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.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

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.