In an Eastern European country lived a powerful man dreaded and respected by all. The man - of noble bearings - was married to a beautiful woman who gave him a perfect male son named Nathan, shortly after their wedding. The woman, however, picked up a rare disease that led her to a very early death. The unlimited resources of the nobleman were not enough to save her.

Following the death of his bride, he became obsessed with the research for eternal life. He sacrificed his existence and that of his firstborn to science, subjecting him to macabre experiments. His mission was to never see his son grow up. He became obsessed with the illusion of the immortality that he hadn't been able to give to his wife. At first he bandaged his baby's feet and head with elastic straps to prevent his growth, but over the years - not being able to counteract his natural development - he began to surgically remove and rebuild pieces of his skeleton, amputating and filing as he liked. He succeeded to develop advanced technologies that supported his purpose.

After years of studies, he stabilized his child's body at about ten years of age.

"It sucks!!"

Jag pressed the 'delete' key of the keyboard as he nervously rocked back and forth.

"It sucks, sucks, sucks!" he repeated convulsively.

He got up, walking nervously; his forehead was sweaty and he gestured with his hands. "I have to know! I have to see!"

He sat down and reduced the computer word processing software window. A screen, divided in four parts, appeared on the computer, showing four rooms.

Jag scrolled onto other screens; he practically had a vision of every single angle of studios.
"Where's Fade? Where are Jess and Sushi? And the assistants?" He asked illogically, browsing through the windows.

Control was his obsession, and he had a widespread network of spy cameras, cameras and microphones capable of satisfying him. Thus, he discovered things as soon as they happened, consequently he noticed that a band member that he idolized had launched an cryptic message on the net; he therefore had traced, in an indefinite point on the planet, a girl without a family or friends whose name was Fade.

His great resources had allowed him to satisfy all his whims and, growing up in a lab, he had learned to apply his father's studies. As soon as he was able, he had continued his own experiments, by employing well paid physicians to keep their mouths shut.

He unfastened the button that held the collar of his lab coat tightly to his neck, a gesture he always avoided to make in public, so he passed his fingers from one collarbone to the other, touching the thin scars that ran through them: he had to come back home, he had to undergo clinical tests that confirmed that everything was going well. That's why he was preparing to leave. He would take advantage of the band's tour to come back to them in great shape.

He closed his laptop and put it under his arm, his stuff had already been loaded in the car. He put up an "I'll be right back" sign on the door and left the room. On the table he left a box for Fade.

The girl went back to his room a few days later. She knocked on the door but no one answered, so she left.

Shortly afterwards she retraced her steps. The sign hanging convinced her to wait, but after several minutes she tried knocking again and, since no one answered, she lowered the door handle and opened it.

The room inside was dark, therefore Fade walked in cautiously. She instinctively brought her hand behind her back to grab her weapon, with a feel of regret when her fingers touched nothing. When she turned the light on, she was greeted by an uninhabited room, full of thousands of objects. She made sure that the unpredictable tenant was not curled up in some corner doing something strange, but no one was around. She approached the box on the table, a common shoe box; an unknown brand, it was probably foreign.

Fade opened it and her legs buckled under her, in transparent plastic envelopes, she found the knife and the strap that had been seized by the police.

"But how did he do it?" She asked aloud and began looking for a note or a message. She flipped the box, but only magnetic cards came out of it: the master key cards of all the rooms in the studios. She ignored them, focusing only on her recovered weapon. She quickly took her shirt off and fastened her shoulder strap; she placed her knife in the case. She felt like she had been reunited with herself; she wanted to scream it to the world, to thank that weird little boy as she had never done before. But she was alone. For the first time in her life, she really felt alone.
She looked for him in the studios. She inspected every corner and asked all the assistants, who responded a bit intimidated; they were used to her being shy and gloomy, and had never seen her behaving so euphorically.

Not finding him, she went to look for him outside. She walked to Ibrahim's kebab shop. She was amazed to see the iron shutter lowered and barred; it looked like a store that had been closed for a long time. She looked for some clue as she turned around the building, searching for some windows to spy through, but it was useless: there was nothing that could give her any clues.

Disappointed, she returned to the cellar and locked herself in her room. She took her knife and laid it down on the bed to look at it. The wooden handle, worn and darkened by water, supported the knife, slightly chunky. Fade moved the object around looking at the things reflected in it, and then she mirrored her irises in the steel.

The girl's eyes were dark, surrounded by light circles under her eyes; she tried to imagine what Nef felt when he looked at them, and then she regretted the stupidity of her question.

By evening, she was hungry but didn't feel like going out, thought to what she had always said in the past months: "If I had my knife I would go out to cause trouble!" She had repeated many times in her anxiety to recover it. Instead, she stood there, staring in space, without the slightest desire to move.

