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.