It was by sheer necessity that I passed through the once controversial Light District every day. It just happened to be the shortest way from home to the robofactory where I had to work every day for my funds, and thus only a matter of conserving my energy. The controversy of places like it lay far behind us in time anyway for the inhabitants of The City, and the whole area had lost most of its attraction to the public and whatever scandals there once were had long faded by now. To be honest, it seemed like the days of any form of human excitement were far in the past now for the inhabitants of The City. Nonetheless the walls of the Light District here were still filled with gigantic billboards on which nude or almost nude human figures of both sexes tried in vain to seduce the accidental passers-by. Most of them were as unconvincing by now as the old political slogans in other parts of the city, and all of them were quite old, just like everything else here, even though most of them still had their pictures moving in loops at the wrong speed, and often in very non-human colours.

I didn’t look at them at all. Even if I would have noticed any of it the whole thing would only have made the world sadder to me. But I was too lost in my trance-like state to even notice the actual people walking around here, let alone the fake ones on the walls. More impersonal people that seemed grey to me passed me by like ghosts, and left me wondering for a fraction of a millisecond if I was indeed looking through them lately. Seeing my own reflection in a window I almost wondered whether I myself was becoming a bit transparent even; but even that thought didn’t really excite me. Maybe it indeed was as if the whole universe, including my own consciousness, was in a new phase of dissolving into nothingness, after losing its colour the world seems to lose its substance too. And no-one seemed to notice or care. No-one seemed to see me at all either. But it felt like it had always been that way, and couldn’t have been different in any possible universe.

A clear alarm sign from inside my body broke the spell. It was only the simple basic need of thirst, but it was enough to bring me back into the physical world for now. For a fraction of a second I looked around, as if I had completely forgotten where I was at all. Unreal icons of a degenerated sexuality stared back at me from everywhere. In a way they looked utterly inhuman to me, but superficially these soulless abstract digital succubi and incubi resembled humans that were beyond perfect. Most probably they were just generated in a visual studio somewhere anyway though, and I had lost virtually all interest in those things years ago. Everything was fake these days, maybe even most of the humans that passed me by. But even though my brain had woken up a bit now, my main concern now was not to occupy myself with questions but to find out where to get a drink as soon as possible.

The light districts had no stores open at this hour, so I looked around for a bar. I realised that I was quite thirsty because I hadn’t drunk anything at all since the beginning of my shift at noontime. The water-vending machine that had been in repair all afternoon by a bunch of rather incompetent robotic repair-people messing things up on autopilot. I was still far from home, and there was no-one to go home to anyway, so who cared if I had a stop in a bar like in the old days? The only thing greeting me would be the same old infoscreen which hadn’t been watching anything interesting for years even though I’d been watching daily for how long as I could remember. I randomly walked into the first bar that looked as if they actually sold drinks in there.

Like most of the local businesses the bar ‘Nirvana Ecstasy’ seemed run-down, but at least still active enough to be entertaining a small and probably shrinking core of niche-lovers. The building was rather dull on the outside, in spite of the name which gave me the creeps. No-one would ever use such a name anymore, so it must have been an extremely old building, named before the new religions started spreading even. The absence of certain basic electronics like a fundlock by the door seemed to confirm that.

The bar was almost empty and not that big. A few men and women were watching an almost nude and probably male figure dancing spastically to very hard digital beats, doing lip-sync to words and a melody that were clearly made and performed by a computer. The whole scene was beyond pathetic, so I resolved to further ignore the whole show. I put my banking chip in the machine to get a beer, and looked around for an empty table to hastily drink it, and then disappear again from this weird place as fast as I could. Usually it was not that hard to stay unnoticed these days. People tended to mind their own business, whatever that was, and not bother with strangers at all.

But today would prove different!