The last thing she wrote in her diary was:

07/08/2001
It's getting boring. I can't hold this anger back anymore.
So why don't I do it? Why don't I put an end to this stupid existence?
Maybe because it takes courage. A courage that I've never had.
I've browsed through the pages of this diary. There are still plenty that need to be filled in, maybe I'll never write on them all, maybe I'll stop this silly routine of writing my thoughts on a stupid diary and I'll begin to really live. Or the contrary...
There's a completely white page among the others.
In the beginning it irritated me.
Why the fuck did there have to be a typographic mistake in my diary, of all of them? But then I thought that maybe it could be a sign.
All these black pages represent my life.
Can it be that there is at least one white page, a small piece of sky between all these clouds?
I wonder if I'll ever reach it,
And write on it...

Then she kept it closed for several days.

In a moment of boredom, the girl took the elevator and went to Jag's room to steal the cards he had left on the table, and then she went to the adjoining wing.

After trying a couple, the inlayed wooden door opened and a silent, dark room greeted the girl.
Turning on the lamp on the bedside table, Fade found it clean and tidy, far different from how she remembered it from her nights spent with Nef. The ashtrays had been emptied and washed, the bed made and the chairs freed from the mountain of clothes the man used to toss carelessly around the room.

She sat on the bed and sank her face into the pillow. She smelled the faint fragrance of the bass player among the fibres and breathed in the aroma that stirred her memories. The ugly things that had happened between them seemed to vanish in an instant, dissolved by all those nights in which they had met right in that bed, when he taught her patiently what to do, when he took her the first time and all the following ones. She fell asleep cradled by those memories with a hidden desire to have him next to her.

When she awakened, among the blankets, she remembered a light melody that she hadn't recalled for a long time, composed by delicate string and clarinet orchestras.

It had been a long time since the last time she had been 'reborn'; she didn't even remember in which occasion she had done so the last time and she thought that maybe she could try it again.
She sat on the bed and closed her eyes, but felt too stupid: that place was not her familiar and cosy shelter, where nobody, except her, came in.

She slipped her skates on and grabbed the master key cards, and then she headed over to Jess's door. She remembers from the website that there was classical music CDs on the drummer's profile page, maybe he had the one she was looking for. The door opened at the passage of the first card.

The girl slipped into a room that looked more like a gym than a bedroom, adorned with the most varied gears, many used as coats hangers, and posters of movies that had made history. No television, but a flashy stereo system complete with turntable and unusually large speakers placed at the four corners of the room. She approached a tall cabinet and began to look at the music CDs arranged orderly by name and type; the labels helped in the search.

The 'classical' section was at the centre of the cabinet, showing that he wanted it to be the one most at hand.

Fade couldn't understand how a drummer could love classical music, but perhaps it wasn't so strange; she knew no drummers, therefore she couldn't connect the two things. She was thrilled to see that there was a collection of compositions by Stravinsky and, opening the CD, she found the piece she was looking for: "Firebird".

She tried to operate the huge stereo but had to give up. There were different components stacked one above the other and on each one there was the word 'on'. At first she turned them all on and confusedly watched the myriad of pulsating lights and equalizers. She even found the cd drawer, but when she pressed the play button she didn't hear a note of music. She raised the volume and began to press the buttons randomly without even reading the scripts. Finally, annoyed, she pulled out the cd, closed the drawer and pressed all the off buttons to put the monster to sleep.

She left the room bringing the CD with her and went back to Nef's room. There she found no trace of a stereo. She then tried in Ted and Sushi's rooms. She immediately left the girl's room. It was too neat, even though it was full of knick-knacks. On two large windows at the sides of the bed were hundreds of three-dimensional reproductions of manga characters and in a secluded corner, a table with a sake set. Finally, on the wall at the end was hung a giant plasma TV surrounded by shelves full of DVDs.

"A cartoon fanatic" she concluded "I'd better not touch anything or I risk ending up like the writer of that movie in which his psychopathic fan found out that he had moved an ornament on the bedside table..." and she closed the door.

In Ted's room she found the opposite scenario: there was a huge variety of musical instruments scattered around everywhere, meaning that the musician knew how to play them all; a musical keyboard, a guitar, a sax, bongos, a xylophone, a harmonic and common bells hanging on the wall in large scale.

The girl moved cautiously so as to not touch anything, she had already noticed how much Nef cared about his bass; she didn't dare to think what kind of attachment the guitar player could have for that melodic multitude. No luck. Even in Ted's room there was no stereo, but the girl considered it justifiable. Why would he need one when he had all those instruments?

Her search continued for a while in the rest of the studios. She found it surreal not being able to listen to music in the building of one of the most popular bands on the planet. Eventually she gave up and asked an attendant who told her that she would have found one in the cafeteria, within a shelving unit.

