1. Man of steel

1. Man of steel

Rainy Sunday morning, January 2020, Northern Europe. David had been locked in his dressing room for hours. Outside, her team's security was knocking on the door and threatening to tear it down.

"Leave me!" I am fine. I just need to be alone for a while.

David sighed. He couldn't wait to rest. At least they were on the last take of the recording — the last take, of one of his last film projects.

It had been years since David had known what it was like to have a real vacation. Even on weekends — when he got rid of filming and TV series — he ended up involved in a thousand appointments with the brands he had a contract with.

His friendship cycle was always about Work. He was never alone. His advisors, contractors, security guards and prosecutors were around him 24 hours a day. His parties were formal, with lots of paparazzi and spotlights pointed at him. All the compliments and greetings had to do with business. All the new people his team had let approach him came out of some kind of interest, however small. Even the women who slept with him did it because he was who he was: one of the most famous and richest actors in Hollywood.

Standing in the dressing room bathroom, looking at the mirror, David stared at himself for minutes. He was very tired. The exhaustion on his face was clear. He always smiled, even though inside he was screaming, "Let me go now, you fucking headmaster." It was about to explode.

He slept late at night in trailers or hotels, depending on where they recorded and how long the recordings lasted. He was finishing a contract and was already waiting for several others to start working. When not, he had already renewed for sequences of his films that hadn't even finished yet. Lots of sometimes recorded more than one show at the same time. No wonder such exhaustion! Years and years without a deep rest... Everything about him was asking for help!

David opened the dressing room door. There was a crowd of employees outside the trailer. He smiled, tried to play and calm everyone down. He said that everything was fine, and that he just needed a little rest alone. His team quickly attended to him, trying their best to support him, involving him in technical matters as they walked together. Seconds later, they were talking about their amazing scenes, about their magnificent performance on camera. A thousand different themes for David to process.

The general direction team of that filming announced that everyone should go home and rest, and they thanked everyone present for their collaboration, stressing that for that day the work had been enough. The majority leaders behind the big sponsorship franchises also thanked everyone and said their goodbyes, but not before giving David a big hug and patting him on the shoulder saying:

"Can we have a meeting tomorrow before the last reruns of scenes?"

- Of course. If it's urgent, we can talk now,” David replied, his face drawn and drained.

The gentlemen smiled and asked him to go and rest.

The mood on set was light. David Nichols was a very charismatic actor and loved by everyone; basically the most well talked about and respected artist in that medium. Everyone knew they could trust him. When David committed himself to a job, he was unbeatable, and sometimes he paid a very high price for it, for no man is made of steel.

Arriving at his apartment, Dave was so exhausted that as he sat down in his armchair in the game room, he fell asleep with the sound loud in the headphones and the computer screens turned on. He suddenly woke up at three in the morning feeling even more tired. A fatigue invaded his body, he felt feverish.

Dave stumbles to his room, lies down on his bed, and takes a dragée. He tries to sleep, rolls around, but he can't! He takes his cell phone out of his pocket, it's unloaded, he would have to unpack his bags to find the charger, then he notices his old laptop on top of a piece of furniture in the room, plugs it in, opens it and takes a while trying to remember the password, but it was in vain! He tried various combinations, but they were all wrong! Now he had a challenge, something that would keep his mind on for the rest of the night.

David puts his cell phone to charge and tries to remember how he could recover the laptop's password, since all his modern gadgets, including cell phones, car and tablet, were connected with his facial or digital recognition. That laptop didn't even have bluetooth! It was all the more reason for his curiosity to increase, because his old social networks, including fake profiles of dating pages and the like, were all there, totally free of access to his company, only he knew of the existence of this laptop. He wanted to delete every file that existed there, even though he never had a problem with it before.

He got on the phone and verified that the notebook was not in his online list of connections. When I had already given up, a thought came from the depths of the subconscious: “The username and password is your old gmail”! But how to get into the old email address he hadn't used for over ten years? I didn't even remember the email, how would I remember the password? One thing was for sure, he was going to try until he got it!

Dave tried the email which was connected to Youtube, but this was not a personal account, there was a company to monitor these accounts, as well as his account on Instagram, Facebook and others. Did not work. He tried several weird names which he remembered he used as a username in online games, all wrong. It was then that the voice of the subconscious again made itself present: “it's your silly full name, so no one would ever suspect it was your real account, it was obvious”! He typed in his four names and realized it was correct, clicked password recovery, was disappointed that no other recovery email or phone was connected to it.

