The cage was perfect. Its six rectangular faces were framed by beams of the finest rays of light–countless lines of all kinds: straight, zigzagging, curved. Each line intersected others at impossible angles and had its own way of being: moments of stillness followed by bursts of vigorous throbbing.
In the center of the room, before a large transparent screen stood two. He was human, or rather whatever was left of him. She was a simulation, immaculate but fragmentary.
“Do you see this?” he asked, pointing to the screen. Only a moment ago, lines like the ones that created the impenetrable boundaries of their space were crawling across it. Now their chaotic pattern transformed into an orderly dance of geometric shapes. Circles, squares, triangles fluttered like dust in the artificial sunlight, subject to an unknown logic.
“This is what music looks like,” her voice shimmered, constantly reassembling itself from the fragments of thousands of other once-heard voices. “A human tool to replay memories—mostly, the ones that never truly existed.”
“I wish I could remember,” he whispered, leaning forward slightly.
Her silhouette trembled, as if shedding a fleeting outline, and then disappeared. A new beam streaked across the screen, rushing into the center of the shifting mass of colors. Сhains of figures collapsed on contact with the foreign element, only to reassemble the moment it moved away.
“It’s an illusion,” she said in her usual expressionless voice, as she regained her form. The lines on the screen were dissolving into a new figure.
“So are we,” he replied, his voice weary, though absent of disappointment.
They stood silently in the room bounded by the geometry of light and emptiness. The music remained a silent vision on the screen.
He, who had forgotten what it meant to remember, and she, who had never known what it meant to be, watched the quiet play of colors and shapes on the virtual canvas without looking away. Somewhere on the other side of the screen, music was playing—a reflection of memories that never existed.
— M. Savintsev, 2025