By Aritra Basak
Morning leaks in slowly, like spilled milk across the sky.
I open my eyes, though I was never really asleep. My body feels like it has been placed in the wrong century. My hands are not mine; they’re extensions of some old machine that hasn’t been oiled in years.
The laptop stares at me from across the room. I stare back.
We know this dance.
Somewhere, in the corner of my skull, a little voice mumbles,
“Where did you save the files yesterday?”
I don’t know. I never know.
They go into folders that multiply overnight, splitting and breeding like insects — run5, results, new_output, try3, final_final_this_time.
Each folder buries something — I no longer check what.
I drag myself to the chair — this chair knows my weight better than I do now. I sit, stretch my fingers, type the same words into the terminal:
>>>g.region -p
>>>r.in.poly
>>>avaflow –run
I don’t know what these words mean anymore.
They’re like ancient hymns I’ve been assigned to chant, not for understanding, but to keep the sun from falling out of the sky.
Lines of text scroll by.
Numbers. Logs. Paths.
The machine whispers:
Process complete.
Output saved.
Somewhere, in some hidden folder, results are born — results I no longer care to name.
Afternoon arrives quietly, without announcement.
I jump from window to window, software to software, as if wading through a shallow river full of slippery stones.
GRASS GIS. AvaFlow. QGIS. Jupyter Notebook.
I don’t even know which one I’m inside anymore; they all blur together into one faceless beast.
I click here, click there, reproject, extract, import, export, run, save.
Again. And again. And again.
The maps appear — bright, meaningless colors swirling on the screen like the skin of an exotic fruit I cannot taste.
And then — suddenly — a new tab bursts open, uninvited.
I see it:
A blue body, floating alone in space, spinning slowly, hypnotically.
It takes me a moment before I recognize it —
The planet. The planet itself.
Except… it looks wrong, distorted, missing its real geoid shape.
It’s Google Earth.
It begins to zoom in automatically, dragging my half-worn concentration down toward some unknown terrain — uneven, jagged, shimmering like static.
A Digital Elevation Model, they call it.
I glance back at the notepad file someone had sent me, where all the steps were written like recipes carved in stone:
“You can also create synthetic data and simulate the effects of climate change here.”
I stare at the spinning terrain and wonder —
Are we simulating transformations virtually?
Or are we reconfiguring ourselves into the virtual —
just to experience the very thing we’re imposing on the climate,
in reality?
I don’t know anymore.
Some afternoons, they stagger into my room.
They don’t knock. They never need to.
I try not to speak, or maybe I do—but somehow, my voice always seems to dissolve before it reaches them.
I wonder, every time, whether they'd speak differently today.
They don’t.
Always calm. Always polite.
But their words slip in sideways — soft, but sharp where it lands.
The software hoppers — gliding through programs like dragonflies over stagnant water—have always carried a quiet disdain for me.
They remind me, again and again:
Stop writing equations on the screen.
Stop reaching for things already submerged.
Their smiles end conversations too easily.
I watch them drift away, satisfied by their discipline toward little responsibilities.
I return to my screen.
I feel my mind dissolving — slowly, sweetly.
Somewhere between evening and night, time slips away completely.
I think about equations — those beautiful, clean little things I used to love.
Symbols dancing on paper, singing secrets of gravity and light.
Where are they now?
They don’t belong here.
Here, we only have folders and commands, input fields and terminal windows.
Here, equations have been boiled down into recipes passed from ghost to ghost, generation to generation, researcher to researcher.
No one remembers the taste of the original meal.
I lean back and stare at the ceiling.
A strange thought fills me, warm and heavy like a woollen coat:
What if I just stop?
But I don’t. I know I won’t.
I open the terminal again.
The command line waits, patient as always.
I type.
I press Enter.
It begins.
I watch the numbers crawl across the screen.
And for a fleeting, absurd moment,
I almost feel free.
Aritra Basak is a physics student based in Kolkata, India. He is gradually learning to write about the emotional and abstract aspects of life through prose and poetry. His work often explores identity, silence, memory, and inner conflict.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 