Of What Was Left Behind (ONC 2024)

17 - Collision Course I

Energy trickled in from the weak sunlight filtering through grey clouds and onto the camera's cracked photovoltaic cells. In normal circumstances, this energy would have been enough for the machine to turn on, but now, it was only enough to pull it from the abyss of shut down.

So the camera, barely functioning, did the only thing it could - process data.

The machine dived into the mire of corrupted memories. It witnessed days where half the sky was enveloped in darkness and moments where birds bore the legs of mice. It observed a chaotic landscape of colour so severely corrupted that images failed to form.

Then, it saw the woman.

Her image was distorted, with one side of her face stretched to nonsensical proportions. She opened her mouth and closed it, bursting into laughter.

"I can't do it."

She shook her head. "'Talk to your camera,' they said. 'It will help,' they said."

There was a moment of silence as she stared up at the camera from her desk chair, spinning it while muttering to herself.

"Yeah, I'm not going to get used to this. A camera in my room? What is this? Some kind of dystopian nightmare? I can't believe grandma is adjusting better than I with this new addition."

The moment cut itself out, transitioning suddenly to another landscape. The room wasn't quite a ruin, but it wasn't quite a room either. The windows were smashed, with sharp, jagged glass barely holding onto the windowsill. The bed, and everything else was covered in dirt.

The whole place was silent. Not even the birds could be heard.

Then, an explosion rattled the air, sending plumes of dust skyward.

The camera found itself in another landscape. It was pure white. Here, the machine found itself thinking, piecing together what it noticed about the pile of corrupted data. It had found it strange that the mere fact of breaking down what exactly the data entailed freed its processing power to do other things.

It didn't make sense.

If it had deleted these useless pieces of data, then it would have made sense but this?

A figure walked out of the blinding white. It was the woman, who stared right at the camera. She looked around as if searching for something in this blinding white void. Then she sat on air, or perhaps on an invisible chair.

There was a moment of silence as the woman stared at her hands.

"Grief," she began, "is such a strange process."

The camera watched the woman turn to the side, even though there was nothing there. "You get better, progress and then, you go back again. When you process one memory, one moment, another one waits in the shadows. It's not even linear."

She lowered her gaze. "You can process later feelings and memories without even touching the earlier ones, the ones from the day you got notified of-"

She stopped and pursed her lips. "It's still hard to say, on some days at least. I think that's why we process, why our minds make us think again and again of the past. It's so we can live out our days with our experiences without them crushing us."

There was another moment of silence. "Doesn't make it any easier though."

The woman looked up, staring straight at the camera. Her words cut in and out, suddenly sounding muffled. Her movements were separated into still images.

Blink.

She stood up.

Blink.

She was closer, stuck in mid-step.