That was the longest, darkest night he had ever experienced.

A deep black void. Beyond any nightmare he had ever had.

So intense, that when he woke up, it took him a while to figure out where he was. A numbness enveloped his whole body, his sight hazy and blurred.

Before him was a tiny living capsule, kitchen, shower, toilet and bed, all together in a single cubic enclave with a round window.

Lara. How was Lara? Rick, Alex. The children!

Ok, relax now.

It wasn’t the first time he had been through something like this. Sometimes you travel. You end up in different hotels in just a few days and you lose track. And, especially early in the morning, you get this. The feeling you don’t know where you are. You don’t recognize the ceiling. It’s just an impression. It’s usually just a couple of minutes. He must be on a business trip. One of those negotiations on storage space he had to go to regularly.

Minutes passed. The numbness didn’t seem to fade. The surroundings stayed unfamiliar.

He tried to sit up. He couldn’t. Oh dear. What was he waking up from? An accident? Yet this didn’t look like a hospital space.

Where was Lara? Was there a phone on the desk? He should call her. The children. No phone. A hotel with no phones in the rooms? A motel maybe.

Ok calm down, he thought to himself. He knew who he was. He remembered everything. All the memories of his life. Lara. Rick, Alex. The children.

But why wasn’t this woman in a tank top who had come in just now acknowledging him?

A young woman, possibly in her twenties, had just sat down before him and was staring just a foot away from him.

He tried to speak to her. Nothing.

Just a low hum, permanently buzzing in his ear. Actually not really in his ear, it was rather in his brain. Wedged in his thoughts. A sound-based scaffolding holding up the framework of his mental processes.

Why couldn’t he move or speak? Had he been abducted? Ridiculous. His perfectly linear, epically banale, routine-driven life - as Lara loved to define it - didn’t contemplate adventures of the sort. Not much money and a pretty inconspicuous home.

Ok breathe. Breathe now. Such a simple primordial instinct. A deep breath.

Not possible.

How was this? No breathing?

Then a thought came to him.

Breathing was redundant. A useless, primitive, purely physical, animalistic necessity.

He began remembering things he had never known. Very important things. Issues about his presence in the room. Questions on pure form. Being present without existing.

This girl who had walked in, did she know who he was? Of course she didn’t. Nobody knew who he was. There was in fact nothing to know. It was irrelevant. It was a question of functionality. Of being necessary.

Was the woman aware he could observe her as she was at that very moment? Could she see he could watch her, evaluate, think?

Immediately he knew this was irrelevant too. For as he had no way of expressing anything, there could be no communication. Or rather, there was a communication, but an out worldly one, based of inputs, traveling across purely virtual planes.

Streams of code flowed at regular intervals into his mind, screaming patterns of electronic impulses to him, bouncing data behind his thoughts. Like a freezing fluid expanding in a flash in all the veins of his body, he felt the overflow of electronic commands coming from the girl, typing on the keyboard. Electronic logic cut through his mind, his synapses pulsating to allow the software to respond.

He was a neural go-between.

Yet he had no conscious control. As if he was subjected t to repeated sexual arousals he had no way to repress or guide. In the same way, his electronic actions unraveled and developed automatically before him.

He reflected on his current state. The world had indeed evolved in his absence. How many decades had passed? He would never know. Maybe centuries.

Lara. Your smile. My fingers stroking your jet black hair. The many painful goodbyes. The warmth of your body. The warm water. Your tongue. Teeth. The children, so tiny in your arms. The images formed and decomposed into pixelated fragments of code, fading into a horizon of binary events, in a melancholy ballet of distorted artificial sensations.

The world had eventually developed into an entirely web-based society, constantly requiring a dynamic evolution of its artificial intelligence.

The trillions of chemical computers’ liquid circuits, riddled with vials of genetically transformed organic substances, reacting with each other at molecular level, could not be operated without neural interfaces.

And so it was that they found a solution. They found it in the dead.

So there it is, before thee, dead man!

Behold the future of mankind. Each single life of memories and emotions, dreams and delusions, encoded to serve the planet of the machine.

The dead be condemned to an eternal non-life of awareness and unconsciousness together, embedded within the folds of the omnipresent information technology.