Linka C

You know...

I am not sure how to say this, but it's once again the start of another story.

Another meeting with a stranger on the train, which will end up in friendship, when in real life, on the STB, it's not really like that.

The bus to and from Bucharest I take.

Actually, on occasions they do and I had acquaintances, and there was a woman from dental study who had a 3D printer whom I talked to when I seen her, and I have seen her like two or three times this year, and when I was studying, because I don't go out, so I don't get to meet strangers. And then there were people from the local university who were nice and I've even got contact with one of them after she recommended me a film but then when I said "hi, how are you doing", a month later I got ghosted, blocked. But there was one person I met on the bus whom I became friends with and that happened to be the friend of my ex-friend, so not new.

Yeah, and it has been boring for me to have only like one religious close friend who is busy most of the time. I did get out with her and I was more mature this time than with the ex-friend, but I am looking for people who are different, more spontaneous maybe, who are more open. I don't trust people who are flowery because some people I met were flowery in the sense that they were interesting and had this conversationalist, creative side, but they were not particularly committed. At the same, I want one who is committed and interesting at the same time.

Right now, neither. I don't think I am interesting person, but that friend I have now wants to make me feel like I'm interesting. She sometimes says "Vlad, the cute one, Vlad, the cute one" and I am not sure what to say, so I say that she is cute too. I am trying to be interesting, but I mostly try being myself.

I try to believe her, but sometimes I don't, so I say something so the sentence has somewhere to go.

So, because I am bored and I want another close friend, I create characters, on and on, using the same scenarios I have gone through but every time I altered it towards a favorable outcome. And you might say, that's serious, like rigging an election. But that's what I did in my stories for so long, rigging outcomes so they are favorable to me and I get a friend and then realize... they were all just multiplications of my mind.

They become friends, I enjoy the friendship, there is always something important to talk about, and maybe I experience love later on, but not always. In fact, most of the time, I create like four characters in the same universe, and then based on how future events would go, I choose who will get even closer.

They continue to exist, but frequency reduces because it's just so hard to balance everyone, and then I say, this is enough, and I stop writing at all.

Yeah, and then I decided to extend my sources of inspiration by watching other people relate things. There was a woman who described her life in Japan, which eventually got to be the source of inspiration for Nozaki in the "Pod Bus, Lindoma" section of the Republic of Fluid universe. There were also street photographers that embedded stories and then there were also researchers who documented longer stories, and I liked the researchers more.

Because the researchers run significantly longer interviewers, which reveal more personality, but there is one disadvantage where the people getting more coverage are either intellectuals, people fighting for a cause or just really mature people who know what they are talking about, and the ordinary people talk less.

Many people don't have a lot to say, or something worth being friends for. That is what I encountered in real life. I must select people, and it is a very difficult process. You can't just approach anyone.

Because that is what happens often when I want to talk to strangers.

I have already ran through it, you were bored, now I let feelings guide me.

That's how it really is.

after a short pause What's your name?

I am so exhausted of multiplying myself in fiction, and I cannot stop.

I tried to stop, but I'll just multiply myself again and again.

Initially relief, but then it's just too much realizing that I have been copying and copying other characters and myself.

I know this is hard...

What is that thing?

Do you know how can I stop this?

I am feeling somewhat lonely. I feel that many connections I could have are inaccessible. And that is in spite of knowing the systemic conditions or the circumstances I was born in, not having been able to have a social life at five because I could speak until five.

Yes. I was born with late speech. I thought it was a simple condition, but then I realized just how much it altered my way of thinking.

It is very difficult for me to predict what the other will gesture, how the other will feel without much information, to tolerate superficiality, and to tolerate not talking about myself at all.

Yes, in some way, but it also serves as temporary replacements for future friends I will have should conditions change.

Finally moving away from my peers, out of twelfth grade, and finding places with more mature or intelligent people I can actually relate to.

Yeah, and when you are that young and different, you can't really connect with others of the same age or even older sometimes.

I've realized that too.

It's environment. I ruled out any possibility that I could find friends in workshops relating to my passions, because I have like five or more passions and very specific preferences. And I had friends like that before, but they have just gone.

I have ruled it out after trying.

Two courses, weekly, and wait, there was a third and fourth...

Wait another few years...

