FOWC with Fandango: Mortifying
Replica of Lascaux cave paintings at the International Centre for Cave Art in Montignac, France
This is one of those stories that would make a a great ” Found footage ” film.
Nobody is actually in this story , nobody is there to say a word. In fact the light in this room isn’t aren’t on.
This story, this moment takes place in a small room with smooth dark walls and next to one wall on a metallic tabled is a free standing thin screen the size of something we used to call a phone book.
The screen on the table offered the only light to the room and it is as pale as a singled over used birthday cake candle. At first the light coming from the screen was pale yellow, then it went dark and in that second the small room was plunged into darkness.
Then the screen pulsed and then it glowed and then the room was bathed in clear white light.
A series of numbers rolled a across the top of the screen and then below the numbers were a series of camera shots of of a ship’s cargo hold.
The holds were full of containers, and the walls were lined with doors and touch keypads. You might wonder if there was any noise- maybe a fan to circulate air, the pulsing beat of an engine. A squeak of a rat or a mouse.
There wasn’t a sound for any microphone to pick up.
Those cargo holds were as quiet as a tomb.
Then the screens danced with information in English, French, Spanish German and the story they each told looked like shopping lists- names of fruits, vegetables, medicines. Then there were lists of seeds and then the names animals- cows, chickens, even dogs and cats and primates, exotic birds and sea life-each tagged stasis.
The screen filed each name of each plant, each animal into neat boxes and each was given a new series of numbers and symbols. The screen lit up pale blue.
It went pale yellow and then the screen blazed back life and then faces- some of those faces would be familiar to us- I’m not saying you would know exactly who they are but you’d get it. Those faces belong to people we see on the news or in our information feeds on our phones and computers.
A long time ago they built marble statues to people like them- gigantic statues to remind you that the subject of the statues were God like and they would be there for all eternity to remind you of that simple fact.
Mortifying isn’t it?
The numbers and symbols stamped over each face were identical.
The screen pulsed, it waited.
Each face scrolled in reverse order and as they disappeared, the screen pulsed and it beeped- or maybe it hissed.
Then it ran through the boxes where it had filed the dogs, the felines, the trees, the grains and birds and even the flowers over and over again.
The screen rested on the face of a dog, it pulsed light blue and when the screen was finished and it went back to pale yellow, you could still see the dog smiling back out at you.
Hamish Macbeth
