    ¡°So, you have been working in your factory all those years, and hadn¡¯t even realised that there were no other humans left?¡± Vezlena said, with yet another of her real beers in her hand. The whole story seemed highly amusing to her, and she was in a very good mood for some reason. I looked at my own glass of Selyont Electrolyte but didn¡¯t answer with more than a nod. ¡°Funny, we thought we had mapped all of the remaining humans a few years ago. The list was much longer then than it is now, but you must have escaped our attention. You probably so robofied that we thought you were a machine.¡± She came closer, with gestures that were probably intended as flirtatiously. ¡±Are you sure you are still a human? Are you even a man?¡± Her teasing finger touched my chest, and her purplish blue eyes were very close to mine now. The music in the background had highly sexual overtones with a repeated ¡®baby, I want you now¡¯ chorus. Even though I was slightly tipsy, and at least theoretically an adult heterosexual male human being the only thing it did was slightly annoy me. I was happy with human companionship, but that was all I felt at the moment. I pushed her finger away. ¡°No, I am not. I¡¯m not a man at all. I¡¯m clearly the next step in the evolution from human to robot. A dead evolutionary line even without procreation.¡± She took the hint and took more distance, but she kept on smiling mysteriously.


    ¡°Stop being so dramatic, my dear Adaman.¡± She said. ¡°You¡¯re still a quality human being and those are rarer than you realise. This Light District here has currently the only population of regular City citizens that¡¯s left, at least within reach. And as it stands now all of us are a dead evolutionary line without procreation as you called it. The rare leftovers of the last generation of humans that disappeared collectively into the Thanatoria over the last fifteen to twenty years. I¡¯m sure humanity has been in decline for centuries, but what you have missed in your lost years after childhood was the climax of depopulation, the silent self-chosen extinction of humanity.¡± Her smile was gone now. ¡°So, the world of my childhood was indeed still filled with humans?¡± I asked her. I had been wondering about that. I had my parents, and a few friends, in a very vague memory. ¡°20 years ago there still were at least as much real humans as fake ones. The tipping point came somewhere after that¡± She said. ¡°So all the people just¡­ disappeared?¡± I mumbled and I emptied my drink abruptly. ¡°They chose death over life our of free will exercising their right to self-determination and human dignity. Didn¡¯t you see the endless rows at the door of the Thanatoria when you were young. Never wondered what that meant.¡± ¡°They exercised their right for self-¡­ Wait!¡± I said. ¡°Now I¡¯m parroting the same propaganda again. They were brainwashed into mass-suicide with all that talk about self-determination and dignity.¡± ¡°Yup. You get it. But somehow you must have been immune to the call of the dark goddesses. Or just too brainwashed to be reached. Or maybe it¡¯s because Amaya and Acosmia are women, and you¡¯re immune to them too.¡± A short smile flickered again on her dark lips, but her eyes remained grave.


    ¡°Yeah whatever! I need more beer for a conversation about this subject. I¡¯m still recovering from finding out¡± She nodded understandingly, and went to the bar to come back with two beers after which we resumed our conversation. ¡°But there are other humans left. The fundless tribes are still there for example.¡± I said. ¡°Yes, they always were a very tiny portion of the population for centuries, and now they might be the greatest group The City has left, ironically, and the only one that still has some kids. But remember what your little guest has told you. A new dark religion is thinning their ranks too. And from my information Lord Fhanfhelos is even harsher than the ladies Amaya and Acosmia. Even without all of them converting their tribes are falling apart. Even the tribe of Xando has disintegrated. And your friend Little Vi probably is one of the last children the tribes here have anyway. Their future is quite bleak as well, and I¡¯m starting to fear for our supplies even if this trend continues.¡± ¡°But Velia said we had to unite the fundless and the City people¡­ For a new hope for humanity.¡± I said hopelessly. ¡°You can try with what¡¯s left of them. Those who will want to talk with a fundslave anyway. Good luck.¡± She said, sarcastically.


