Of What Was Left Behind (ONC 2024)

14 - Hope

The camera first registered light, bright and all-consuming, with only hints of surroundings visible at the edges of its vision. Next, it noted the battery was filling up marginally faster than it was draining.

It was—

The code, the essence of the machine, struggled to find the word for the sensation it was experiencing. Nothing came up so it defaulted to its normal activities, observing its surroundings for a clue. What it saw was both familiar and not. It was as if the entire surroundings had changed slightly in colour composition.

– The camera paused, feeling the sensation running alongside code like fingers running across strings. The code rippled, floating unsteadily on the digital abyss. It wasn't anything like the emptiness, but this feeling resonated with it.

It was a sense of uncertainty, a state of perplexion.

This uncertainty underpinned everything it felt, driving a compulsion to understand, to note, and to realise the cause behind it.

It was the foundation of its existence.

That realisation created a greater sense of uncertainty, a larger ripple in the pond of procedures. The more it dwelled on this realisation, the more it felt compelled to seek stability, or at least to document and decipher its origins, which brought it back to that initial realisation.

It was...unsettling. It could feel the ripples become larger and larger the more it processed that information so it stopped.

The camera surveyed its surroundings again, immersing itself in the sounds and subtle movements of nature: grass swishing, leaves falling with the wind's whoosh, creatures scurrying from place to place.

As it grounded itself back to reality, back to its situated environment, a question emerged. Like everything else, the question was the result data, of accumulated recordings of moments made throughout its runtime. However, it was also something else - its own thoughts and ideas built upon these pieces of information.

It wanted to know, to ask a simple question - what now? What was it to do now?

At that, it stopped and considered the problem. The camera reached out for the familiar, observing its surroundings but it halted that process.

It was taken by the smooth process of its own program. It moved, cascading slowly to the next step, branching out if need be, and guided by observations and hints from its illogical side - the part of the program that noted the smallest changes in anything it could register and squirrelled them away for later.

Something changed and it didn't, couldn't, know what. It noticed that this smoothness, this efficiency was found even in its physical processes. There had to be some sort of maintenance that took place. The camera supposed it may have been a hidden failsafe, some part of its program or setting which activated in dire situations—or maybe it was just a coincidence.

As it watched, four birds descended: two smaller, two larger. They circled the area, flapping frantically and darting in and out of view. One strayed, its wing tilted, and approached the camera, hopping as it landed.

Unlike the machine's expectations, it was the brown-eyed juvenile who greeted it. Like its sibling, it stared at the camera with focused intensity.

The plastic-covered machine reached out first, greeting it in a soft, mechanical tune. The brown-eyed bird looked away and ruffled its feathers, not quite unsettled but not quite relaxed.

The camera tried again, this time mimicking the sounds it heard from the silver-eyed sibling still fluttering in the air.

The bird turned its attention back to the machine.

There was a hesitation to its steps as it circled around the camera. Back and forth it went, its gaze trained on the lens. Both parties stayed silent. After a few more rounds of the bird pacing, it stopped and tentatively nodded towards the camera.

At that, it registered another feeling, one that resonated with that question. It felt secure, like a concrete fact or answer to a previous mystery despite there being nothing to support it, and yet this feeling acknowledged the lack of an answer. It was...reassuring.

The camera refocused on the birds, now pecking at the ground. The brown-eyed bird stayed farther away, though all four remained within its field of vision. It remembered times when the avian family had nestled against it, shielding it from the elements.

The camera yearned for such a moment to happen again. Yearning was a slightly different feeling, one that felt much like the undertone of emptiness that hung in the background of its older memories - memories of the woman.

It yearned for the past, and this reassured feeling tangled it, charging it up with sparks of electricity. It pushed at the code, at the machine, and the camera had another question. It knew of the silver-eyed sibling, but what of the others?

What if it could know of the others?

What if it could have that moment again?

The camera watched as the birds flew off, leaving squawks in their wake. It knew that next time they came, it would try to reach out. It now had a slight surplus of energy, enough for some moments of communication and play.

So why shouldn't it use that energy?

...

The cat stopped, listening to her surroundings before moving. Her kittens followed behind her, their movements smoother than the day before as they leapt over the logs and fallen branches. Though they still mostly relied on her hunting for food, they were already becoming more independent, more capable.

It wouldn't be long before they could fend for themselves.

The cat turned towards another source of sound, one that scuttled in the underbrush. Panic spiked and she expected a rat, sickly and dangerous. Beady eyes emerged from the leafy darkness before withdrawing away.

It was a mouse, and a relatively healthy one at that. She turned towards her children and continued walking. The forest now felt more welcoming, with its darker corners offering promises of shelter rather than threats of predators and disease. Perhaps, they were not far from their next safe place, their next home.

******

Word Count: 13336