The night went by, the malaise getting worse, until he finally got the password right, it was his dog's name! Dave squealed in celebration and then swore at the fact that he hadn't tried the obvious!

Sitting comfortably on his bed, with his notebook on his legs, he was snooping at the screen of that old laptop. His intention was to reboot and erase everything in his memory forever. He was used to not having a fixed time to sleep due to the intensity of recordings over the years, so for him “the night was a child”! To delete some profiles and accounts he needed to retrieve the information in the email.

There were thousands of unread messages, opening them one by one, hoping to have a good laugh with messages from passionate fans. It would take him years to check them out. So he didn't continue, he would just get rid of everything, that's when something caught his attention, several messages from the date of 2011, from the same person, it was a dialogue, because he had also replied, sporadically he decided to open that message before delete it, the title of one of them made him curious: Yes, I'm what you're looking for, by Nina Dahl.

Hello strange! I deleted my social networks like you asked. Now we only have this email. I no longer used Orkut anyway! Now it's your turn to call me, as promised.

In another message more recent years:

Here's the link to share my Google+ online library with you. You will have full access to my database, online photos, shared, messages, everything I connected to my phone. I know it's dangerous, but I have nothing to fear or hide. Kisses and have fun with my nonsense!

There was a link David had clicked years ago, as in the next message Google had confirmed access to Nina Dahl's online library. David clicked on the link and immediately had access to over 100,000 photos and videos of a blonde woman, long hair and extremely straight, yellowish eyes. Old photos from the time of Orkut, everyday videos, choreography rehearsals for dance classes, private parties at discos or with friends, trips, tours, birthdays and many other albums recounting the entire life of that stranger.

For a moment David hesitated to continue snooping into the woman's private life, but the fascination was so great he couldn't resist. Couldn't stop! After all, she had allowed it herself. In addition to photos and prints, there were messages, posts, and WhatsApp conversations. Curiosity took over her being at that moment. It felt like the old movie: Invasion of Privacy, where the owner of the luxury hotel spied on guests.

Lost amidst so much content, he realized there were photos dated that day. Every action she did on her cell phone was instantly saved to google photos. Even before she deleted the bad photos, without filters and effects, or reports of a day of an allergy crisis, they were already there, saved. He saw them. He tried not to look at the sexy pictures on the bed, baby-doll, see-through and sexy. There were also some nudes. He began to wonder who she had sent such pictures to, was she married? Was she single? Did he have children? There were so many “saws” passing through his fervent mind that he couldn't stop thinking about “Who was she”?

Dave opened his fake social media accounts to stake her, but there was no trace of her, no Instagram accounts, no Facebook, Twitter, nothing. No information publishes on google searches. All he had was her email, but he couldn't just reply to a g-mail from a decade ago. He wasn't going to give up!

Looking at photo by photo from the year 2020, he found prints of a passage from Norway to Italy. Nina would travel with her friend Kara and her cousin Lyon the following week. They would be there for 14 days. Dave had access to the flight, the hotel, and all the programming the three of them would do during the trip to Rome, as all the files that travelers sent to each other on the phone were automatically saved.

David Nichols couldn't sleep that night. I kept thinking about Nina, her symmetrical face, her funny videos, and her personality. He wasn't looking for love, he really just wanted peace and quiet at that point in his life, he was exhausted from so much work and so many women in his bed, trying to possess him, control him, or otherwise take advantage of his status and fame, using it as an object of desire, whether for business or pleasure, to feed their egos. That's how he felt, used! He felt that no one really saw him, just a famous face, a product of the media industry. Not Nina! She looked authentic. He didn't know her closely, but based on everything he spent the night reading and seeing in her message exchanges, meme prints, funny voiceovers, all her likes history,

At dawn, he attended the last meeting he had arranged before finishing that job. Handshakes were exchanged, hugs were given, and a lot of celebration from everyone involved in the making and completion of that feature film was made that late afternoon. David looked awful! Sick, sleepless, tired and stressed...

Alexia, Dave's producer, advisor, secretary and friend, kept advising him to take a long vacation this time. She had already fitted an appointment with a psychologist into his schedule, and made him promise that he would attend this time.

Arriving home, Dave downloaded Hangouts to talk to Nina online via email. He had two simultaneous chips in his cell, one was a personal one that wasn't registered to his name, and a work one registered by the company, but he couldn't risk contacting her on her private number. He added Nina to his contacts and sent a message using Richard's name.

“Hi Nina. How much time! Are you all right?

After a while, no response, but Nina had visualized the message.