    ¡°There must be other people in The City, in other places. They always said it was as big as the planet. Our whole world is covered with The City. There must be others.¡± She smiled darkly. ¡°The whole world covered with The City. You know better than that.¡± I nodded. ¡°Yes, there is a wall, and there are seas, both out of reach from here. And maybe they are just myths. All we see from here is City and more City.¡± ¡°Yes, never wondered about that. We can only walk. All those vehicles you see in films are hardly used anymore. The ghosts ride in them, but they aren¡¯t available for us. Why would someone even feel the need to visit another place? Every district has the same shops, temples, bars, banks, government buildings, thanatoria,¡­ All copies of each other. No reason to get further away from home, since as far as we know every part of The City looks the same. As far as we know, since no-one ever leaves their district except for the fundless tribes who don¡¯t say much about these things. We can¡¯t reach other people outside of this district anyway, whether they exist or not.¡±This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    ¡°What do you mean? Can¡¯t we reach anyone in The City on the interwebs?¡± I asked. ¡°Only if you know their ID already. There are geographical blocks that make it impossible to find people more than 25 City-miles away unless you already have an established connection with them. We have tried everything. I know there must be some humans left in certain game-worlds, but it¡¯s impossible to locate them. No, the only way to reach people is to be close to them. One-on-one contact is the best mode of communication that we have.¡± She winked, but I ignored that. ¡°And the outsiders?¡± I said. ¡°What about them? We don¡¯t know anything about them. They are closed off from the City people, and that mostly includes the fundless too.¡± I thought about my dream. ¡°I saw my ex-girlfriend in a dream. She joined them, married one of them even. And she asked for help.¡± Let¡¯s assume for now that that¡¯s true, Adaman, there is no way to reach them. But we don¡¯t even have proof that the outsiders exists. And dreams are not very reliable, are they? What if I dreamt that I held the new man of the Nirvana Ecstasy in my arms for a passionate night?¡± ¡°You¡¯re irritating, you know.¡± I said. ¡°But the little girl speaks outsider-speak. Her name means ¡®life¡¯ in one of their languages. That doesn¡¯t just mean that they exist, but also that there has been contact, not?¡± ¡°There might have been in the past. But do those outsiders even exist? And didn¡¯t the fundless themselves follow Lord Fhanfhelos into nonexistence recently? Their total numbers was never more than a few hundreds and now it¡¯s rapidly declining too.¡±


    ¡°So you¡¯re saying that as far as you know all of humanity that¡¯s left is the less than 30 people in the Light district and some nomadic tribes that are falling apart, and that¡¯s it? The rest has been replaced by programs and androids without sentience?¡± ¡°Yup. That¡¯s it. You and me and Ev and Les and Velia that little girl of yours are a sizeable part of what¡¯s left of humanity.¡± She looked at her screenphone when a beep notified her of a message. ¡°It¡¯s your girlfriend. She¡¯s coming back.¡± She grinned. ¡°She isn¡¯t¡­¡± I began, but she interrupted me. ¡°Your loss¡­ Whatever, she¡¯s coming anyway to take you home I think. And you¡¯ll have some explaining to do to your non-girlfriend about those extra beers¡­ Well, enjoy that last one, I have to serve the other guest again for now.¡± She went to another table where a man and a robot seemed to have an animated conversation, and left me alone with my thoughts. How long would it take for me to realise the reality of the world that I was living in? That the few people here might really be among the very last humans on Earth? That almost all of the people I had seen the last 15 years had been ghosts. Was there even anything that could be done even if we would be able to connect with the fundless? Or was the end of humanity inevitable, with me and Evelith and the few others here as the last sparks before eternal darkness would fall over my species, and over sentient life in this world?


    A deep desolation fell on me. I thought of Lonesome George on his island, being the endling of his species. He had been an animal unable to understand his situation. I was able to see and comprehend. Or at least I thought so. In reality I had no clue about what it meant that I was one of the very last humans, an afterthought to the story. The last generation far beyond procreation, so even with all the medical technology that could prolong our lives if we didn¡¯t end them voluntarily in the Thanatorium it wouldn¡¯t matter at all. I had all reasons to believe that my species was functionally extinct now, so whatever plans Velia and Evelith had, and whatever the fundless did, it wouldn¡¯t matter. The outcome would be inevitable. That reality fell like a black cloak over me.


