Chapter 3 - Getting a Device

My alarm blared loudly from my phone as I groggily woke up. Surprisingly I didn't feel tired. I was actually quite energetic, so that did mean that I could just go to the world every time when I sleep without worrying about being too tired. I got up, made my bed and headed down. This was a Saturday, I could wake up late without worrying. My mother was making dosa and the smell drew me to the kitchen, I went in drank my milk and left to go watch the news with my dad. The news was currently still speak about the message and making analysis on what had happened. Until suddenly, the 'BREAKING NEWS' visual came up and the feed was switched to an anchor on a desk. He went on to say, "It has been found that, if one wishes to, they can enter the consciousness space again. They will be transported to the world of Domus which seems to be a human hub elsewhere in the universe. They will be assigned a school, arts and attributes based on the entity they selected from before. We have yet to figure out more, but the governments will be making an announcement tomorrow. That's all from us, updates soon." My dad being the ever perceptive one, asked me "Were you able to?" Trying to avoid the question I replied, "Able to what?". "What the news channel said." he pushed me to answer. "Yes." I tried to keep my answer as simple as possible. He told me to keep doing what I was doing, he felt that this was important. I told him that I felt the same and was trying to get more info to get ahead of the rest of the world. I then walked back to the kitchen picked up my breakfast and went to my room.

I watched a couple YouTube videos while eating my breakfast, one of them was a popular theorist making a video on the message that had happened. He theorized that the other human civilization is trying to make a channel to other humans in the universe without having to travel all the way to them. This was pretty smart I thought and maybe true. I told my parents that I would be re-entering the consciousness space and hit the bed. 

When I did, I did the same procedure and entered back into the world. 

I realized that I forgot to tell the lady at the desk that I didn't have any ID and needed to figure out where to register for the ID. So I headed back to where the information centre was, went into the building and approached the desk. "I'm sorry to disturb you again, but I have no ID and was wondering where I could register for some." She seemed somewhat surprised, but still answered "Uh, you can get some right here. We will just need to know certain information such as your name, school and others that we will test such as height, weight etc." She then pushed a form towards me and said "We cover that for new citizens, no need to worry." I thanked her and started to fill out the form. It asked me things like my name, age and place of origin. For place of origin I just took a shot and wrote down unknown, though I wasn't from here I thought it would be strange for me to mention Earth, since I would have to explain how I had got here, which would be a whole journey on its own. At least if I wrote unknown, I could explain it by saying I had lost my memory and reached here somehow. I filled out the rest of the basic information and gave it to her. She looked through as her eyes widened at a certain part, "You don't know your place of origin?" I tried to make it as convincing as possible by portraying myself to be nervous while saying "Yeah, I only have faded memories from when I was a kid, the last solid memory I have is when I was already here. I'm really sorry.. I-I just can't remember anything" and I gave her the most genuine eyes that anyone could possible conjure up. She luckily seemed to understand my dilemma. She said "It's okay." and determinedly added some things to the paper and continued "I will take care of this, and make sure you get the ID." I felt bad taking advantage of her but I was going to make sure I would repay this somehow. She would then tell me to follow her and she took me to a room on the right side of the building past the moat. As she walked forward, I got to notice more about her appearance. She wore a formal outfit, with long black pants and a tucked in white shirt. She had slightly short brown hair that just reached past her jaw. Her face was round in an endearing way, and she still had sharp features like her blue eyes to complete the look. She was quite pretty, but I didn't have it in me to point it out. We walked in stride to the new room, where she told me to stand up against a wall in front of a camera type device. When I did so, she told me "This device is just going to take a couple pictures of you, along with making certain measurements." I nodded my head and the device produced a violet light for 5 seconds or so before turning off again. She walked over to me and showed the recordings that the device had made. 

- Height : 168 CM

- Weight : 65 KG

- details such as skin tone, important marking features and a couple pictures of me. 

This was actually the first time I took notice of the clothes I was wearing, I had white tee on with just some normal jeans, that seemed normal enough. I then asked her, "What about my school and stuff?" She looked into my eyes, "You have a school? Well you can just put your hand on that device right there" as she pointed at a pyramid shape device with a spot drawn out for a hand. Following her instructions, I put my hand in the spot drawn out. Then a similar violet light as before and scanned my hand from left to right. After a minute or so of the same, the device turned off and displayed the details from before in a projection. She gasped when she read the details. At this point I was quite afraid that I had shown her something that I shouldn't have. I asked her "Is-Is something wrong?" This time with real hesitation because of my fears that I had fucked up. She coughed and said, "No its nothing, just that you have quite the rare attributes." Straightaway, I realized something and asked her "Are you supposed to read all the details for the registration?" She seemed to tighten up and get nervous, "No, I'm not allowed to read through the details but I just made a mistake. I'm really sorry." "You could've just said no you know, I didn't know that you're not supposed to. " She seemed really apologetic as she finished up the process for the ID and eventually handed me a card with just a number and something that looked like a QR-code on it. She then said "I'm really sorry again. I've enrolled you for the fighter institute no charge just as an apology." I didn't get why she was being nice to me, until I thought about my attributes again. I didn't like that people would like me because of some attribute that could be taken away, but I had to work with what I had. "It's okay, you really didn't have to." as I bowed down and said thank you to her to show my appreciation. After confirming that there wasn't anything else to add, I walked to leave the building. She followed behind and as I reached the door, she said "You can come back if you need anything else." whilst waving. I thanked her once again before leaving. 

