In a city that looked like it was from Earth, on a cold gray sidewalk, Farid woke up with a slightly swollen, bluish body. He woke up, and all he could remember was that suddenly, in the middle of the Self room, the world blurred and overlapped like a television broadcast cut-off, and then he was falling into the vacuum of space. He felt during that time that the oxygen expanded his lungs and rushed out of his mouth. His internal organs swelled from the pressure drop, and he felt that the water was boiling in his eyes and his blood until he penetrated beneath the ground in an illogical way and regained normal atmospheric pressure. From the sudden pressure change, he felt as if he had been struck by a huge cosmic entity, causing him to lose consciousness while he rose in the air from his previous momentum. It seemed he fell once more onto this hard, cruel ground, and the last thing he saw before losing consciousness was not this city, but only his palace garden.
Is this an alternate reality?
A different timeline where Madlena is an advanced city?
All these thoughts crossed his mind, and clearly, the city was not an Earth city, judging from the writings, signs, and shapes of the buildings.
He tried to get up but began coughing up blood, and pain pulsed through all his internal organs. The matter would have been worse if he had remained in the vacuum for more than a minute. If he had been a normal human, he would have died in seconds from the shock of emptying the lungs, but the bodies of the humans in Sarmad are very sturdy to withstand hundreds of thousands of kilograms of air above them. Farid began to regain his color after oxygen nourished his veins.
He got up from his place and contemplated where he was. There was something uncomfortable. The streets were empty, even though it was the middle of the day. The traffic lights shone in their red, yellow, and blue colors. Moreover, the architecture of the buildings, despite appearing modern, had a distinctive aesthetic touch different from Earth cities, which were dominated by decoration-free brutalist architecture.
The construction here was dominated by Neoclassical architecture, which looked like a revival of Greek heritage, and decorations with plant shapes and other Gothic ornaments with frightening mythological creatures on the peaks and sides, in addition to building styles he had never seen before, such as buildings that looked like a stack of huge concrete bones carefully arranged in the form of a modern building, and other overlapping abstract buildings. But the most prominent feature was the Pareidolia effect. The buildings were designed in a way that viewing them from a certain angle created artistic paintings, whether faces, eyes, or skulls. It was an architectural style that reflected a cooperative spirit, so instead of each building being unique on its own, there was overlap and cooperation between the buildings to make the city look more beautiful, or rather, more confusing.
Farid walked through the empty streets of the city—no cars, no humans, no animals, only faint, distant sounds that could barely be heard, sounds of people and cars. Sounds that seemed like a yearning for memories he had not lived, a feeling the Madlenians called Anemoia. The followers of Hexagony were keen to name everything, especially a feeling like this, which seemed like a memory invasion that threatened the COTA scenario of mass amnesia. The Hexagonians exaggerate everything, but this is justified: the Third Extinction was due to complacency and lack of oversight. Both the inhabitants of this world and the Transcendent Ones participated in naming things.
Farid found a clothing store. This was good, as he was almost naked. He pushed the slightly open door and entered.
Inside, Farid heard the sound of reversed music reciting speech similar to disgusting incantations, and a television set deep in the hall displayed a terrifying black-and-white image of a child with sharp teeth, white irises, and an illogical color distribution. He quickly closed the door and moved away. He thought for a moment: he was almost naked, and he was an adult now. A silly picture, seemingly made with Photoshop, wouldn't deter him. Furthermore, if the monster was real, who took the picture at that very close angle, which looked more like an artistic shot?
On the other hand, ghosts do not exist. Life is wombs that push and earth that swallows. Ghosts are just an illusion from lack of lighting. All internet videos are fake. Farid decided to return to the store.
"It is an insult to the world to retreat out of fear of ghosts."
Then paranoia struck him:
< What if I was wrong? delta is a ghost or a loving jinn. Yes, she is a loving jinn as in folklore, but she is only inside my brain here. I don't know the mechanism by which she exited.>
The obsession overcame him, so he decided to place some trash and tile pieces near the door because normally doors in suspicious places like this close to trap him inside. The recurring scenario in horror movies was preserved, and he also decided not to look at the television and steal the clothes closest to the door. He succeeded and exited the store safely.
"That was easy."
