My life was now unlike anything I had ever imagined. After my early shift the next day I headed straight to the Acosmic temple behind the Light District to meet Evelith there. I had had a short night sleep, and an unfocussed sleepy working day, but there was something about this new task that completely woke me up. Deep in inner conflict I arrived at the temple, but I din't want to let it show. I gasped when I looked at the sinister building that would be the starting point for our mission to investigate the current state of humanity. The whole idea still made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. It was surprising to myself too what I was willing to do for my new friends: religion was something I always stayed far away from, because it made people mad and took away their will to live. But I had said that I would do it with her, so I couldn’t back down now. Maybe I should’ve said no like Leste had done, but it was too late for that. The sanctuary of the dark goddess Acosmia towered over the plaza. Even running away wasn’t an option anymore now, and my inner coward was too afraid to say no. It was a tall and dark building, built more than a century ago in a weird combination of architectural styles varying from neo-baroque to the oldfashioned cubism of old official buildings in The City.

Evelith was already sitting on the stairs in front of the building, waiting for me. She looked a bit out of place with her new and colourful outfit: old-fashioned pants and a shirt with a flower motif. Her smile and the life in her eyes alone were a great contrast with the monstrous house of the Dark One.

The gigantic wooden door looked rather impressive, and not really welcoming to us tiny mortals. It was not only decorated with strange carvings of otherworldly horrors and apocalyptic battles, but most of all it seemed completely out of proportion, being at least thrice as high as a grown-up human. The entrance was just left open nonetheless, with a hand-written sign on it that simply said ‘everybody welcome here for religious truth’. With a bit of hesitation she took my hand to lead me inside. The warmth of her body touching mine came like a shock again, but that wasn’t the first thing on my mind now. I was entering a religious place!

This enormous door had clearly been left open by someone who regularly closed and opened the temple, but the whole place felt if no living soul had been here in this temple for a long time nonetheless. Without making a sound we both strolled inside, trying our best not to disturb anything disturbing. There were things between hell and Earth that you wouldn’t want to meet, and even if there weren’t a place like this made you believe there were?

Why did temples like this have to be so dark on the inside? I held my breath when I saw a gigantic statue of a naked woman that filled up most of the hall. She was skinny and completely hairless, approximately the same height as the doors, and carved from some kind of black stone: the goddess Acosmia herself! The Dark One was fiercely trampling the remains of a broken globe, while holding the cone of nothingness in her left hand, which represented the black hole of knowledge. In her other hand she held a tiny human skeleton that looked like it tried to escape.

The slogan “All is illusion! Life is a lie! Nirvana is non-being!” was written in enormous calligraphy on a plate behind her. Surely I knew that Acosmia wasn’t an actual entity but a symbolic representation of the realities of life and death or something like that, but she still scared the hell out of me. Religion was nasty business.

Evelith nudged to one of the corners of the room. We hadn’t entered unnoticed: a priest arrived from a side door when we stood there in front of the goddess. He was exactly like one would expect a priest to look : a man of uncertain age with a shaved head, dressed in long dark robes. He spoke with a low slow voice as if everything he said was really important.

“Welcome, my pilgrims trapped in this sorrowful realm of illusions. Do you want counsel to understand the nature of our actual non-being? Do you want to get reconciled with your non-being and get ready to enter nirvana?” Before I could react Evelith replied frankly. “I want to talk about your religion indeed. But I don’t need propaganda. I want serious answers about the state of this place.” She looked angry already, but the newcomer didn’t seem to notice. “Do you want counsel to understand the nature of our actual non-being? Do you want to get reconciled with your non-being and be ready to enter nirvana?” He had uttered the same question again, with the same gestures. “Have you heard me, priest…” she began again, but he said the same words again, in exact the same way.“Do you want counsel to understand the nature of our actual non-being? Do you want to get reconciled with your non-being and be ready to enter nirvana?”

I stared at her and in her eyes I could read the same thing as what I was thinking: Something was going completely wrong here. Suddenly the body of the priest who had been speaking in a loop flickered for a second, and a fraction of a second later he turned to me as if to attack me, but he held back.

“I will need to call the policebots now for intervention. But don’t let the prospect of eventual death bother you. It’s not like we’re not all headed to the Thanatorium already anyway. And as the goddess teaches us, death is always preferrable over life, and non-being over being.” He relocated to the wall, and pushed a red button. It flickered when he touched it with his finger, but the machine didn’t react at all. “Connection dead.” The priest mumbled when he came back to me, to grab my throat and choke me.

I had no experience whatsoever with fighting in real life, but I was still prepared to fight back with all of my might. The priest wasn’t what he seemed though: when my fist reached his body it didn’t hit anything at all, and only felt a tiny shock of static electricity. He was not just a damaged robot with artificial intelligence, but apparently he didn’t even have a material body at all.

“What the…”

For a last time the hands came for me, and instinctively I pushed its head away from me, and then I finally felt something material, even though it seemed not really big. For a second the whole priest seem to flicker, and then he just faded away. From the place where the head had been a small spherical object roughly the size of a marble fell to the floor. I picked it up while Evelith and me kept staring at the place where the priest had stood. “So the priest himself was nothing but a…”

“A mere self-projecting holographic being, indeed. Like I am myself.” A voice behind us said.