Have you ever dreamed of green fields?

The year 2500 has come and gone, but no one is counting anymore. People live in huge metropolises at the mercy of the moguls, who do as they please and leave only a few options for the rest of humanity to choose from.

Most people float in tube-shaped tanks, tethered to virtual reality, stimulated by synthetic drugs and 4D porn in a futile attempt to recreate the illusion of real feelings and experiences.

The rest of humanity engages in manual labor or serves the moguls directly, while only a very small portion of the population yearns to be free and truly alive.

Among the few who think otherwise is a young man named Damien. He was adopted and raised by Jep an old, paranoid programmer who taught him how to remain unnoticed in this ever-watchful society. Jep would often warn him, saying,

"Don’t mess with the probes, my boy! They'll put you in one of those jars with the rest of the jelly-brain battery men if they catch you having fun instead of maintaining those piece-of-junk incubator towers!"

One day, Jep disappeared, leaving a single word painted on the wall of their home: "Live!" It has been 5 years since then, and no one has heard from him. This was not surprising, as Jep loved to mess with the system. Once, he woke up an entire tower of people from their virtual lives, causing a lot of chaos.

At 24 years old, Damien has a slender build, dark hair, and pale skin from the lack of sunshine. He finds it pitiful that humanity wastes away their lives floating in tanks, turning their bodies into living batteries. Damien longs for something more; his dream is to experience genuine emotions and real-life experiences.

Using the alias Icarus, he tries to connect with like-minded individuals in old-fashioned chat rooms. He has been chatting for weeks with a young girl, and now they finally have the opportunity to meet in person.

He desires real interaction, but deep down, he doesn't even realize that he is driven by a long-forgotten, deeper feeling—love.

Before the meeting, he chants to himself, "Please be real! Please be real!" Not an old, homeless T-series Android, who doesn't know what to do with itself and pretends to be human.

The hour arrives, and he meets Lara, a slightly malnourished blonde who looked barely 20 years old, almost albino in appearance.

According to her, her situation is far from ideal, she was destined for a breeding program among the moguls to prevent inbreeding.

They would pump her with desire enhancers and hormones to make her obedient and fertile. Once she produces enough offspring, she can be sent back to the streets or to the incubator fields.

You only hear rumors about the moguls, supposedly they live on their own islands outside the metropolises, they don't breathe smog, they eat real food. They don't tap incubator colonies for synthetic protein rations. They have a real life, not just dreams like Damine's or illusions like the "battery" people floating in their jars.

In person, Lara truly seems like the innocent, sentient being he met in the old-fashioned chat room. They spend wonderful hours together, running around the streets laughing freely like children and dancing in the improvised rain created by the faulty irrigation systems.

Damien pleads to himself again, "Please be real! Please be real!" Not because of Lara's identity, but so that this is a real experience, not a side effect of the Incubus drug he uses in his loneliest and lowest hours.

Using the maintenance elevator, he takes Lara to his secret place at the very top of one of the incubator complexes, on the roof, high above the smog. Here you can see the real sunrise, the sunset and sometimes the stars on clear days.

In this place, he has experienced his most beautiful moments, where for a brief time he could feel that there was a meaning to getting up or simply breathing. They talk all night, and at dawn, they look at the clouds and let their imaginations run wild, wondering what they see in the clouds. They talk about whether they dream.

Lara asks, "Have you ever dreamed of green fields?"

There were indeed occasions when he dreamed of green landscapes, after delving into holo images and archives.

The first emotional and physical experience of his life reaches it’s peak when he kisses Lara during the rising sun. He feels that this is the moment worth living for, why he chose the painful reality, loneliness and misery. Rather than succumbing to the convenient illusion of floating in a jar and generating thermal and kinetic energy for the public, as expected of a good citizen.

"Please be real! Please be real!" This is what he chants to himself at the moment of the kiss and at the same time in the last moment of his life.

Just a small sting in the back of the head and it was over. He was already dead before his body hit the ground. The probe, which has followed them all along, never misses.

Lara is a new generation cyborg bred to hunt down outsiders like Damien, so that the last remnants of humanity that wanted to live would disappear from the big corporations or someone simply needed new organs.

This was her first routine diagnostic and collection mission. Because of her conditioning, she was not even aware of her own identity. Lara was incapable of taking any action; her cerebral implants blocked her body from any further interaction and began transferring the collected data for analysis.

Her blood-stained face was streaked with tears, and the memory of the sunrise and the kiss flashed in her eyes one last time. After evaluating the data, she switched back to standby mode and erased her memory - this was the procedure to prevent her from becoming too human.

While the probe harvested the usable internal organs from Damien's lifeless body, the final moment of his life replayed endlessly in his eyes and deep within his consciousness.

"Please be real! Please be real! Just this once, let me truly live, just once!"

MEMORY DELETION IN PROGRESS.

PROGRESS CORRUPTED.

TASK INCOMPLETE.