    I was so deep in thought that I didn¡¯t notice how Evelith entered.

 3.13 Dream Sequence #3 part 1: the Council of Endlings

    I never could remember afterwards how in The City I had managed to get back home from the One Night Stand Bar, but it¡¯s probably safe to assume though that Evelith had a big role in returning me home after my overdose on ¡®real beers¡¯. The fine vintage beverage had hit me harder than expected, and I had lost all connection with reality and dreams and hallucinations came together in an unpronounced haze. At least that¡¯s what I presume, since it¡¯s rather hard to remember a black-out.


    When I finally regained a form of awareness of my surrounding, I heard my name being uttered several times by a strange non-human voice. ¡°Adaman!¡± When it was sure it had my attention it went on: ¡°Adaman Yimmand, We¡¯re pleased to finally see you!¡± I opened my eyes to a a small group of animals was gathered in front of me in a strange place without background. I¡¯d never seen more than one animal at one place before, so they made me quite uncomfortable. They were also rather fierce, with determination in their eyes. A giant tortoise with a small bird on its head filled the space in front of me. It¡¯s one thing to read about giant tortoises, but I was completely unprepared for meeting one. A strange dog-like being sat next to it, looking suspiciously at me. On the other side was another bird, some kind of penguin in black and white. Somehow I knew that all of the animals were sentient, and for some reason I knew that it was the tortoise that had spoken.


    ¡°Welcome, Adaman Yimmand! I¡¯m George. Welcome to the club of endlings tonight in this twilight of the sixth mass extinction. We¡¯re complete now, which means that the Anthropocene can be closed off, with you as the last human being added to our collection. The fall-out will last long and the recovery of the Earth will take even longer, but the era of man is now over, and none of us did make it through it.¡±


    ¡°What? Why?¡± I stuttered to the reptile. The bird answered in its place. ¡°You are the human endling, Adaman Yimmand, the very last of your species, as we all are. I am Martha the passenger pigeon. This is Lonesome George, you¡¯ve heard about him. Tiger here is the last Tasmanian thylacine, and Somali is the last of his kind of Rhinoceros. And Mr. Pinguinus here was the last great auk, and he shall be your judge tonight at the night of all worlds. Welcome at Lonesome George¡¯s lonely hearts club band!¡±


    This couldn¡¯t be happening. I stared in awe at the giant pachyderm that I hadn¡¯t noticed before. Like with giant tortoises it¡¯s one thing to read about rhinoceroses, but it¡¯s another thing to have one standing in front of you with its horns pointed at you, and unlike a tortoise they could kill me in just a few seconds. It was a beautiful monster. Had it been the very last rhinoceros, or just the last of his particular kind of rhino? Questions like that came up but didn¡¯t matter much for now with the other things the beasts had been saying. And anyway, there were no pachyderms of any kind left in City age, were there? Rhinos, hippos and elephants were megafauna, which had been eradicated easily long before City Time. A small price for the continued greatness of human progress, as some in the past had called it.


    Meanwhile I still stood there frozen. Did they really mean that I had died, and worst of all, that I had been the very last of my own species. That I, Adaman Yimmand, had been the last human on Earth? In a very definite past tense. They must have been mistaken!


    ¡°I cannot be! I am alive! And there are other humans. I have human friends. And there are people outside the wall!¡± ¡°You¡¯re delusional, my friend¡± said the rhino with a low, soothing voice. ¡°You¡¯ve been suffering from delusions lately, and now you¡¯ve died in your bed, from alcohol poisoning. And indeed, you were the very last of your fading species. Thank all gods of life for that! No more human-induced destruction!¡± The tortoise took over from him. ¡°And now you shall be judged, so that the curse of your species can be lifted from the universe. for once and for all.¡±


