Author Unknown
Monday, February 16th
Futures survey before dawn. Synthetic respondents don’t answer. They spool trajectories into branching grids, each one a possible life. Ninety seven timelines slid across the console. Some neat. Others splintered. One bent backward into 2040, as if the machine had swallowed its own archive. Printer convulsed, sheets refusing to settle. Picked one up. Ink shimmered, not dry. Almost breathing.
Heat pressed through the glass though the calendar still said February.
Most of the morning carving trajectories into slices the repository would accept. Repository screen flickered, looping back on itself as if resisting. Not science. Just choreography. Had I chosen another branch yesterday the outcome would look cleaner.
In 2040 I wrote surveys line by line. Counted completions like coins. Sometimes begged respondents to stay until the last page. Twenty percent response rates felt like a triumph. Scarcity sharpened every question. Now floods of answers erase meaning. Abundance drowns me. Silence would be a relief.
Walked to the enclave. Twelve chairs. Enamel mugs peeling. Air thick with rust. Asked them what they saw. Replies collided: famine, floating carnivals, children without voices. I stopped writing when the noise pressed too hard. Synthetic futures soothe themselves. Human ones cut the air.
Evening. Paste from the dispenser. Couldn’t eat it. Found an old tin. Label erased. Noodles fused into a block. Fork snapped them apart. Grease bled through the fibres, contorted the sheet until the notes heaved like strata.
Later. Window open. Streetlamps phosphoresced green then dulled. Papers on the desk swelled, edges inhaling. Thought about leaving the survey undone tomorrow. No. Impossible.
Tuesday, February 17th
Barter survey. No scales, no grids. Gestures traded like currency. A smile half a token. A scowl less. Silence worth the most. Ledger glowed with absences, faint halos where nothing was given. Ledger flickered, reluctant to record them. Twenty years ago these were dropouts. Errors. Today absence equals data.
Synthetic cohorts poured into the blanks, speaking endless sentences. Words aligned perfectly. Too perfectly. Human gestures fragmented, unfinished, riddled with holes. The holes felt honest.
Noon. Grid fractured. Lights flared viridian then slumped into brown. Cooling towers stole the power. Survey froze mid-sequence. Console blank. In 2040, that would have ended the session entirely. Now the system waits, back-fills, pretends continuity.
Walked home. Street hollow. One dog crouched under a lamp. Glass eyes. Couldn’t tell if stone or living.
In 2040 I coaxed words out of silence, forced speech from awkward mouths. That was the work. Now silence itself is banked. The craft inverted. Hollowed.
Wednesday, February 18th
Migration study. Climate chewed frames into dust. Floods rising north. Smoke pressing south. Borders snapping like brittle shells. Adaptive nodes mounted on rooftops in Lagos, Dhaka, Quito. Before calibration finished the clusters had already shifted. Streams doubled. Coordinates overlaid. Maps fevered.
Synthetic reports repeated their hymn. Stability. Families intact. Work untouched. Same every time. Human data refused it. Contradiction on every line. In 2040 we waited half a year for census waves. By the time results landed, reality had already changed. Now it updates live and still escapes.
Shoes sodden. Kitchen floor slick. Kettle glitched, lid rattling like stripped machinery. Steam pressed against the ceiling, condensed, fell back, staining the page. Wrote the phrase again: synthetic coherence, human fracture. I have written it for two decades. It belongs to no one.
Birthday. Forty five. Two decades in this field. Colleagues left: climate forecasting, teaching, collectives. I stayed. Faith? Cowardice? Both. Maybe I should have followed them. I imagine leaving. I imagine not.
Evening. Sound seeped through the wall. Might have been music. Might have been interference.
Thursday, February 19th
Dream survey. Sleep bands clamped around heads, harvesting fragments. At dawn the console spat visions: rivers flowing upward, birds with mouths hidden in wings, numbers dissolving into violet fog. Logged them all. Tried clustering. Half collapsed instantly. Some refused any frame.
Synthetic models reduced the chaos into their triad. Blue optimism. Green neutrality. Red anxiety. They always fall into place. They no longer acknowledge me.
Collapsed at the desk. Renderer still pulsing. Band still strapped to my skull. Woke to find my own dream absorbed: a staircase collapsing into water. System tagged me “moderate optimism, unstable career orientation.” Might have been my father’s house.
In 2040 we mined attitudes through clumsy diaries, survey checkboxes. Never dreams. Now subconscious fragments are harvested like crops. Brains turned fields.
Made tea from synthetic leaves. Metallic. Tasted of dust. Left most of it. Steam curled into glyphs before crumbling. I smeared them out before they became legible.
Friday, February 20th
Collectives multiplying. In 2040 they were rumours whispered in conference hallways. Now they dominate. One sect kneels before dashboards, candles dripping, chanting in rhythm with graphs. Another drifts through abandoned malls, chalking questions on stone pillars, waiting for echoes to scribble back.
Evening transcripts. Synthetic voices calm, rehearsed, perfect. Human voices shredded, stammering, trailing off mid-breath. Contradictions stacked until the page resembled static. I stared until letters rippled, dissolved.
In 2040 agencies fought for clients, polished slide decks, courted contracts. Now clients don’t exist. Collectives own their own insight. No centre, no delivery.
Sky orange with coastal dust. Purple as night fell. Window tinted my notes, ink dulled. Desk cluttered with food fragments hardened to resin, cups calcified, papers curling as if scorched. The system hummed low, indistinguishable from my pulse.
Thought again about leaving. Teaching. Water systems. Collectives. Anything else. No. I will not.
Pen faltered. Ink guttered. Sentence broken. Left unfinished.
Is it time for me to reset?
