Doktor242
Bluelighter
This is a cleaned up, recontextualized version of something I posted in social a few days ago. I was suffering from a bout of insomnia when I wrote it.
I'd appriciate any comments you may have!
The Girl Who Removed Herself
A room, warm and comfortable. A bed, or floor or an object which occupies the middle ground thereof. "I" (that being our protagonist) lay on said semi soft surface.
Silence drifts through the room, broken by the metallic hum of several computers running in the background. The room is lit by 2 active matrices. The light is tinged with blue, of the quality only a computer can imbue.
Minutes roll to hours roll to subjective decades which turn out to be minutes.
An image occurs and reoccurs in the mind of the protagonist (that is me, or "I"). A bare featureless room. The walls are white as is the floor and ceiling. Centered in the room is a small transparent (glass? plasticine?) capsule. Within the capsule, suspended by means unknown is a blue rose. On closer inspection, the rose seems to be some sort of construct. The blue petals appear pixilated, as if reality was attempting to raster the image, and doing a poor job of it. If your eyes follow the stem, a gradual transformation occurs, almost unnoticeably. The stem continues as a length of cable. The cable is terminated in a high-speed serial plug, IEEE 1394 (you call it Firewire). Upon still further inspection, the leaves of the flower shimmer as though they were made up of silicon wafers. You can see the gold shine of electron paths etched into the underside of the leaves. It is coldly beautiful, the most beautiful thing the protagonist has ever imagined.
Of course it represents the girl who removed herself. That's how these things work.
Eyes open again. Some temporal drift has occurred. Minor. The laser continues scanning the tiny pits in a thin aluminum layer of a plastic disc. The information is replicated on a circle of magnetic information. All this takes place in the span of a nanosecond.
Voices, warm laughter. A door clicks open. A very dear friend and a girl who is like the girl who removed herself, but is not her materialize in the next room. I close my eyes to not be blinded by her resemblance. She reminds me of the hole where my love used to sit.
Friend walks past.
Door behind my head closes.
Girl walks past.
Knock
A flash of light. The creak of a door.
Door closes. Light is gone.
Once again I am alone, contemplating a biomechanical flower. Somewhere a dog barks in the distance. I hear the click of a door being locked. Dawn arrives.
I, (the protagonist) am shifting in and out of lucidity like a radio station that drifts in and out of static as you drive through the long cold night. I imagine the white room again. This time the girl who removed herself sits in the capsule. Her face is motionless, as if in a deep sleep. I look at her and here eyes open.
"Why did you go?" I ask her.
She answers, but the capsule is airtight, so I hear nothing. I have the same answers I have always had.
Ping!
I look up at the screen from my reverie, and realize that the disk I was copying is complete.
Stand.
S-T-R-E-T-C-H…
Engage in normal life activities in order to draw my mind away from the girl, and the flower. It’s really the same thing anyway. My tether to her was tenuous at best, most of the time. An 850-mile chain of electrons is bound to have a few weak links. Is that why the image of the flower draws so poorly? Because digital is imperfect, an approximation of a wave. Digital stairsteps the curves and rounds off the numbers. Digital takes the infinite and renders it merely complicated.
We failed because we had a digital relationship, a precise approximation of a real relationship. The few moments of analog contact were not enough to add warmth to the digital file.
I'd appriciate any comments you may have!
The Girl Who Removed Herself
A room, warm and comfortable. A bed, or floor or an object which occupies the middle ground thereof. "I" (that being our protagonist) lay on said semi soft surface.
Silence drifts through the room, broken by the metallic hum of several computers running in the background. The room is lit by 2 active matrices. The light is tinged with blue, of the quality only a computer can imbue.
Minutes roll to hours roll to subjective decades which turn out to be minutes.
An image occurs and reoccurs in the mind of the protagonist (that is me, or "I"). A bare featureless room. The walls are white as is the floor and ceiling. Centered in the room is a small transparent (glass? plasticine?) capsule. Within the capsule, suspended by means unknown is a blue rose. On closer inspection, the rose seems to be some sort of construct. The blue petals appear pixilated, as if reality was attempting to raster the image, and doing a poor job of it. If your eyes follow the stem, a gradual transformation occurs, almost unnoticeably. The stem continues as a length of cable. The cable is terminated in a high-speed serial plug, IEEE 1394 (you call it Firewire). Upon still further inspection, the leaves of the flower shimmer as though they were made up of silicon wafers. You can see the gold shine of electron paths etched into the underside of the leaves. It is coldly beautiful, the most beautiful thing the protagonist has ever imagined.
Of course it represents the girl who removed herself. That's how these things work.
Eyes open again. Some temporal drift has occurred. Minor. The laser continues scanning the tiny pits in a thin aluminum layer of a plastic disc. The information is replicated on a circle of magnetic information. All this takes place in the span of a nanosecond.
Voices, warm laughter. A door clicks open. A very dear friend and a girl who is like the girl who removed herself, but is not her materialize in the next room. I close my eyes to not be blinded by her resemblance. She reminds me of the hole where my love used to sit.
Friend walks past.
Door behind my head closes.
Girl walks past.
Knock
A flash of light. The creak of a door.
Door closes. Light is gone.
Once again I am alone, contemplating a biomechanical flower. Somewhere a dog barks in the distance. I hear the click of a door being locked. Dawn arrives.
I, (the protagonist) am shifting in and out of lucidity like a radio station that drifts in and out of static as you drive through the long cold night. I imagine the white room again. This time the girl who removed herself sits in the capsule. Her face is motionless, as if in a deep sleep. I look at her and here eyes open.
"Why did you go?" I ask her.
She answers, but the capsule is airtight, so I hear nothing. I have the same answers I have always had.
Ping!
I look up at the screen from my reverie, and realize that the disk I was copying is complete.
Stand.
S-T-R-E-T-C-H…
Engage in normal life activities in order to draw my mind away from the girl, and the flower. It’s really the same thing anyway. My tether to her was tenuous at best, most of the time. An 850-mile chain of electrons is bound to have a few weak links. Is that why the image of the flower draws so poorly? Because digital is imperfect, an approximation of a wave. Digital stairsteps the curves and rounds off the numbers. Digital takes the infinite and renders it merely complicated.
We failed because we had a digital relationship, a precise approximation of a real relationship. The few moments of analog contact were not enough to add warmth to the digital file.