So he returned and stole more clothes that seemed to be of good quality. Moreover, he carried a mannequin and struck the television as proof of dominance, and struck the wall speakers to stop the cursed sound. He served himself, and on top of that, he shook the ATM. It was making the sound of coins, so he took it too. Under the ATM, he found a plastic bottle with water. He opened it, smelled its water, and tasted it. It was Madlena water with a mild sweet taste. The bottle itself was strangely new and sealed. He was the one who opened it for the first time in an abandoned place. He looked at the date and didn't understand anything, as the Madlenian date apparently had extra numbers.
Below, he also found a cleaver next to the bottle's spot. It would be useful. Farid thought of a scenario where his brain was hiding people, but the idea quickly left his mind because he literally destroyed the store and stole the money, and no one stopped him. He quickly threw the idea to the back of his mind and left victorious, putting the new clothes in a large travel bag he also found there, with a walk that involved a little dancing. He celebrated, and then he changed his clothes and tried the sizes, most of which fit him. He continued his journey wearing a gray and black summer shirt with straps and black pants similar to jeans with knitted straps that stretched to fit the wearer's body, and military boots for adventures. In the commercial ledger he stole, he recorded his memories and the path he took.
Hours of walking, and the city did not seem to end. He came across maps of the city's design, but they were incorrect maps, which added to his confusion. He tried to understand the Madlenian alphabet from them and from the signs, but he couldn't. He adopted techniques like repeating letters and patterns, such as articles and predicting words based on the location and the pronunciation he knew, but it was useless. The language was almost random. What he understood was their numerical coding, which was not like the pattern widespread on Earth, which the Muslim scholar Al-Khwarizmi invented and which relied on the number of angles.
In the Madlenian language, the numbers are stages. In each stage, a line is added, starting from a point, and sometimes a circle for clarity, representing zero, up to a symbol resembling an eight with a line through the middle, which is nine, representing the completeness of the numbers. After that, a number is added, exactly like the decimal counting on Earth. Hours passed, and he did not find any food, and amidst the stream of thoughts, he saw that the buildings ended following that road until he exited into an area that looked like a parking lot from the marks on the ground.
A huge parking lot, so vast he could not discern its end, was centered by a building that looked to be 30 kilometers away. It was very far but very clear. It did not disappear with the curvature of the planet or air pollution. Farid tried to see what was inside it.
Humans, starting from the Third Update, have the ability to zoom in on scenes if they concentrate on them enough.
Farid saw that it was a huge store, and the products inside were evidence. Farid was very hungry. He had not eaten for hours, which were considered Earth days, so he launched, optimistic for the best, based on the potable water he had obtained earlier.
An hour passed, and he moved far away from the city. Some fog began to form in front of him. It was a bad sign, but it was not very dense. The sounds of humans began to disappear since he left the city and were replaced by a sound similar to the sound of ship horns echoing in the sky but very faintly and distantly. The sound made Farid feel that he was being watched.
The sound was illogical. Farid did not finish his analysis until suddenly night fell, literally. In one second, day turned into night without warning, and the sound of an old radio started with incomprehensible speech. Farid's body contracted, and he tried to protect his head, then he realized the situation. He tried to take steps backward, hoping that day would return.
But nothing happened.
The parking lot was illuminated by the lamps distributed throughout it. Visibility became difficult, but the store had lights illuminating it.
"Psssss.."
Farid quickly turned around to see the source of the sound.
There was no one. The place was very vast, very dark, despite the lighting. He felt that he was clearly visible. Fear crept into his heart. He quickened his steps. He felt he was being watched more than before. Suddenly, he felt someone touching his shoulder. He turned around quickly. No one was there until his eyes fell on a Pareidolia scene created by the city of a smiling face, an unnatural smile, with nine eyes staring into his soul. The atom of courage turned into terror. Farid launched, running toward the store, which was still 20 kilometers away, and every few steps, he looked at the illusion that was still staring at him. It was an illusion, and he knew it, but it was an uncomfortable illusion to look at. It tickled and squeezed his heart. Suddenly, a sound of screaming and the sound of giant horse footsteps approaching echoed. The horse had three yellow eyes for three fused heads. Its height was double Farid's height. Its footsteps shook the soul. Farid saw the horse's face, and his terror increased, and his steps accelerated. The loud sounds attracted more creatures, the ugliest of which was a grotesque adult clown child. His shape was very disgusting to look at. Farid wished the horse would eat him rather than this thing touch him.
