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.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

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.