Walking back from the temple to the bar we didn’t say much to each other. I hadn’t understood half of what the artificial monk had been saying, but his closing ceremony for the Acosmist temple would be something I’d never forget, no matter how long I would live. The things he had said had completely shaken my worldview, and my certainties about how things operated. His ideas about being a monk of Life for example, instead of being a priest of death as anyone would expect from religious people, were completely alien to me but very refreshing. All my life I had known religion to be about death or even worse, and not life. It would take a while for all these things to sink in. And that while my poor old robobrain wasn’t even ready processing most of the thing Evelith, Velia and Leste had been telling me the last few days.

We were almost at the bar when I saw a man, a real human, with VR-glasses passing us, which reminded me of the V-junkie woman from yesterday. She seemed to have known Evelith, so I had a new subject to break the silence. “Oh, Ev, I almost forgot. I said some weird gamer girl that I bumped into last night that I’d say hi to you. What was the name? Tul? Do you know her?” Even with all the strange experiences we had just had she still stared at me with an utterly surprised look. “Wow. Tul Pavithopho? You actually spoke to her? In this world?” I nodded. “It’s good that she’s still alive. That’s a relief actually. But how did you get her to talk to you? She’s always in faraway other worlds…” “She bumped into me because she was not in this world and still walking on the street. Extreme gamer or V-junkie even if you ask me, that one.” She nodded affirming again. “Ah, yes, but she’s a lot more than just a gamer. she’s a virtual nomad, a glitch-rider even. The problem is that she never recovered from the breakdown of the Next-SystenZ servers. She lost a bit of herself there.”

We had arrived at the bar, still followed by the now slightly levitating monk, and continued our conversation inside. The name of Next-SystenZ had taken my thoughts away from the temple, and brought me back to younger years. Long ago I had enjoyed some gaming in second worlds myself, and not just the simple stuff like the Game of Trains. Just like Selinomas it had been a classical online game platform with a whole virtual universe inside of it. It had had thousands of users at its peak moment, and some people really had spent a lot of their funds on it. There were even people who managed to make funds in-world, which was something that was highly discouraged by the government of The City, so you had to know how to get around lots of safety measures to do that. Yes, Next-SystenZ had been the most popular virtual world that the City had had in recent times. But from one day to the other the whole thing had just disappeared, much to the chagrin of the gamers. The infonews had explained that the servers were crashed. Whatever had happened to it, the entire world in the game was inaccessible from that moment on, even though it had been whispered that it still existed somewhere. Something about the whole story had not felt right though, but the infonews soon became silent, and it was as if the whole thing had never existed. One needed very good hacker skills to find back any reference to it on the interwebs.

“Poor Tul had some kind of deal with a sentient game character, at least that’s what she said. They were planning to do some kind of revolution to fight injustice and to overthrow prez. Emon, and he had a plan to make endless funds from a certain bug in the paywall system and share them with the people whom she saw as screwed by the system. But before anything of that could happen Next-SystenZ disappeared, and she could not reach him again. After that she has tried everything to get him back. Not because of the plans, but because she really considered him a friend, and she still believes he is alive somehow. Last time I hears she was looking through all kinds of game platforms and cybersystems to get back to him, with no results.”

I filled the rest in for her. “She was trying to get to the inner ring of Selinomas, but meanwhile her body was walking on the street and she bumped into me and broke her glasses. She was in complete shock.” Evelith took a beer for herself, and one for me too, but her eyes stood rather serious.

“Hmm. Tul broke her VR-glasses you say? Man, that’s not good for her. She’ll have to pay a lot of funds, and her job probably pays even less than yours. I’ll ask Leste that some of our people look out for her. We can’t have her disappear too. The temple might be empty and closed now but the Thanatorium isn’t, and lady Acosmia herself isn’t exactly dead yet either. Tul’s not just someone by the way, she’s actually quite powerful inside the virtual world. It would be a shame to lose her and her skills and connections. If she wouldn’t be so closed off and out of reach I’d suggest Velia to add her to our little group.”

“Do you think he still is there? The Anapa guy?”

“I have no idea. I’m not a gamer nor a cybernaut. It’s probably possible. Stranger things have happened in virtual worlds than characters hopping from platform to platform. But I’m more worried about Tul losing touch with her body. And even more for what’ll happen if she runs out of funds.”

Leste, who had been sitting at his table looking at some long-haired guitar-wielding weirdos from the 20th century stood up and looked from me to the almost levitating monk to Evelith and back to the monk. “I assume that both of you have indeed been to the temple.” He mumbled. The monk answered for us. “Greetings. I am San Yaoyao, the first monk of the new order of Life. Your friend Evelith has invited me here now that the temple of the dark goddess of non-being is out of order.”

Leste stared at him, as if he was not believing his own eyes, and then at her as if he was saying “how could you?” but the self-projecting holy man ignored his disapproval completely. “Greetings, friend! I am San Yaoyao, first monk of the new order of Light and Life!”