Yeah, unfortunately. Since I got in high school I thought to try making friends early as much as I can, knowing I will be hitting into some very hard walls, and hope I will find love or at least another significant friend in four years.

I set at fifteen. And that's the unfortunate reality of being above your years in some things. You have to try and wait.

Yes, but early on so many things that I've even got accusations of seeming superior without concrete proof.

From older teachers.

It's actually only my IT teacher, and a few others I don't remember where the accusations came from. I was doing all tasks, then not doing some of them because I already did them. I eventually got recognized as a power user after I've got third place in an olympiad where I presented an older program I made.

It's a questionnaire my mother told me to make as a demo to demonstrate to the National Health Insurance House, where she works, that digitization is possible. It sat an year unused, even after it got promoted, and even if the source code was public and the my mother decided when there were complaints about lack of digitization once again to ask me for the direct link to the source code, which I pasted to her, and she forwarded it, and then finally the House took a copy of my program and integrated into its own system.

My mother says that yes, and I wrote the whole logic in simple javascript, what you would expect of the simplest programs out there.

Of course not, my mother only told me the program was integrated. And wait, I made the program two years ago, it only got integrated now.

Of course. The procurement is chaotic. I was even offering the program under a free license where the only restriction was that a copy of it may link back to me, and they didn't know that the source was available for the public.

My mother says that has been passed off to the programmers. They must have credited me and read the licenses, but of course since it's inside the healthcare system, which is private, I cannot verify that they credited me.

It doesn't really matter now. It finally got into the system. And I've got other new projects to work on by the way.

Whatever ideas come into my head, like Fluid, Sifonator, Legacy IDE, other stories... by the way, Sifonator and Legacy IDE are technically complete and I have not tested them since. I move on fast.

They are tested while in the development cycle. Now they are out, and I come back when I plan to revive them. They are personal projects after all.

Sifonator, or SifonatorPRO, is a fictional subscription-based service that aids corrupt politicians in Romania to siphon off public money by exploiting loopholes in the procurement and justice system. Of course it's satire, and there were three fictional APIs, like ANAF Sync, PSD Direct Connect and Mântuire Proiecte. ANAF Sync is a government API that connects to E-Factura and provides a detailed overview of purchases. starting to laugh for a bit PSD Direct Connect is a service that allows you to pay for all the fees of SifonatorPRO and everything small you would desire by using public money, essentially using taxpayer money as if it were yours, under certain conditions. And "Mântuire Proiecte" allows you to salvage shoddy projects, and it is the fastest way to gain reputation points in the game, which can be used for press and escaping DNA investigations and drop convictions like Vanghelie.

Of course not. There is a feature called the magic wand, and if you are not planning to subscribe, you can buy hours. The magic wand uses accounting tricks to multiply the money you cash in from public projects, therefore draining even more taxpayer money.

I built the interface. It's playable, but it's in Romanian.

People don't play it, I kept as a personal project. All personal projects are public.

Yeah, there is no way to announce.

I'll look for a way later, right now I am not interested.

Do you have to get down somewhere?

The same. I am not heading anywhere in particular.

What else to say?

I don't know Prague, that's the thing. I come from Bucharest.

Because I've been looking at generic housing estates. In fact, many of my stories happen in the most generic places possible.

Because I go through them every day. And I get bored in usual tourist destinations. At camps, I soaked up in clothing, standing on my tiring feet, looking at castles and other overflowing buildings.

In one of my stories, I also featured a generic inside. And when I thought about Leriduson, a port city in that story, I thought that it's architecture would be like, center, sídliště, sídliště, sídliště, sídliště, sídliště and then sídliště.

Leriduson is where Marliene, a fluidian-born woman, lives. She moved from Prevessa to there. In later parts, after Vlad returning from Japan and stopping at Leriduson before going to Lindoma, she hangs out with him in a restaurant and then she invites him to sleep on an extended couch in her apartment block, which is located inside a "silies", the fluidian term for "housing estate".

In some way, yes. And Vlad lives in a silies at the Marginal neighborhood in Lindoma, with Akima and Nozaki eventually. There has not been a single character that didn't live in a generic housing estate.

In different buildings. I have used the word "sídliště" many times in my recent stories, and not just in Fluid.

Yes, because I learned from the archives what a sídliště is.

