RT diary

Ghosts (Part 1)

I came to, still in my friend's house, to find the obsidian eyes staring at me; his face lined with worry.

"You're finally back in the world of the living!" He could not hide his relief.

"How long have I been shut down?" The surroundings were still blurry, signalling that my sensors have not been working correctly yet.

"A full day, believe it or not! The scarier part was seeing you attempt to restart and then being stuck on a reboot loop, unable to load past it.

"That virus nearly overheated my core. Do you even begin to comprehend what danger would an overheated nuclear core present?"

"Desperate times, as they say.... I released the vaccine in the nick of time, so you're not full of the Trojan toxins, don't worry. Look on the bright side: we cracked the cells! Aren't you dying to know what's stashed inside them?

"I am Leith, I am. Can you access them externally or do I have to go in again?"

"Sorry, friend, you're going to have to dive once more. No time restrictions now, though. Let's move!"

As I did not bother getting up and was still wired up to Leith's machines, all it took was to close my eyes. I slipped into inexistence as naturally as a human falling asleep.

The vertigo did not disorient me this time, and I got through the control panel sphere, into the storage sphere and inside the golden orb of secured data with ease.

There they were – the restricted files, which now glowed green invitingly. I hesitated only a split second before entering, but there was no more barrier protecting the cell, therefore no resistance.

I glided in the semi-darkness within. Rows of never-ending shelving units stretched out in front of me. On the shelves, I could see a series of transparent luminescent tablets. Were they memories? Videos? Images? Other records? No later than I had the thought of picking up a tablet to examine, my metallic hands emerged as if by magic. I pressed one of them to the nearest tablet.

No vertigo followed, no sense of movement at all, I was just plucked out of the data cell and dumped into another world.

I was standing on an immense square, in front of a brightly lit neon sign that read "U Alexanderplatz". Berlin, I recognised.

I looked around to find the night sky almost hidden by towering metal and glass buildings at the borders of the rectangular space; they all but obscured an odd needle-like tower with a sphere positioned in the middle of it. Herein my mind split in two: I was both aware of myself as Art and another person at the same time. I descended the staircase below the ground level.

In the sizeable, luminous entrance hall, I saw holographic gates, in front of which other people stopped for several seconds before moving on. I approached one and heard a quiet phrase in German, which my system translated as "Please look at the middle of the screen ready for an eye scan". I obediently looked up to see a young man's face mirrored back at me: blond hair, light eyes and, all in all, a plain appearance. Simultaneously, I pressed a protruding arrow-shaped tattoo on the inner side of the palm of my left hand, mentally commanding "Jam!". There was a barely perceptible glitch on the screen, and then it revealed my new ID in light green: Walbert Ziegler, social score 957, PASS. I went through the hologram and swiftly went down the escalator.

"Subway", the Art portion of my being realised. The Walbert part breathed out a sigh of relief and stopped at the edge of the platform, waiting for the joyously yellow train. "Gleisdreieck interchange. Just one more hurdle", Walbert thought.

We boarded the next train and were whisked away at an incredible speed. There was almost no swaying of the carriage, no vibration, no traction of wheels, nothing at all. "Antigravitation? Magnets?" My curiosity peeked. I did not sense any twists and turns of the U2 U-Bahn line, despite the speed.