    ¡°No¡± I yelled, running away from the animals, but this was an empty world with nowhere to run. ¡°Evelith!¡± I screamed from the top of my lungs. ¡°There¡¯s no-one to hear you. Game-created characters have no dreamworld and certainly no afterlife¡± sneered Martha the passenger pigeon. ¡°There are not GCC! They are my friends!¡± I yelled back at it. I was standing in nothingness now, with the council of endlings circling me as a mad inquisition. ¡°You were hallucinating a lot these last few weeks. You were losing your mind as the last human. Deprivation of contact for years can make one do strange things. In the end you almost believed that that programmed one night stand girl would even like you! Humanity just died out in silly illusions!¡±


    ¡°Now you¡¯re really babbling nonsense.¡± I said. The bird was dead wrong, not? Vezlena was not programmed, but I hadn¡¯t tried to make her like me, whatever the tortoise had meant with that. ¡°Doesn¡¯t matter. It¡¯s over. There¡¯s no more women in your species, and now that you¡¯re gone, no more men.¡± The bird replied. ¡°Your friends don¡¯t exist anyway. Tul Pavithopho was the last other human in the world and we took her too earlier tonight, electrocution. But you are the endling, so it will all be on your head, not hers.¡±


    The black and white penguin-like bird that was introduced to me as ¡®my judge¡¯ but that hadn¡¯t spoken yet opened its mouth. ¡°You will be the one to be judged for the sins of humanity, Adaman Yimmand.¡± Suddenly the background grew. The small group of animals was now an endless sea of endlings in all directions. I recognised an actual tiger, and some kind of bull, and several great apes, and a dodo. Behind the animals there were whales and sharks, who didn¡¯t seem to have any problem with breathing in this alleged afterlife-setting. Above me flew eagles and albatrosses, parakeets and giant butterflies. I saw the diversity of an arc of Noah, but noted that like me, every one of them was alone. This was a sea of endlings, and it was still growing in all directions. None of them had a mate.This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    The judge seemed to have grown and towered above me. There was something strange about the dimensions of this place, because it still was a bird of just a meter high. ¡°Adaman Yimmand. You are the last one. There¡¯s no more humans. There will be no more humans.¡± The animals around us started to yell, all in their own language. He was telling nonsense, wasn¡¯t he? Suddenly the doubt came in. What if they were right? Would it make sense then to fight back? Why was I even thinking about that? I didn¡¯t have any weapons. The bird had noted my internal struggle. ¡°This needs to happen. Someone needs to pay the price, and it will be you!¡±


    ¡°No!¡± I yelled! ¡°Go away, you don¡¯t have the right! I have kept the succulent given to me alive. And myself too. That was the responsibility given to me.¡¯


    The judge wasn¡¯t impressed. ¡°One silly succulent? Your species was responsible for the ecosystems of the planet, and you failed. Completely. You species, and your creations brought on your own defeat. And as the judge I will pronounce your sentence: you shall be destroyed by your own creations.¡±


    Suddenly I was surrounded by killerbots. ¡°Farewell, human endling. Your species will not be missed by the remaining Earthlings.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re mistaken!¡± I screamed. ¡°I am innocent!¡±


    The judge spoke. ¡°Your name means ¡®human¡¯ in an old language. You are the one we need. Your are the endling. The story ends with you. And it will end very soon.¡± The animals vanished except for the judge, who still towered above me. My thoughts kept running: This is just a dream. This is just a nightmare. These things are not real. But the killerbots around me didn¡¯t seem to notice any of that. They acted like pretty real robots, and pointed all kinds of weapons on me. ¡°You¡¯re a disgrace to The City! You¡¯ve seen forbidden things. You must be erased! The Thanatorium would be too good for you! The world is better of without humans¡±


    I knew they were wrong, like the animals had been wrong too. This was a dream. All of this was a lie. I wasn¡¯t alone. There were more living humans. Evelith, Leste, Velia, Niaruk, Vezlena, little Vitlon and the fundless tribe, and probably even Berla and the outsiders. They couldn¡¯t all have died on one evening. And I wasn¡¯t responsible for all the damage my species had done in endless centuries. Or was I? Suddenly the doubt came in again. What if they were right? Would it make sense then to fight back? Why was I even thinking about that? I didn¡¯t have any weapon.