There is an archive of news from CT24 called "Paneláková kultura". In the 1950 recording, the reporter says via a ball experiment that they are made of expanded clay and then the rest documents their growth until they eventually start decaying, and it ends with a note that most people would agree more on rehabilitating than demolishing them.

How is your building?

It's a normal life, hearing the television?

Yeah, and you know, I don't actually live in a panelák, my grandmother lives in a bloc.

I live in a half-house with a small, long yard.

Yeah, because if the setting is an urban place, what other place to think about than either the most boring city centers like Geneva or the most boring peripheries like everywhere in Romania, Poland, Czechia, and so on.

Because the place will no longer be doing the relational work for them, and it's where most people live.

In romantic films like Before Sunrise, the place is doing a lot of work in place of the characters, who mastered teleportation for some reason and the church is non-euclidean because the inside scene has been filmed in a different church than the one being shown on the outside.

Vienna is a city where it's pretty easy to add events that seem spontaneous, and since the architecture is so coherent, you can film in different places without ever attracting attention. And many of those activities are designed to help them get closer in a seamless way.

Yes, that's how romance works in this film. I wrote a story where both characters, Celeste and still Vlad but slightly different, know about the Before Trilogy, get off and get to know each other at Geneva, visit Lyon, her provincial city, and then visit Bucharest, his city.

Yes, the story is meant to a critique of this romance film.

That's it's just not really feasible in real life despite sounding very realistic.

They still get to meet each other, but they've got to realize just how banal they are.

They talk about a lot of things, and it turns out to be none of the interesting philosophical things in the film.

Of course, I wanted to say, that's how it really goes with most people, don't go chase after those interesting conversations. Not every one of us has the capacity to wrap up their theories or life experience in beautiful words.

Films and stories are often designed to be out of the ordinary. Romanian literature has many instances where relationships go wrong in extreme ways because at the time the text was written, it gathered the most attention.

Usually both. In Ion, Ana dies. In Ultima noapte de dragoste, Gheorghidiu is a person full of misogyny, so much so that he decides to revenge on Ela for just talking to someone named G. And then because Gheorghidiu is deep in his revenge, she leaves him, and Gheorghidiu is at war, so he left too and just didn't think about her anymore.

It's 1930.

Many of those books do not have a point, they are meant to be exploratory.

I had to study them.

They were somewhat good, but they are both way too dramatic.

It's both reaction and the fact that I find them true.

The next one is.

You have be challenging me in a really good way.

Yeah, but you know what is like when I am writing all these alone.

I am planning everything, I am sitting alone with my mind, I am directing what characters should be saying, I am making portraits for many of the characters except for me using a simple sampling procedure, I get bored, I create another character, another scenario, different story, but everything converges. And it's tiring, but there is nothing else to do to keep company.

The sampling procedure is where I pick some images and I derive faces, because I am more like a programmer than an artist.

I only pick stock images and then make sure they are not identifiable, so as to make sure the characters are always unique.

I tried to generate portraits of fictionalized versions of myself, but it is a lot harder for men, and there is a lot less variety.

Less variety in images, there is the over-representation problem, where some features are a lot more represented that others on the internet.

Of course they do.

following her after the doors open You are different, refreshing from many other people who are just really nice but not interested. You asks questions. I like that.

standing behind her on the escalator What else to say? I see you are trying to critically think about the stuff I am saying. Most people I talked to don't do that.

Not many people talk to strangers when they don't have anything better to do.

reaching the top after her I've done enough self-aware tropes.

pulling out his sketchbook Check this thing out. I have drawn many geometric buildings that look like exactly the ones that will be on the outside.

I used the dots on the page.

Thirty minutes to an hour. I haven't drawn a lot since like six months.

I've had other things to do, I wrote more.

It's just simple geometric shapes. Usually people asked me, why I don't go to architecture. I no longer want to say why I won't.

You are going home, right?

Then this over. We could talk more or just end this, and I go back home.

Alright, you know, usually when a conversation turned out to be really interesting, you ask for contact info, at least that's what a guide has been saying, and that's what I have been doing nearly every time.

Sure, can I have your phone or a handle or something so we can debate more?

writing her number on his phone and then texting Well, now you should have me.

Hope you don't ghost me like all the others, whether it's at high school, or university or whatever.

At least that's honest.

My home is in Romania. I'll go back to the center. Bye, I'll write to you and see if you reply.

looks at the station, then back at the bus, and then steps into the station