She walked past me, trailing a cursor’s afterimage. I followed. We passed through a door labeled which stood for Miscellaneous , but also Mourning , Myth , and Mistake .
We arrived at a terminal. Not a computer terminal—a train terminal. Dusty tracks stretched into infinity, each rail a different search engine. On the departure board, all the trains were labeled or CLEAR HISTORY . Searching for- Juelz Ventura in-All CategoriesM...
I don’t mean metaphorically. The screen grew warm, then cool, then ceased to be a screen at all. My chair dissolved. My office—the stack of ungraded papers, the cold coffee, the dust motes dancing in afternoon light—all of it folded like a house of cards in reverse. I was standing on a gray, lint-textured floor, the walls lined with infinite shelves. Each shelf held a single item: a VHS tape, a Betamax, a jewel case, a dusty hard drive, a crumpled note, a polaroid facedown. She walked past me, trailing a cursor’s afterimage
The train arrived. I woke up at my desk. The screen was blank except for the original, uncorrected search: We arrived at a terminal