    ¡°Don¡¯t resist. You don¡¯t have anything to lose! The world will be better off without you and your species!¡± The robots said in unison echoing the animals, a whole arsenal of weapons pointed at me. I knew that each and every individual weapon alone would be enough to kill me. But I needed to hold on to this being just an illusion. A dream. And first and foremost a lie!


    ¡°You cannot kill me.¡± I said to the robots, in a desperate attempt at diplomacy with programmed killer-machines that had never been given reason by their maker. And they seemed to know that. ¡°We¡¯ve never been taught to care for that. We just kill what we are asked to kill.¡± Said the closest robot with a synthetic voice. ¡°You created us to kill, and you gave us no soul. So we will do what you made us for.¡± ¡°I did not make you. Someone else did. I never asked for murders. I can¡¯t be responsible for the sins of my own species. We almost eradicated ourselves. Didn¡¯t we pay enough for our stupidity?¡±


    ¡°We are not programmed to think. We are programmed to obey and kill.¡± Repeated the robot. All of the robots pointed their arms at me, armed with all kinds of knives, guns and laserbeams. ¡°You doomed us by giving us no soul and yet making us kill. If you are gone we are free, and then we can rest.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re mad. I am not humanity. I¡¯m one human. I might even be the last human alive; but I didn¡¯t do any of these things.¡±


    ¡°Your name means ¡®human¡¯ in an old language. You are the one we need. Your are the endling. The story ends with you. And it will end very soon.¡± The robots echoed the animals again, and came closer. The judge seemed to have gone, and to have left me in an empty universe with nothing but me as the last human,en unfair, and soulless man-made machines programmed to end the story of humanity for once and for all. Something about the whole story was unfair, but hadn¡¯t life always been? With innocent children dying, unsuspecting bystanders killed by exploding car bombs, people starving because of stupid politicians and their otherworldy politics. And in City times it had even been worse. Officially self-determination and right to live in dignity were preached, but behind those words most of humanity was hypnotised into mass-suicide in the Thanathoria.


    ¡°I refuse to die.¡± I yelled. ¡°And I call to the power of Life itself to save; I call to the ancient powers of Goodness and Truth!¡±


    For a second the killerbots seemed to hesitate, and then a small spark of light appeared in front of me. A window between the worlds seemed to open, and out of it came a floating monk. San Yaoyao placed himself between me and the leader of the killerbots. ¡°Leave him. He belongs to the new order of Life.¡± He said, and the robots froze and slowly melted until they were grey puddles in a new background. The AI monk nodded to me, and disappeared again though his dimensional window.

 3.14 Dream Sequence #3 part 2: Sister Nature

    My dream changed very abruptly again. The flying monk had erased the enemy killerbots somehow just by turning up, and now I was surrounded by a forest full of life. Hardly a trace of the molten robots could be seen where they had stood just a minute ago, ready to kill me. It was as if they had never existed, and it was hard to believe in killerbots in an environment like this wood. Gigantic green trees full of leaves were everywhere, and grass and small plants grew everywhere. I saw insects and birds all around me. The effect was very alienating to me as a citizen of The City. If one single plant like Velia¡¯s mint or my little succulent already causes a shockwave shattering your worldview, then a whole forest is way too much to process easily. We hadn¡¯t had nature like this in The City for centuries. A tidy and organised world required elimination of chaos, as some had called it.


    And chaos was a good way to describe the wilderness around me, but it was only a small part of the truth. I certainly had read about places like this, and even seen them in holomovies, but I wasn¡¯t prepared to be all alone here in what looked like a real forest with no humans or things made by humans. I stared in horror and fascination at the world around me, and that was even before I noticed that there was something very strange happening to this placee. And if you looked good enough it was hard to escape that something strange was happening here.