The place was empty. There were no obstacles he could use, and fatigue had taken its toll on him, and they were about to catch him. He knew he wouldn't make it. Here, Farid remembered the cleaver he found in the store. Its tip was sticking out of the bag's pocket, just as he had placed it. He drew it with his right hand and dropped the bag.
"Either victory or death."
The horse reached him first. It tried to bite him, but Farid opened its face with the cleaver, but the hideous horse did not give up and tried to trample him and strike him with its foot, but Farid was more agile, so he circled around it and stabbed its belly and cut it, so its intestines came out. The clown child arrived. Farid was disgusted by it to the extent that he did not even want to stab it because the knife itself would become uncomfortable to use due to the filth of this suppurating, peeling creature's blood. The creature could not see but only relied on its sixth sense. Farid cut its neck and quickly pulled himself away so that its fluids would not touch him. As for the horse, it gave up and fled. Farid threw his knife. He did not even bother to clean it and continued his way, breathing a sigh of relief and seeing luminous eyes surrounding him. He rushed to the store with light steps because the fog was getting denser, and more sounds began to appear, and he did not have a weapon. In the distance, he saw a human, but he was black.
Was he charred?
Was his body so hairy that only his eyes could be seen?
He did not know, and it seemed that he did not see well, so Farid moved in a semicircle around him.
Farid tried to quicken his steps, and the fog literally obscured anything beyond fifty meters, but Farid was guided by the lights until he arrived, pushed the door, and entered the place.
The dimensions of the interior center were literally different from the exterior. The ceiling, which seemed to be six meters high at most on the outside, was ten meters high here. The store facade, which seemed to be one hundred meters wide, seemed to extend much further inside to the right and left to the extent that the refraction of the light in the air prevented seeing the other end.
Behind Farid, the door closed quietly, and Farid noticed it and went to make sure it was really closed, and it was closed. He was trapped inside, but being trapped inside was better than being trapped outside, especially since this place had enough food to last him for the infinite lifetime, as Lusihar told him. He looked outside, and the lights went out, eliminating the visibility of anything except the city light there and the eyes of the creatures lurking outside.
Inside the store, quiet shopping music played. Farid took a cart, put his bag in it, and began shopping. The mall was like a maze with a visible ventilation system in the ceiling that maintained a very suitable temperature with a light cold breeze that increased the refreshment of the breath.
Farid walked deeper and deeper, storing food, eating some of it, and cooking some of it in the oven aisle, and even without spices and additions, the food was a sensual pleasure, better than Earth food. He found the kitchen aisle and carried many different knives with him. He continued deeper for hours until he found the bedding aisle, which was what he was looking for. He took a television set from the electronics aisle and placed it in front of him. He plugged it into the electricity and extended the wires. He did not expect to turn on any channel, so he connected it to the cameras. The screen was split into six cameras, and at the bottom, the number of pages. Those scenes were on the first page. As for the last page, the numbers in it were constantly changing in a strange random way.
He began flipping through the pages until something stopped him—a creature walking from the path he came from, and it seemed to be sniffing his footsteps. Farid lamented his luck.
The creature looked like a Husky dog with blue human eyes. Its behavior was suspicious. It reflected awareness. It reflected composure. Its teeth were human teeth, but the strangest feature was its legs. Its hind legs were long, double the length of its front legs, and twisted as if they were broken. It walked on its knees and front legs. Farid heard its voice. It was like the sound of a person choking or going through the throes of death.
Farid did not have time even to take a nap and rest. This was another disgusting creature that had to be eliminated.
Farid rushed the confrontation and made a sound in a nearby corridor covered by the camera and returned to monitor it.
The dog did not rush but pushed itself to stand on its knees, then stood on its hind legs, which looked broken. As for its front legs, their shape overlapped like an AI-generated image until they became red human hands covered in blood.
Terror struck Farid. The dog, which was taller than the shelves, stared at the camera, then looked in Farid's direction.
Farid raised his eyes and saw the dog looking at him from afar, and he froze in place from terror, and the monster was also looking at him.
A rising voice, as if coming from afar, echoed in the store microphones, saying:
"Th-Th-Th-The mall will close."
Then the lights began to go out, row after row. A smile formed on the dog's face, increasing in hideousness as the lighting decreased.
Then all the lights went out at once.