Inspired by a dream and the interactive installation project my students are working on. Picture from the internet, the source is written at the right side or the picture.
They keep
falling out of the sky, little buglike creatures. Their half transparent, fist
sized bodies land on my balcony and I look at them with amazement and disgust.
As soon as they hit the concrete floor they start crawling, like spiders, fist
sized spiders. I shiver and start counting their creepy legs, only six, no
spiders after all. But what are they? Those jelly, yellowish, sixlegged spidery
beings? I’m glad there is a window between us. They keep raining down and
crawling all over the building, the streets below must be filled with their
small bodies by now, where are the going? And where do they come from?
For a
moment I just want to close the curtains, shut them out, pretend they are not
here. Nonetheless I just stand there, staring at my balcony, unable to move.
Finally I turn around, the dark yellow light from the sky conflicts the blue
light emitted by my computer screen, a huge screen taking up almost all
the space on the wall opposing my window. Somewhere in the middle the lights
meet, enlightening my highly efficient apartment with a sick green color. I try
to remember what I was working on earlier, before the bugs started raining
down.
Something
bangs on my window, I startle, are the bugs coming in? A big moth landed on the
window, now looking inside, scanning me. I take a step back, away from the
window, back to my computer feeling the urge to do something, although I have no
clue what to do. The moth flutters to the balcony and lands between the
jellyfish bugs giving me a clear view of its wings. They do not look mothlike
at all, not fragile and soft, but hard and scaly. It’s iridescent blue glow
reminds me of my computer screen. ‘This is the queen!’ I am quite sure of this,
don’t know how, don’t know why. This is the queen, the central brain of the bugs.
A beeping
sound enters my mind, small beeps, long and short like a Morse code. Is the
queen communicating with me? That sort of makes sense, the light in my rooms starts
to pulse together with the sounds, blue again, coming from my screen. I turn
around and look at it, look at an image of a luminous creature, pulsing. I
never learned Morse code, but my computer translates it. ‘Cloudburst,’ it says.
‘Cloudburst. Cloudburst. Cloudburst.’
Did I do
this? I look back at the queen moth, she seems to nod. It is still raining bugs,
the moth spreads her wings, shaking the bugs off. I was working, have been
working for hours, probably days straight, when all this started to happen, working
on something big and complicated. It must have gone wrong. I walk over to my
table and hit the ‘escape’ button. ‘Data overload’ appears on my screen. I hit ‘back’.
‘Are you sure you want to upload?’ askes my computer. I choose ‘No’.
The sky
lightens up, the queen moth starts to shimmer, spreading her wings and flying
away. Even before she has flown out of sight her image is gone, and so have the
bugs. So this is what it looks like. I have been warned about it, the risk of
causing a cloudburst while working on this project. Never imaged it to be like
this. Time to turn the computer off, I need a break.
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