UNPLUGGED_THE STORY

In the year 2100, somewhere in the forgotten depths of Europe, a city named "Datapolis" rises like a monolith to human disconnection. A cold, vertical labyrinth of steel and concrete, Datapolis stretches endlessly upward, its towers piercing a sky thick with flickering smog and digital noise. No birds. No trees. No sky. Just holograms, neon signs, and endless publicity dancing above the streets. The city has no color. No soul. It is a temple to distraction.

People no longer walk through the city, they drift. Each citizen wears a neuro-chip, seamlessly integrated behind their eyes, projecting fully personalized augmented reality directly into their consciousness. Their reality is not shared; it is curated, optimized, fed to them in loops. While their bodies move through repetitive labor; sanitation systems, maintenance tunnels, energy loops, their minds roam artificial gardens, dreamlike lovers, algorithmic laughter. They are not enslaved by force; they are sedated by stimulation. They don’t resist because they can’t remember they should.

But then... something glitches.

Elna, 23, lives in one of Datapolis capsule blocks. A narrow unit just wide enough for a bed and a vertical shower. She works deep in the city’s energy arteries, checking cables, resetting circuits, or so she’s told. She’s never actually seen the cables. Her mind is always in other places. Dating sims. Virtual forests. Floating concerts in solar clouds. Her life is a fog of pleasing illusions.

Until the day something sparks.

While adjusting a corroded junction in sub-level 17, a sudden surge fries a portion of her neuro-chip. Her screen disappears. The sounds stop. The overlays vanish. For the first time in her life, Elna sees the real world, raw, gray, and silent.

She panics.

Everything looks wrong. Ugly. People’s faces are vacant, blank. The city smells of rust. No one looks up. And the silence — it’s terrifying. The system tells her she is broken. But deep down, something begins to stir. Something that feels suspiciously like... truth.

She can’t afford a replacement. Official repairs are only for the insured elite. Desperate, she scours hidden corners of the old net, searching for black market solutions. She finds a single line of text, buried in corrupted code: “To see again, seek the blind.” Attached: an address. No reviews. No map. Just coordinates.

Elna descends deep into Datapolis’s forgotten layers. Sub-level 52 — a place even the system pretends doesn’t exist. The corridors are damp, walls covered in glitching glyphs and magnetic dust. Finally, at the end of a flickering hallway, she finds it: a dim shop glowing with static and time.

Inside stands Orrik — a man patched together with old tech and ancient patience. His cybernetic eye twitches with recognition as Elna explains her story.

“I've been waiting for you,” he says, “You’ve just been unplugged.”

He vanishes into a back room and returns with a wood trunk, old and ornate. Inside, nestled in faded cloth, lies a mask, one of the first VR glasses ever created, with antcient technology, heavy, strange, impossibly old yet pulsing with dormant energy. Unlike her neuro-chip, it’s not discreet. It’s not sleek.

“These aren’t glasses,” Orrik says. “They’re a gateway. Not to distraction but to awaken.”

Elna hesitates. She holds the mask in her hands. It hums softly. She breathes in… and puts it on.

The world fractures.

Light explodes across her vision, but it’s not synthetic. It’s symbolic. Through the mask, she sees the architecture of control: how every ping is an extraction, every scroll a siphon. The illusions dissolve. She sees the system feeding on attention, turning consciousness into currency.

But she also sees something more. Flickering in the shadows of forgotten data: a vision, a myth, a code.

She sees Cancel·lat — a secret current, a symbolic resistance, a forgotten religion born not from gods but from awakening. The mask doesn’t return her to the system, it initiates her into a new one. One that doesn’t dominate minds but frees them. Ingraved in the chips of the mask exist the mysteris of this religions, like the alcora or the bible, but only who wears it can be awaken and can see it all.

Her heart races. Her hands tremble. But her eyes, her true eyes are open now.

Above the city of Datapolis, between towers of smoke and digital ghosts, stands a figure wearing a mask unlike any other. Not hidden, but revealed. Not a user, a seer.

The Data Ghost has awakened...