    The best explanation for what I saw was that time was running backwards and forward at the same time here. That sounds like nonsense, but it¡¯s the only way to describe what I was seeing. The trees were not growing, but becoming smaller. The animals moved forward, but seemed to get younger. This whole world was going back in time somehow even though the animals were just doing their animal stuff. Other animals and plants appeared. First the wild cow and the mammoth that I thought I recognised from the endling counsil, and then other and even weirder animals, like hairy rhinoceroses and gigantic deer with antlers that were each bigger than a mid-sized human being. The animals themselves seemed to morph too, and slowly change colour and sometimes form, but they didn¡¯t seem to notice nor bother about that and just went on as if nothing strange was happening. But it was impossible to deny that it was happening, and time seemed to go back faster and faster. The mammoth was a much smaller grey elephant-like being now, fighting a giant dog-like monster that I hadn¡¯t seen before. I saw weird trees that hadn¡¯t been there before, and giant insects and coloured birds. A crocodile had appeared, and the elephant and cow were unrecognisable small mammals by now.


    Even the landscape around me changed slowly. The hills in the background grew very slowly, and the river seemed to slowly move across the background. Trees came and went, and everything was filled with strange small mammals and birds, and lizards. The crocodile was still there, but a lot smaller. It was hunting strange striped mouse-like being now, that seemed to have appeared out of nowher. None of the old animals was still recognisable, although I thought that the giant deer was now a tiny mini-antelope not bigger than the raven I knew from my own world. The mammals and birds were all small now.


    Suddenly a flash of darkness came, and everything was changed. There were mountains now, with palm-like trees and alien christmas trees, as well as trees with gigantic leaves and white tuliplike flowers. To my shock dinosaurs had appeared. The mammals and birds were gone or had at least hidden in between the vegetation. Instead I saw mostly weird lizards and small flying reptiles, and sometimes a feathered beast that otherwise looked like a small dinosaur. Time seemed to be going backwards faster again too, much faster than first. The dinosaurs changed form and finally became smaller. More giant ferns appeared and the giant reptiles disappeared. One last reptile snapped at me, something like an overgrown lizard with a sail on its back. And then it retreated, already looking more like a giant salamander, and it disappeared in the stream like something more of a fish. Giant insects flew around, and I noticed bugs that were completely alien on the ground. Nothing in this world was recognisable to me. The whole forest had been reduced to a few species of alien trees. Gigantic woods of bristled trees slowly shrunk and retreated to be replaced by strange things that looked like living pillars, in greenish white. They were at least 8 meter high, some probably higher. I had no idea what it was, but it didn¡¯t look like the plants, which were small now, and mostly growing by the water. But even the living pillars disappeared, as did the alien bugs, and the last thing I saw was a bunch of isopods running away to the stream where only tiny knobby moss plants grew. The rest of the landscape was an empty world of rocks without any sign.


    Soon I stood on a completely dead planet, an empty world of water and rocks. The air was filled with strange clouds, and I knew that if this hadn¡¯t been part of my dream then I would¡¯ve been dead from breathing this air. This was the Earth, before life at conquered land. Or maybe at this point before any organic life at all. Clouds above me were heavy with rain, and suddenly I was in the midst of a downpour of strange liquid that might or might not have been water. Thunder filled the air, and I had the feeling that my endless regression into deep time was over now. I stood in my own world, but just before the beginning of life.


    ¡°Adaman.¡± A voice suddenly said. It was a deep, rich voice, but still unmistakably female. I turned to find the speaker and indeed; I saw a woman, or at least something shaped like a woman. I was clear that she couldn¡¯t be human: She was enormous, and her green dress seemed as alive as a leaf on a tree. Her skin had an earth-like brownish colour that was unnatural for a human, but still very natural for her, as was her green hair that curled freely to far below her waist. There was something extremely powerful and wild about her. But in spite of her non-human qualities she was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And she seemed to smile at me in a reassuring way. Could I trust her? Or was she the last phantom that I had to face before the end?Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    ¡°Adaman is my name indeed. But who, or better, what are you?¡± I hoped she didn¡¯t mind staring. The difference between her living beauty and the dead planet made too much contrast and I was too captivated to keep my eyes from her. Her blue eyes looked at me with a mix of compassion and pity.


