TRANSCENDENTAL TABS

Adam always woke up in his rented room outside Milan both too late and too early. The world outside ticked to the rhythm of train schedules, but his life moved to the rhythm of browser tabs. In the top right corner of the screen dozed the messenger icon; on the left, a rare vinyl store glowed; in the center, three flickering search bars where the browser insistently tried to finish someone else's very private thoughts.

He kept a mug of coffee ready and mechanically flipped through realities: email turned into news feeds, news into spreadsheets, spreadsheets into online shops. Tab forty-seven opened on some obscure regional portal. “Strong earthquake in Sicily, evacuation expected,” the headline read. Adam smirked: there was nothing about it on TV or in Italian feeds. He clicked “Refresh.” The post disappeared as if it had never existed.

The next morning, the chandelier trembled, and an emergency message arrived from Rome: a 6.1-magnitude earthquake. He recalled the ghostly notice but dismissed it as coincidence.

It continued for a week: marketplace carts filled with items that didn’t exist in any catalog; news feeds reported games that weren’t on any tournament schedule. Every time, a few hours later, reality caught up with the browser. Adam began recording discrepancies and found a strange pattern: the longer a tab remained open, the faster its contents materialized in the real world.

He ran an experiment. He left open a tab featuring a rare edition of Goethe’s Faust—description, price, ISBN. A day later, walking past a second-hand bookshop on the Naviglio Grande, he saw that exact volume, in the same tiny binding. He bought it, placed it on his desk. The pages smelled of 1912 printing ink, as if the book had seeped through the screen, bringing the scent of old Berlin from someone else's library.

Adam’s cat, a dignified black-and-white creature named Schrödi, watched him with polite suspicion. Sometimes he lay across the keyboard, spawning dozens of new windows in the browser. Schrödi’s chaos complemented Adam’s methodical nature, as if the cat instinctively understood that disorder was the driving force of the universe.

One evening, Adam stumbled upon a page without an address bar. The background was white; at its center pulsed a gray ring like the breath of a sleeping whale. When the cursor neared, the ring shivered. Adam felt a strange chill in his fingertips, as if static electricity pulled him toward the screen. He reached out and touched the glass.

A flash. The monitor rippled at the point of contact, like water struck by a pebble, and drew him in. The silence hit so sharply he had no time to panic: sound cut out, air froze, his body dissolved into weightless lightness. Before his eyes opened a colossal room with no walls, made entirely of flickering windowpanes: news sites, gaming streams, archaeology blogs, student portals—a kaleidoscope of worlds linked by invisible hyperlinks.

He stood without weight. One step, and a site collapsed, displaying a 404 error; another step, and a rainy webcam view bloomed into a clear northern night. In this ether, he could reach out to a search bar and pull letters like threads, weaving them into new images. Adam realized: here, thoughts and clicks held power. Around him floated others—barely visible avatar-silhouettes. One chased a missing child whose face endlessly multiplied in pop-up banners; another built a home out of banking windows, where numbers turned into bricks.

Among them, Adam saw a girl in a green hoodie. Her name was Lu, and she'd been searching for an exit for three months. She showed him the rule: a tab where a living conversation appears becomes immortal—you can't close it, only fork it like a vine spreading its tendrils.

“You can stay here forever if you accept that you, too, are just a tab,” she said. “But then the smell of coffee, the softness of your cat’s fur, all boundaries will vanish. Instead of a soul, you’ll have a cache.”

Adam remembered the sound of Schrödi rustling a newspaper on the windowsill. He reached for a window showing his desk. The image was sharp: the desk, the mug, the same Faust… and the cat sauntering across the keyboard.

Schrödi pressed “Ctrl+W.” Windows began to collapse one by one. Exclamation marks, empty squares, pixelated tears; in Adam’s ears echoed the snap of a laptop lid shutting—though he no longer had ears. He lunged for his world, but the gap between realities narrowed. The last to vanish was the white ring, popping with a dry sound like a bursting soap bubble.

Darkness remained, pierced by the distant glow of scattered web windows. Adam no longer belonged to any tab. He was stuck in between—a hidden corridor of the browser where the address bar is blank, and the “back” button is inactive.

Others were there too: an old programmer who had accidentally compiled himself into a cloud service; a teenager who downloaded a pirated game with a portal inside; a woman who clicked on an ad promising to contact the dead. All of them sought a way to forge a new link to the outside. But without an external click, the tab doesn’t open.

Adam gathered the fragments of closed windows and began weaving strange constructs. He collected pixel dust, script snippets, metadata shards—anything still glowing like embers. He shaped them into a miniature decoy site: an empty blog whose title updated every minute with the latest viral keyword, and in the footer blinked a barely visible GIF of Adam’s face, if you looked from the right angle.

All he needed was for someone in the real world to search for strange browser glitches and stumble upon this blog. One external click would open the portal—and if he moved fast, he could slip out like smoke from dry wood.

Time here wasn’t measured in seconds: it flowed like the scroll of a mouse wheel. But one day, Adam felt a tug—someone had opened the page. A silver crackle swept through the void, like perforated film unraveling. He ran for the breach, but Lu was already there.

“Take my chance,” she said calmly. “Your cat is still waiting for you.”