With her portable stereo in her hand Fade returned to the bass player's room. The device was easy to use: a CD player drawer and a play button, just like all normal ones were, but the girl had been out of touch with technological progress for too long during those years she had lived alone, so her conception of 'normal world' was also distant in time.

She chose the song and stretched out on the bed to listen to the notes, imperceptible at the beginning.

Fade had created a whole set of scenarios on that composition and remembered them every time she heard it. Near the house in which she used to live, in fact, there was a theatre where for a long time they had rehearsed a ballet on that base.

She imagined a Phoenix living in a garden of white weeping willows. It was alone but not unhappy. It spent its time flying through the thin branches and watching its reflection in the water of a lake, which was so clear it seemed made of crystal. The animal broke its reflection by touching the surface of the water with its claw and played with the grass of a boundless green lawn moved by the wind.

But then came a man, an avid hunter, who caught it to put it in a cage, or kill it to display its feathers on a hat. The phoenix escaped flying away and zigzagging among the willows so he couldn't catch it, the man pursued it, trampling the enchanted garden, destroying the trees that sheltered it and poisoning the lake's waters to make it leave that place. Until the bird, cornered, decided to die rather than being captured, wrapped itself in flames that left only carbonized remains. The hunter, at that point, looking at the ash falling apart between his hands, considered his gesture and left, full of bitterness for not being able to catch his prey. Leaving the Phoenix free to be reborn.

A little at a time, from its ashes, it again took its shape and began to rise, accompanied by music in crescendo. Everything around it was destroyed, its world had gone but it would continue to fly and prevent anyone from reaching it. And at that moment, the music blended so much with her imagination that she was also reborn, purified from the wickedness of those who had attempted to capture her, breaking the branches that protected her and ruining the world around her.

The symphony ended with a conclusion of strings that overlapped with the girl's sigh and her body was pervaded by a shiver that brought her an ecstasy of peace and silence.

[...]

A few days later, going back into Ted's room, she noticed that the guitarist had left his laptop closed on a table, covered by many papers and music notes.

The girl opened it and, finding the ignition key, started it. After a very slow loading, the screen stopped at the password entry window.

She had no idea what word she could enter, imagined several possibilities, and tried with something trivial, such as "Ted", "Guitar", "Sushi", "Joanna", "Momuht"... but they all gave the same result: "wrong password". Fade quickly got frustrated and started looking around her. She noted that the table was entirely covered with inscriptions, probably engraved with the tip of a knife - as she had seen on the website screen at the internet point. She began to read them curiously. It struck her that the most recurring phrase was "I want to be free", surrounded by letters and numbers that she couldn't understand.

To be free. Free from what? She couldn't match the sense of that phrase to that boy who lived exactly as he liked. Perhaps success could be considered a cage?

She dragged her mind away from those thoughts and immediately tried to enter those phrases as passwords, but they all gave an error feedback.

She then understood the meaning of the unfinished row of letters and numbers: "I 1 2 B 3"; "I one two B three", sounded like the phrase repeatedly written on the table. She tried that sequence and the computer started. A full screen automatically opened: white, with only one box and a flashing cursor in the middle. Below, in small words, was written "Enter the keywords you want to search".

Fade was confused. She had used a computer sometimes when she was a teenager, but it was all very different from how she remembered. She tried to write a word and pressed the send key. She was struck by a screen full of scripts.

She tried to understand what they meant; she clumsily moved the mouse in the attempt of getting a result.

Following several attempts she understood how it basically worked. The computer connected to the Internet and she, by entering words on that screen, was able to see pages related to the sentences she had written. She tried to find the Momuht website that Jag had shown her and, imitating the kid, she also understood how the links worked on a website. The second thing she did, after browsing a bit randomly, was look for Jag: who knew if that could be the way to trace him somewhere in the world.

Having no other references, she only wrote his name. She got a varied series of links, but none of them connected her to the weird boy. She decided to refine her research by adding the name "pink hair", "crazy scientist lab coat", and even "with a lot of money", but the more words she wrote, the further she got from what she was looking for.

Soon it was night time and the girl finally looked away from the monitor. Her back hurt and her eyes stung. She couldn't believe she had spent all that time in front of the computer, also skipping lunch, without having concluded anything. She decided to shut everything and go to see if she could find some food, but she had no idea how to shut that hypnotic device. She thought of the quickest and most effective method and unplugged the wall socket. The computer made a loud noise, as if it had received a painful stroke; the screen diminished its brightness, but it didn't turn off. Fade flinched for a moment. That strange reaction had frightened her so much her heart beat fast, yet she couldn't realize why; after all it was just a piece of plastic and chips. She calmed down and try to figure out what was wrong. In the end, she wrote on the search engine "how to turn off a computer", discovering that on the internet there were also minor things like that. So she correctly turned it off.

---
Author's note
This is not my favorite chapter. After many years, read it again, I consider it a little bit overtalking. Thanks for have read it, anyway!