What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing.
—Ray Bradbury
Days were gloomy, greyish, and her
spirit always felt the same, what was left of it. A spirit that had
run dry, that could not light up anything anymore. Everything she saw
and experienced was through the interface of an LCD screen, a window
to the outside, the existence of which she was unsure of. Her
knowledge of the biggest problems in the world was derived from the
blog wars she occasionally browsed through. A picture of a man shot
down dead, a malnutrition-ed child who was only a black canvas
stretched over bones. Work was indexing and terminals. Learning was
you-tube tutorials. Honest communication was pixel strings of text
messages sent describing the frivolous. Memories were pictures on
Instagram, some GB of data on her cloud account. She was an expert at
recognizing 'emoticons', but clueless when it came to the expressions
on a three dimensional human face that could be touched. The only
warmth she had ever felt was the heat from over used processors. Her
hollow thoughts were like an abandoned dog that looked for food in
the trash and could not find a smell or a track to follow. A child
lost among the crowd on the night of the public fair. A sailing ship
that was without wreck and without guide. She was first a little
girl, robbed of her innocence, then an old lady, with matted eyes
that kept inching closer to the screen, year after year, day after
day. She took out her soul a long time ago and carefully zipped into
an unseen folder for safe keeping. Her life was digital – a careful
combination of zeros and ones, of eyes shut, and eyes open that let
her optimize the output she was required to give. Time was a
dimension-less quantity – a number on the screen.