She pushed Adam toward the shimmering void. Myriad pixels flared like mirrors in sunlight. He stepped forward—and passed through the screen. Digital Adam became human again.

…The laptop screen lit up again in the rented room outside Milan. On the table, the cat lay curled in a warm lump, and Goethe’s book rested open nearby. In tiny letters on the subtitle, someone had penciled: Ausgabe 1912, Weimar.

Adam opened his eyes. Evening had fallen. The chair still smelled of coffee grounds, his fingers tingled as if they had touched a live wire.

The monitor looked clean: no open pages. He clicked the mouse—and the browser opened a blank tab with the address about:blank. He sighed. At that moment, a push notification appeared in the bottom right corner:
“New article: Mysterious Browser Failures Around the World.”

He peered at the frame. In the thumbnail image, Lu’s face glowed clearly.

Adam reached to click—and suddenly froze. Schrödi jumped onto the table and lay between his hand and the mouse, hissing at the screen.

Adam withdrew his hand, placed it on the cat’s warm back, and listened to the steady purring, deep as the pulse of a distant sea. He understood: while the cat sleeps on the keyboard, the tabs sleep with him. The portal sleeps too.

But the push window blinked, breathed, shifted headlines—like the gray ring that had once pulled him in. Below shimmered the button: “Read More.”

He closed his eyes, counting to ten, and thought that the coffee was still warm, that the night above the canals of Naviglio smelled of jasmine, that two concert tickets were still in the drawer—canceled because of yesterday’s news.

When he opened his eyes—the window was gone.

In its place, a search bar appeared.

The cursor was already blinking.

And beneath it, the first words were slowly being typed.

But he was not the one typing them.

 

CHAPTER 2
ACCESS FOR THE RETURNING USER

The coffee was hopelessly cold.

Schrödi, having leapt from the desk, lazily wandered over to the window with the bearing of a creature who had long understood the futility of rushing. Adam sat in his chair, his gaze chained to the screen. The screen was blank. A bare about:blank page—no tabs, no browsing history, no saved sessions. As if the browser had no memory of Adam ever having opened it.

A swipe across the touchpad yielded no results. The cursor obeyed the motion but crawled sluggishly, as if infected by the user’s own hesitation.

Click. Another. Useless. Only the lifeless whiteness of the screen.

Adam was about to close the laptop when he heard a soft click—though he hadn’t touched anything. As if an invisible companion on the other side of the monitor had clicked first. The screen flickered. The browser restarted.

The new tab was empty, without an address, only the blinking words: “Loading...”

And then, over it, a window popped up:

Invitation activation complete. Awaiting returning user.
Response time: 17 seconds.

Adam froze. This wasn’t a bug, not a background process.

It was an answer. Or a callback. He knew—windows like that didn’t appear randomly.

A countdown began on screen.

16… 15… 14…

He reached to close the laptop—and suddenly noticed
a second line slowly appearing beneath the timer.

It was in a different font, as if handwritten.

It held no commands. Only a name.

LU

13… 12… 11…

Adam didn’t touch the mouse.

But it was already moving.

The cursor was crawling toward the “confirm” button on its own.

He understood:
he wasn’t the one initiating the process.

It was her request.

And now it was up to him whether she would return—or remain trapped there forever.

 

CHAPTER 3
HANDING OFF THE CONNECTION

The timer hit zero—and vanished.

The screen went black, as if someone had pulled the plug.

But seconds later, it lit up again.

Not with light, but with code.

Everything looked different.

There was no browser, no familiar interface—it felt like MS-DOS: just a stream of commands, a sequence of lines. As if Adam had peered into the operating system’s core.

But this wasn’t a program in those lines.

It was her.

First, the name appeared: LU_session.

Then—fragments of an image.
The formula of motion, the structure of voice, the parameters of a gaze.

Adam didn’t understand what he was doing, but he didn’t hesitate.

For the first time in all this, he had no doubt.

He simply started typing commands.

Wrote, deleted, rewrote—driven by the sense that she was waiting, and that he couldn’t stop.

He didn’t know if he could pull it off.

But he knew: if he stopped, Lu would vanish forever.

The screen flashed.

A dot appeared—and disappeared.

Then another. But this one stayed. Others began layering over it.

They formed—a hand. Pixelated, pale, jagged.

It trembled, like a weak internet signal.

Then half a face appeared.

Suddenly, the process froze.

A message popped up:

Insufficient data. Restoration impossible.
Continue manually? [Y/N]

Adam didn’t read. Reflexively, he pressed Y.

The system froze.

The process continued blindly.

Memory overloaded. Modules blinked. The laptop fan howled like a living thing.

On the screen—silence. Black background.

No symbols. No cursor.

And in the far corner—an unlit character.

A barely visible line:

lu_saved.tmp

Adam didn’t know what it meant.

A file?
A fragment?
Just a name?

He tried to open the file, but it didn’t respond. No program could read it. As if the system couldn’t recognize it.

Adam rose from his desk.

The cat slept, undisturbed.

The screen remained black.

But seconds later, below the file line, a new sentence appeared—Adam hadn’t typed it:

Download complete. Connection active.

Question: which of us returned?