The next thing I had to do was get myself a device of some kind to be able to access the internet. That way I wouldn't have to worry about having to come to the library every time I needed information. I headed to where I could pick up a , well I was hoping it was a smartphone so I didn't have to learn how to manage that device as well. I figured I wouldn't get anything top of the line, since this was just a scheme to get everyone to access the internet. I hadn't walked that long, about 5 minutes before reaching the new government building. The city was actually quite well organized into sections, so it made sense that all the government buildings could be found in the same places. Like the information centre, the architecture of this building was quite well done. This one was more wood based though. It had two large trees that had the height of palm trees, but had roots dangling down like a banyan tree. Some of these roots were pulled to the side and held up a large building, that resembled a cosy hammock on a beach. The architecture imbued with me with a homely feeling in a very intentional way. 

To get into the building, though I guess I could climb up the wines to reach the top, I needed to stand on a platform, that would hover up and reach the entrance which was about 10 metres up in the sky. The entrance to the building had no real door, just a curtain of leaves, though I'm sure there were some other measures for safety. Inside, there were two floors. As I walked into the bottom floor, this building had a lot more hustle and bustle than the information centre. Some people were getting aid from 3 nurses on the right while sitting on some chairs. On the left, there was a lounge like room with people drinking out of steaming mugs while soft music played in the background. Ahead there was a bathroom, what seemed to be a cafeteria and another desk, similar to the one from the centre. I walked up to the desk and I asked the man, "Hey, I heard at the info centre that I could get a free device from here? Thanks.". Surprisingly, the man was happy to help and said "No problem, I just need to see some ID to register the device under your name." I reached into the pocket of my jeans, pushing away the fabric to reach for the ID I had got from before. He looked the ID for a second, before using a holographic keyboard to type into a screen that was projected into his desk. He reached for his coat pocket and pulled out an all white object that looked like the apple pen, but without any lines or indentations on it. Its surface was impossibly smooth. He pointed the device to where the code was on my ID, and then the same violet light as before shined onto the card before the man smiled and said "I'll have that device right to you." As he looked through the cupboard behind him, my train of thought diverted to the how good the public workers were at their job. It seemed that the support for the people in this city, maybe the entire civilization, was quite good. I still didn't know much about the government that managed this city. I would find out more about it, but I couldn't be bothered. I didn't think it would be of much importance to me for the tournament anyway. At about this time, he turned around back towards the desk with a small square object in his hands. It was seemingly made of the smooth, white material that the 'pen' he used was. He then said, "This is a relatively older model, we can only give you the older model at this point since we are all out of the newer model." I nodded and said, "I don't have much knowledge on these devices anyway so its all okay. I'm just glad I can even get something like this." "No problem at all, its just our duty to our loyal citizens." he said almost too calmly. His voice seemed to falter when he said loyal, but it quickly returned to its normal tone. I said my thanks and walked out of the building feeling strangely off about the man at the desk. 

I went to a nearby bench that was under a small tree, and sat down to look at the new device I had purchased. As I held it in my hand, I waited or something to happen... but nothing did. I looked a bit closer at the device until I noticed a small indent on the part of the device that was facing me. I pushed down just a little bit on the indent and as soon as I did, a small needle pushed out of the indent and some text was displayed on the surface "Please prick your finger on to the needle. 'You will not bleed, this is just to connect your nervous system to the device.' I was willing enough since I had yet to find out if I had an actual body in this world, maybe this would help me figure out. I pricked my hand against the needle, and felt a slight sensation before the needle suddenly retracted. The text on the device then almost seamlessly changed to 'You have been registered as a user under the name, Amitav Reddy.' 

Well, that's interesting. The feeling was quite unique, it felt like I had suddenly gained an extra limb that was this device. In a strange way, my brain felt like it had new actions to do. Life if I thought about the action of remembering something, I suddenly had a lot more info there. It seemed like my brain was now directly connected to the internet at will. So at most times I would be disconnected, but when I needed to know something I could just think about it and the information would be in my mind. It was almost like turning the device on and off. This made me realize that most people in this world were probably always online, always having some sort of entertainment while they live their lives. Hopefully there is something in the device to make sure people can't always be online. 

I wondered if there was some sort of visuals to look at as well and just as I did, a screen appeared in front of me with a home screen on it. I could see all the normal apps you could find, the camera app the settings app but most importantly there was a Connect app. Pretty quickly I was clued in on what I need to do. I imagined that I was opening the connect app, and so it did. The screen that translucently covered the right side of my vision, now had an app with a keypad on it reminiscent of a calling app from my world. I realized that this was probably a direct connection between the minds of people that I thought was quite cool. It was going to be quite hard to convince people to give me their contact but no need to worry about that for now. I looked through the settings app and just chose some personalizations to make. I made the screen a small square in the top left of my vision, and set up a time and search widget on the always on display. I know this isn't the most important but to me it still mattered. 

The last thing I did was take note of the time so I could figure out the time conversion factor when I come back and start planning my life ahead.