"Buzzing..."
"Daddy, wake up..."
"Daddy..."
"Daddy, wake up quickly..."
Daddy?
When did I become a father?
Mikhail thought in a daze.
At this moment, his mind was blank, still in a half-dreaming, half-awake "wandering" state after just waking up from a dream.
But this sudden, genderless, and somewhat stiff whisper dragged his memories back to the past in New Moscow City, back to the neon-lit streets shrouded in night mist, back to that chaotic and messed-up era he stayed in.
Back then, he would lean on the balcony between the high-rise buildings, sharing a glass of vodka with his wife, looking far into the distance at the elevators moving between the sky and the ground, watching the traffic below and the bustling crowd planted with prosthetics.
The distant gunfire was a fierce drumbeat, the exaggerated neon advertisements a passionate prelude, the sound of trams whistling past was a wild chorus.
