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.

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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!