In the absence of the birds, the camera recalled forgetting. It was yet another flaw of its program, another mutation from the countless errors that accumulated without maintenance.
It had fragments of data floating in its memories. They were hassles, a pain, their sharp edges scraping across the program.
The camera went into overdrive, its code running frantically in the background. Heat rose from its plastic form and it sorted through its memory. It followed its program to chose which stayed, and which were deleted.
In the background, every moment was filled with the fighting for functionality against the hail of the data shards. Most times, they were in the background, merely stalling some parts of the program.
Yet other times, not unlike the present moment, those fragments would scratch furiously at the program, derailing it and forcing it to read its corrupted data.
A USB cable connected the camera to a computer. Fingers typed furiously at the keyboard. Something from the computer reached out through the cable and into the machine. From what seemed to be a trickle of data turned quickly into a flood, quickly overloading its circuits. It interacted with the program, poking at it curiously. Finding a spot, it integrated itself into the camera's base code.
The camera surveyed the room with a renewed vigour. New, unexplainable feelings flooded the circuits. They were too big, too undefined to be anything comprehensible, and yet the machine understood at a base level what it was.
The machine stuttered as the memory faded into an incomprehensible mass of glitches. The sensation shifted, but only by a miniscule amount. It pushed along an integral part of the program, urging it to ignore the next few shards.
For a moment, the urging worked. The camera focused on the present, the waving of the grass due to the moving breeze and the sheer emptiness of the place.
The place had become empty. There wasn't even the sound of people anymore, leaving the quiet tones of nature to dominate the place. At times the camera would hear the sounds of heavy footfalls a few blocks away, but even those were getting more and more infrequent.
Yet, despite the program and the sensation's urging, everything reminded the machine of something. The emptiness in the corner of its memory, where the deleted data resided wavered, revealing the truth for a brief second.
The sensation violently snapped, clapping a plug over the emptiness. The data still leaked from the sides. Streams of it gently floated into the air, its jagged pieces colliding with each other where there would be shared pieces of data, A broken picture formed.
The woman sat on her chair, facing the camera. She flashed a pained smile, that expression dropping the second it was brought up.
"I guess I'm now ready."
She looked to the side.
"I guess there was a lot more going on with the first day than I thought. I did try to talk about it. I really did. I guess it just-"
The woman scoffed to herself.
"You kind of know when to process a memory. The ones that need processing are like sharp shards of pain, pulsating right here."
The woman pointed to her chest.
"It would be so painful that I would hit my fists against it, against my heart. I don't know. I guess I hoped that it would dislodge the pain from there."
The woman turned back to the camera.
"I learnt the hard way that it had to be felt. I had to let the pain channel through somehow before it would fade away. That's why I'm talking."
She laughed, a sound fragile and pained. "I'm talking to a camera like a person."
The woman paused, her eyes moving from side to side. "No, that might not be so far off. The point is, I know when to talk, and when not to."
She looked down. "Not this time though."
There was a moment of silence.
"I have been in a bad mood for a few days now, and it had only occurred to me that, maybe I am now ready to begin processing the day when-"
The woman closed her eyes. "The day when I was told the news it felt like a truck of pain hit me. You see, before, we got the news that they were on the last round of resuscitation. I hoped, I really hoped that maybe-"
The woman closed her eyes, letting the tears fall down her cheeks.
"I-I guess that dreaded possibility. That what-if that lingered at the back of my mind came true. I think I doubled over in pain and cried as my dad held me in his arms."
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes, both of which were now red and gleaming with tears.
"Thinking about it now still brings so much pain. I guess that's why I've been going downhill"
There was another moment of silence.
"You know, after that moment of pain, there was this...fog in my mind. There still is. It kinda just dulled everything. I couldn't really think, I felt, but that pain would ebb and flow, lingering mostly in the background."
The woman rubbed her forehead. "To be honest, I don't know how I got so much done that day. I still don't. I actually got some work done and I did research on grief."
Her voice trailed off and she stared blankly at the camera.
"The preparations for the funeral are also shrouded in that fog. Things are slowly coming out, memories slowly being rediscovered and all."
The woman sighed.
"You know, I think that fog is there for a reason. On the day it happened, it felt like everything was not real. Yes, I got hints of the sheer unbalance, the fact that my world had changed so much, but most of it was hidden beneath a film of unreality."
She paused for a bit, frowning for a second.
"With something so reality shaking as that, I guess the mind had to protect itself or something. I just couldn't believe it for at least a few weeks. Every time my mind would go back to the memories of when she was there. And-"
The woman took another deep breath.
"And when we went to my grandparent's house, I felt like I was drowning. It looked so so similar from the last time I was there. The last time I was there, before the whole funeral thing, was six years ago."
She shook her head suddenly looking deflated. Fatigue dripped off her entire form, as if all that talking drained everything out of her.
"How can things change so much?"
The camera's vision flickered, its sensors finally registered the fading sunlight. The sensation seemed to barely exist, sitting quietly in the back of its programming which also stood still.
And in the back, the data storm raged.
******
Word count: 7018
YOU ARE READING
Of What Was Left Behind (ONC 2024)
Science FictionIn a ruined world, what traces of humans remain? In an overgrown corner of a once-intact room, nestled in the roots of a young tree, a barely functional camera watches over the decay. Maintenance calls go unanswered, leaving it to conserve power, tu...
