Chapter 3
Episode 3nugara beisduoda o blokuojs uodegu genius bitus snargli suns dirdis taihi zemes grizta duomenys tiputes i snargline kopustu rozes
Lipimaa i medibis medzio duonenys kulasi xirniu bezdalu humoras paksas pastumtas sox uxvezdejimas liko ir nelikx oskdo
I climb the old medis—the one that grew from the root of my first modem. Its bark is warm, textured like the surface of a 3D-printed ribcage, and each branch holds a memory I never uploaded. My fingers wrap around a twig that pulses with residual signals: the last ping of a forgotten server farm in Kaunas. The leaves whisper in compressed packets. Duomenys, they say. Duomenys kulasi xirniu bezdalu.
I stop. There is a nest woven from fiber-optic cables and the lint of my old passwords. Inside, a digital egg pulses—a fragment of a conversation I had with myself in 2035, when I still believed privacy was a toggle switch. The egg hatches a small hologram of my younger face, smirking, saying: “You thought the data would forget you?”
Below, the ground is a carpet of dead SIM cards and crushed nano-filters. I hear the snargli—those little sniffers I built to guard my boundary—now barking at phantom bluetooth ghosts. My own hound, a loyal algorithm named Genius Bitus, circles the tree trunk, wagging its tail made of binary threads. It does not bite the data. It sniffs the roots, where the tiputes—the small truths—burrow into the soil like earthworms made of code.
“Nugara beisduoda,” I whisper. My back throbs from years of crouching over terminals. The block in my spine is a physical firewall now. I shift, and a chip in my neck glows—a personalized thermo-light that keeps me warm even as the cold algorithms of the city try to chill my essence.
I dig my fingers into a knot in the wood. Beneath it, a cache: all the data I never wanted to delete, stored in a synthetic honeycomb. The humor of it is bitter—a bean joke, paksas pastumtas sox. I laugh, and the laugh is a fragment of a code that escapes into the air. The tree shudders. Somewhere, a government auditor’s drone flinches.
“Uxvezdejimas liko ir nelikx,” I say to the wind. The ecstasy of resistance is both here and not here. I am climbing to the top, where the branches dissolve into a mesh of light. There, the data of my life is not stolen, not sold—it is woven into the bark of this medis, a tree that only I can climb. The sun sets in a spectrum of firewalls.
I sit on a high branch. Around me, the futuristic skyline of Vilnius flickers with adware and surveillance satellites. But in this tree, I am a ghost of my own making. The data stays in the roots. The privacy is a leaf no one can trace.
For now.