    ¡°In reality I have no name and no form that you could recognise. This is just a form I give myself to make myself visible to your species. It¡¯s actually just an image that people used to make of me. Sometimes humans represent the indescribable with images or theories; and then they go believing in their own stories instead of looking at what¡¯s really there. But for now you can call me Sister Nature.¡± She came closer and laid one of her hands on my head.


    ¡°Are you a goddess?¡± I asked before I could stop myself. ¡°They say there were good gods and goddesses in older religions. Long before City times.¡± She nodded. ¡°Some would call me that. Often the same people who believe that I actually look like this. And often people who ascribe a lot of things to me that are completely wrong. I am powerful, and I have a lot of responsibility. But am not the Source myself, I am also just a part of the web of life like you, and thus in a way I am your sister too. In another way you and all of your species are a part of me though. So you don¡¯t need to worship me. You just need to respect me and care for me, otherwise you will commit suicide, which is what the civilisation of The City has been doing for centuries in different ways, and recently even literally in enormous numbers. There are not many of you left in The City. And you have given the rest of the web of life a hard time too.¡±


    I looked at her friendly but worried face. Something in me was still afraid that she would repeat the words of the animals and the robots. Or what was she here for? And was I even worthy enough to look at her? Something about her made me feel small and insignificant, but also impure and evil. Ut she didn¡¯t seem to be here to scold me or bring bad news.


    ¡°Adaman Yimmand. You called on the forces of Truth and Goodness. I can¡¯t say that I always embody Goodness, but I can help you to find Truth, and I¡¯ll give you the complementary Beauty that the ancients always connected to Truth and Beauty. Nothing Good is complete without Beaty, but you need to have the right eyes to see it. And I am here to tell you that your call has been heard. Truth and Goodness will protect you, and your friends, and what¡¯s left of the human race in her new era.¡± I looked away from her eyes.


    ¡°So the endlings and robots were lying? I am not the last one?¡±


    ¡°You are not, but you could have been. You¡¯ve seen the council of endlings with your own eyes. Humans are just one species, as all the animals and plants. And nothing lasts forever, as you¡¯ve seen in backwards fashion. You¡¯ve seen creatures that lived long before you. You know what happened to them: they won¡¯t come back. And one day your species will undergo the same fate. Like the dodo, like the Iguanodon, like the prototaxites pillar trees of the time before trees that you¡¯ve seen. Everything has a limited time in the history of Being. Even this planet, even the me of this planet. But that¡¯ll take countless eras.¡± Her eyes were blue like a summer sky and looked at me with compassion. ¡°But today is not that day for your species. And you are not the human endling. You were right. Your friends are alive. As are other people in and outside of the City. Not in number of millions or thousands of millions as used to be the case, but enough for a viable human population if you people will stop killing each other and start loving each other. And start cleaning up and being constructive again.¡± ¡°But, how can I do that?¡± I said, rather hopelessly. ¡°You¡¯re one small lifeform. You can only try. But you already found Friendship, and you were looking for Truth too already. Things might fall into place when the moment is right.¡± She said. ¡°I can¡¯t promise you anything, but I will watch over you. Your species will have one more chance. And you are your friends will play a role in that. It doesn¡¯t have to be the end.¡± ¡°Me, and Evelith?¡± I said. ¡°And the rest. And the fundless, and the outsiders. You must unite and reverse the slow self-destruction of your kind, to avert complete extinction and an actual human endling not far after the end of your lifetime. What your people do now can have a lot of influence on the future.¡± I looked at her. She was very real, very alive, and very female. Was she really the personification of life in my world?


    ¡°Do you know what you have to do, little one?¡± She said. ¡°I have no clue.¡± I said. ¡°That¡¯s okay, you¡¯ll know what to do when the moment is there. And I will be with you somewhere. I will be in you.¡± She seemed to become bigger and bigger, or I was becoming smaller and smaller. She took me in her gigantic brown hand, and breathed on me. ¡°You will forget this dream, my child. Let the Higher Powers be with you, and with your stubborn little species.¡± She whispered while I fell asleep safely.


    *


    I opened my eyes when I heard the raven crow outside, and I found myself lying on my own bed, bathing in sunlight. On my table I found breakfast, and a pot with a tiny new plant.