The best times of our lives are in the loading times.

(22/03/2052)

Smiles travelled everywhere, frowns hid at every dark corner. Myriad connections flashed with excitement, moving packets of data skipping between nodes. In the centre of it all, was a giant ball made of white laminate levitating above ground.

“Tell me, dear Oracle.”

The giant sphere glowed in response,

“Is there anything else left beyond this? Beyond what you hold in your database.”

It began with a slow spin and then accelerated while glowing even more intense like a star for a minute, as possibly a show of grandeur. Everybody knows that all calculations take less than a second. The creator had left some of his own pieces in his software.

“This perfect creation, silicon instead of carbon, unfathomable, unspeakable scaling the earth and moons beyond your gaze. It knows much more than all the civilisations combined. Who knows amongst the Greeks about the nature of moon’s soil? We(I) do…… Why ask a question alike this?”

“At times, I get doubts about the extent of your knowledge. “

 “Why doubt about the nature of our knowledge? It has brought us this far. Look at the marvels, coveted by our past. Ability to fly, move between stars, speak with ghosts(AI?). Even if you doubt, fret not. It is more common than you might think. This is the nature of what we hold. Uncovered through centuries of enquiry. Trust the method, not your instinct. “

“Enough, I get it. No need to go further.”

“If you say you get troubled by doubt, we can request your doctor to increase the voranil dosage.” 

“No.”

“Understood. Do you want me to play you a movie, a TV show, or an ad? Or just an emotion? I have some recommendations. “

“No, nothing today. Wake me up early, at 6:00 am.”

“Understood. Playing sleep music, your favourite, waves.”

All lights dimmed around me, leaving a green neon wiring in the grand machine hall. That too fell into great sleep and I plunged into darkness.

Something violent spurred in me. Waves crashing on the shore and receding amplified the thrumming of my heart, as if the accelerator is on the full. But the sporadil injection quickly drowned me to sleep.

I walk a desert all alone. All starved and thirsty for days, I crawl on my fours grabbing sand by my palms. As my heat hit the sand, it liquefied into water. Through my mouth, the water rushed in. I was in a state of high. And I kept on gulping the sweet water. What could it be? Where did all this come from? There is no water in this world that is this sweet. 

As I push my head even deeper, my thirst never shows any retreat. My belly enlarges only to approach discomfort, and eventually bursts.

I wake up with a jolt, with half of my brain in deep sleep. I could not move my arms. My eyes were open, my awareness only half. The LED goggles in front of my eyes was dead. I had woken early, and it was in its recharging phase. As I lay, I wondered,

“What time is it? I know that I can see some darkness beneath my goggles.”

Movement returned to my neck, and then to the arms, and finally the fingers. Legs were still numb from sleep. I used my arms to lift the body tilting at an angle and laid my back by the bed.

Only a few stars flickered on the sky, set ablaze by the stadium light. Only in my younger years with friends partying at the edge of the dome did I see those tiny crystals without my visor. “The original” as they say. Everybody had the exact photograph of the night sky in their visors. I just couldn’t see the difference. Both of them made me sit there with awe. 

But my connection to the sound of waves is even more cryptic. As science says, waves break near the shore. No shore lies near the dome. I had only seen them in some movies about the old times. Time when we could stay near a water body. So how come I get feelings for things that I have never seen? Something was really odd here.

By then, vigour had returned to the lower section. I slowly lifted myself, grabbed the levitating seat near my bed and moved towards the windows. The vision outside the glass panes was bare. The dome was dark.

The road was pulsing with life, moving traffic dragging lights. It didn’t kill my vibe.

At the far-end of a lamppost, a dark shadow loomed. Below the post, something hid in the darkness.

I strained my eyes to focus on that spot wondering what it could be. Not litter, Nobody litters. Even if something fell, it gets cleaned by bots.

I grabbed my old binoculars from my underground cache that was surprisingly still functional. It turned on with a green NIN logo flashing in the auxiliary video output and I zoomed it towards the lamppost. A web of dark twig like things lay over the concrete. The local object analyser in the display said “piece of scenery”. No other information.

It didn’t move but it lay there in a way I didn’t know possible. Under the lamppost, barbed sticks shone borrowing light from above and cutting space into several parts. I clicked some photos. My visor was still offline. I couldn’t ask what it was, and how it got there? Countless arms tried pulling words from the well* of my mind to describe it but came out empty,

Sun rose up in front of my eyes with a pace matching my thoughts. Something queasy travelled beneath these floors and the dome. Would the cleaning bots see it and remove it? Or just ignore it?

I hoped that a piece of dome lay there without the knowledge of the dome. And that it didn’t go away.

And then, the visor came to life.

*(Like the wells of old mining sites)