Apart from the shows on stage the Nirvana Ecstasy bar itself proved surprisingly uneventful that evening. Sporadically people left or arrived, and then Evelith had to serve the customers, but the tiny group of people never became a crowd, and most of the seats remained empty. Her job mostly meant giving them their drinks or clean up their tables after them. Everything was strangely slow-paced in this completely new world, and different in a way that I couldn't describe with words.

Slowly I started to get used to this new environment enough to understand bits of what was going on. On the wooden stage I started to recognise the same four people or so in the dance acts, but they still didn’t raise much interest from my side. In between the live acts there were a great diversity of ancient projections, during which the dancers themselves seemed to converse from time to time with the small group of customers. This certainly was an in-crowd, and I was the outsider. But the ‘insiders’ themselves were a weird and diverse bunch too, and not just the human ones. An oldfashioned humanoid robot that I only recognised from old holo-movies stood motionless facing the stage, and only some infrequent movement of tiny lights signaled that he was enjoying at least some of the ancient projections. It was clear that this was a museum in more than one sense.

I was still observing the whole thing from the last table closest to the exit, where my conversation with Evelith had fallen silent. It wasn’t just because of the immersion into another projection but also for the simple reason that conversations with real humans took a lot of energy for me. I hadn’t had any contact with a fellow Homo sapiens for years, and even the e-contact through my screenphone had faded long ago at this point. And my conversation partner was quite intense, so I certainly could use a break from that.

The new video itself was beyond ancient. It had slowly moving very crude 2D pictures in black and white, with a lot of snow-like distortions on the tape, and weird piano music played in the background. It was even older and further away from me culture-wise than anything I had seen here this evening, yet it sucked me in completely. People in strange clothes did their alien dances underneath the analog snow of an antique kind of screen and made me enter another world, a lost world that must have been everyday life for people living long before me, a world that was completely inaccessible to me. A world of beauty, and life, and things that I couldn’t even name.

I was abruptly called back to my own world of The City by a male voice that addressed me out of nowhere.

“So, new blood? Do you enjoy the show?”

I turned my head to find myself face to face with a man who could’ve stepped out one of the old projections. He seemed maybe a little bit younger than me, and just like Evelith he was a mix of all the races that humanity had once had, with blue eyes but a rather dark skin and long curly brown-black hair that hung in all directions in some kind of messy rat-tails. His clothes looked like if he had come out of some kind of historical re-enactment, but I was sure that he wore them every day like that. A T-shirt with monsters and unreadable letters, blue pants that looked heavily damaged, and weird ‘jewelery’ that I wasn’t even able to interpret. He joined me and Evelith on the table as if that was the most natural thing to do, but his whole arrival was a bit much for me to take in. So instead of answering his question I just stared at every part of him for a while. He didn’t seemed to mind, and waited patiently for me to return to the world of talking people. I looked at Evelith again, and then at him until I could open my mouth to say something.

“Eh, what did you say?”

“Do you enjoy the show?” His arm pointed at the stage. I looked at the video again, and mumbled something like “ah, eh”, while trying to find back both my voice and mind in this confusion. “The projections, yes. I like them. They are fascinating.” I paused for a while before I added more.

“But the dance acts are not my thing.”

He smiled lightly and turned to Evelith. “Good catch, Ev.” He nodded to her and then and looked at my clothes, which seemed a bit out of place here. Apart from my antique sweater that was now worn by evelith I only wore the usual grey uniform of the workers in the factory, which seemed out of place here. “And what brings you here in the light district? A robo-overseer who turned into a half-robot himself and became asexual enough to not even care for our sexy dancers. That must be an interesting story.”

I had no idea how to answer that. Evelith must have noticed that, because when the silence became uncomfortable she spoke up for me. “Cut it out, Leste! He just needed a drink, and it’s purely my fault that he stayed. I stopped him from leaving. We need new people here. You know that as much as I do! And he’s the first new one in a long time that isn’t a sex-crazed baboon or suicidal reli-freak with one feet in a Thanatorium. Don’t scare him away!” Something about her seemed a bit desperate somehow at this point. He just seemed amused.

“Me, being scary? For an adult human being?”

I just looked at them, without finding the right things to say or do.

Real humans were intense indeed, much more than robots and computers and self-running machines on autopilot. There seemed to be a lot of tension between those two that I didn’t really understand, and It took a lot of my energy to just be around them in this place. What was even worse was that it was mainly my own presence that had brought on these ripples in the social energy of this place, while all I wanted was to be invisible. All I had wanted was just one beer, I thought bitterly.

Meanwhile the dance act began again in the background and the beats that went with it also assaulted my brains and feelings. But it seemed impossible to leave already under these circumstances. I was sure there were social rules that would prevent me to do so, and I had no clue what would happen if I broke them, but it would certainly be bad.

Plus she still wore my sweater, and it was still getting colder outside.