With Everything But The Music

(Film strip image from tutorial article
on Web Designer Wall)

As she sits in front of the flickering monitor trying to bring some sense to her plot, her life is flashing before her eyes.

~ ~ ~

Ancient stories often told of seers and prophets and various other mystic types who could look beyond the veil of time into the past and the future. She grew up believing them to be just that: stories, fantasies born of the imagination of writers like her. 

She's always been jealous of those early writers who so captivated the imagination that they continued to do centuries later. She has pictured them, staring at the blank papyrus before them and struggling to find the words. She imagined the frustra- tion they must have felt as they filled sheet after sheet with ink from a carefully dipped quill, only to produce dreck. And she imagined their jubilation when those elusive words finally came together to tell the perfect tale. 

What she never imagined was a day when seers and prophets and other mystics created a new reality in temples of modern technology in San Jose or Cambridge. 

She never foresaw a day when the veils of time and concepts of what was possible would disintegrate and be gone like so much dust carried on the wind.

And she certainly never expected to see the day when fantastical stories were no longer fantasy, their fictional heroes and villains very real and out there, watching, always watching. 

Nope, she never saw it coming. Now that it’s here, she wonders why more people aren’t freaking out.

They know who you are. They follow your every move and know where you go. They know who your friends are. They know what you like and don’t like. They know how much money you have and whether you manage it wisely. They know your political leanings, your religious beliefs, and probably your sexual orientation. 

She finds it all kind of scary, when she stops to think about it. So she just doesn’t think about it.

~ ~ ~

She stares at the flickering monitor, where the plot is finally coming together.  The hero in her story lies wounded and close to death in a foxhole. While field medics struggle to save his life, his past replays in his mind like scenes from a movie film strip. Her fingers fly over the keyboard creating the last chapter to her novel. She is flooded with that feeling known to every writer who came before her, the thrill when a successful story reaches its climax.

Then, maddeningly, as she writes her final scene, her concen- tration is interrupted every few minutes by a pop-up window. It's driving her bonkers.

Several days earlier, someone had added her name to a private group on that popular social media site. You know, the site created by one of the aforementioned mystics whose first name starts with Mark? Yeah, that one. 

Since then, the veil of time has been slowly disappearing as the pop-up windows come more and more frequently.

Each interruption bears a name from her distant past.  Its message begins with something like “Remember that time when we…”  or ""Will you ever forget...?"  

One after another, scenes from her past roll past her eyes.

She hopes she isn’t dying.