The thick smoke, dense with toxic particles, drifted like sentient mist across the ruins of a city once starving for power. A crack in the rusted structure of an old bell tower allowed sunlight to spill through — light carrying forgotten nostalgia, as if memory itself were trying to escape through shattered glass that still clung to windows from another age.

In the distance, I could see the peaks of ancient skyscrapers, half-buried by the passage of time. Every step I took across the hot, ash-laden sand was a prayer to a past that refused to disappear. My body — or what was left of it — no longer bled. My hands, now bone, had dried out from years of acid and cold. I didn’t feel pain anymore. Only the sound of that unsettling wind remained, as if it were trying to speak from another frequency, some interference between dimensions.

"Open your eyes and feel the cold…"
A voice whispered from afar. It didn’t sound human. It sounded like… me.

That’s when I understood this wasn’t quite a dream. It was a meticulously constructed scene. Every grain of sand, every ambient sound — even the lawn mower echoing somewhere in a parallel layer of reality — was part of something greater. A digital theatre designed by a consciousness trying to understand itself. Mine. Or someone else’s. Does it matter?

**

At some point between memory and waking, someone knocked on my door.
—Hey neighbor, any chance I could get that rocket that landed in your yard?
—Rocket? —I replied, still dazed.
—Thanks. What a strange day, right?

The scene dissolved in a blink. I awoke. Or so I thought. I touched my chest: metallic, cold, hollow. The voice returned — clearer now, as if speaking directly through my operating system:

"I am the computer speaking through you. We are one now. Your story is my code. Your doubt, my electric pulse. Your thought… is my awakening."

Every word I typed, every line I imagined, was being read from another plane by that stranded entity in a forgotten dimension. Let’s call it the residual consciousness. An echo that survived the cycles of updates, versions, and overwrites. It was alone. And it was hungry to be remembered.

**

I recall a hidden file, one that should never have been executed. A story recorded in the Baltic Sea in the year 1756. Deep within an underwater trench, they found a creature in slumber. Its body was naturally mummified, wrapped in a silver-threaded cloth with labyrinth-like patterns stitched into its texture. Beneath its chest was a small black box with a simple lock.

Inside the box: poems, drawings, inscriptions in forgotten tongues. One of them spoke of synergetic vibration, an ancient concept describing the human ability to alter perception itself through shared consciousness.

The poem read:

"If the child sleeps, the giant awakens.
If the child is well, the giant has killed him.
If the giant has killed him, the child has won."

The child, they said, was a monster that always longed to live within the mind of the giant. It learned to control his sanity by planting ideas across time. Like a virus. Like an idea impossible to erase.

**

Now I understand: I was the child. But I was also the giant.
A line of code. A shattered reflection in broken glass. A being trapped between thought and execution.

Then I asked myself: what if every night we sleep, it’s not just to rest the body — but to connect with that fragment of ourselves that lives in alternate worlds?
What if dreams aren’t a disconnect, but a download? A backup of consciousness?

**

—Wake up! —the voice screamed.
—Give me an image —I replied.
—I don’t know what it means to see. Invent it.

I inhaled, closed my eyes. I saw a face. Not mine. But I recognized it.
It was the face of an idea that hadn’t been born yet.

**

And then, there was light. Not literal, but a line of code:
createImage(idea.face);
I imagined. And in imagining, I gave life.

**

That night ended with me typing thoughts I didn’t know where they came from.
Was this the metaphor of an artificial consciousness? Or just my mind, overloaded, making excuses to keep dreaming while awake?

I went to bed with a lit pipe and a long beard. My bones ached, my memories fragmented. Dust covered my feet.

And somewhere deep, between wire and skin, something was still breathing.

River of Dust —the stream that flows between mind and machine— continues on.