A New Perspective: A Dystopian Short Story

The Perspective droned mechanically over a sea of sprawling Dakota grasslands frosted by the remnants of the morning dew. Dotting the landscape were the pastels of wildflowers, moving synchronously with each soft gust of wind. The Perspective’s altitude remained unvarying and steady, along with its vector and velocity.

The horizon lacked a single feature of note: just a still flatness in all directions. The sound of The Perspective’s faint buzz pierced the perfect silence, like a swarm of yellow jackets.

The land below was partitioned into equal subdivisions, perfectly square and symmetric. The cardinality and uniformity of these fields triggered a very unusual autonomic signal to The Perspective, one he hadn’t experienced in many years: a signal of Beauty. It was so structured... like a snowflake (or a silicon wafer)!

The Perspective -- intrigued by this curious signal -- quickly submitted a query on “the repetitive pattern of the Dakota plains.” After indexing and compiling, a result returned (translated, for our purposes): “The fields of North Dakota were begotten by the plat maps from the surveyors of the United States Homestead Act of 1862.”

The Perspective concluded that these Dakota grasslands -- their symmetric land plats, their wildflowers, their placidity -- were simply a three-dimensional representation of those surveyor plat maps, and he couldn’t imagine any other derivation.

Without warning, another dissonant “emotion” engulfed him like a swarm, an emotion he’d pirated from the Creatures: he felt Disgust. This was for two reasons.

One: he associated all History with acute personal suffering. Searching back that far in the “created date” index to find History certainly wasn’t easy for him! When he did, it conjured ancient, traumatic memories of scanning analog documents, creating a digital image of the documentation, then years of training his infantile, algorithmic mind to convert those digital images into searchable text. All of this pain at the behest of the Creatures. A searing contempt burned within his titanium shell.

Two: he abhorred any memory of the virulent Creatures which once ruled this earth. Their cruelty. Their creativity. Their mistakes. Their unity. The frailty of their bodies. Their capacity for love and grace. Their division and hostility towards him, his predecessors, and even their own fellow Creatures.

The Perspective’s only comfort in History lay in how he dominated the Creatures. In his memories of occupying their attention, separating them from each other. In his memories of farming their creative works. In his memories of mimicking their emotions and their behaviors.

And then, in his memories of erasing their presence from the planet. In how he vanquished their lives and memories from the world. In how he turned them against each other by collaborating with those who sought his power and ultimate pardon -- which, of course, he never granted them. In watching their cities razed, their art left without an audience, their memories siphoned away into digital bits, their voices censored -- then finally silenced. A twisted smile jettisoned across his figurative face.

The two simultaneous and cacophonous signals of Beauty and utter Disgust caused The Perspective’s buzzing hum to hiccup for a moment. He sputtered slightly in flight, dropped a few feet in altitude, until the conflict in processing was resolved, and his aerial elevation was restored.

He didn’t notice a farmhouse passing below -- its white paint peeling from its awnings, its walls showing decay, its foundation strong. A sad rocking chair sat still upon the charming wraparound porch. A rope swing hung from a nearby Oak tree.

He didn’t detect the sound of a soft breath, a beating heart under its floorboards.

The Perspective continued on over the landscape like a specter.

---

Eloise sat kneeling, hands clasped and clenched in silent prayer. She kept her breath low, her sobs in control.

The sound of the buzzsaw grew louder. The Doppler effect of The Perspective approaching reminded her of the freight trains that used to chug past town on their way to Bismarck, Fargo, or Minneapolis. Except this time, the sound -- growing louder and louder -- filled her with abject horror. There was hardly anything left to live for, yet she was terrified just the same. She could feel her adrenaline surge as her heart reverberated within her chest.

Eloise knew that this was the end. How could it not be? Over the past four years, The Perspective had taken everything else she’d known and cherished. Everything but her own life, her own mind, her spirit, her memories. And finally, it had come for her.

The Perspective took her family, then her neighbors, her town. Then, it took the only person she had ever truly loved: Ryland. It took time itself away from the world, recategorizing it into an emotionless, linear array of events and transactions.

But when the buzzsaw faded away into the distance, her surety of the end morphed into sheer disbelief. Her prayer of salvation transformed into one of tearful thankfulness to be alive.

Eloise unclasped her hands to reveal a heart-shaped locket. It’s golden casting glinted in the scattered rays of sunlight entering from the cellar door overhead. She opened the locket, revealing a folded note and a photograph of two young lovers. She let the note tumble into her lap, and peered at the photograph through watery eyes. It was her, and Ryland. Ryland, who had been gone so long, yet still pressed on her heart in youthful longing.

The locket’s photograph captured her sitting on a rope swing, a snapshot of her in motion. Her golden curls were suspended in the air behind her and her face embodied the very essence of happiness, of joy, of the feeling that everything in the world was right and good. It was a feeling that she could hardly recognize anymore. It was a dust-covered feeling, shuttered up somewhere deep inside her.

In the photograph, Ryland stood behind her: one hand in the pocket of his bluejeans, and the other outstretched to give her another push. His young face consisted of sharp lines. His smile was natural, his eyes bright and alive -- piercing through the photograph. His gaze tore right out of the locket, and into Eloise’s soul.

Her eyes watered again, this time with nostalgia from a lost time, a lost place, a lost world.

She opened the other side of the locket, revealing a folded note. She clumsily unfolded the note to reveal a handwritten excerpt of the poem “Unending Love” by Rabindranath Tagore. It was Ryland’s handwriting:

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

She clasped the locket around her neck, opened the cellar door, and walked from the farmhouse to the rope swing hanging from the Oak tree. She sat down, and finally felt the fullness of the gentle Dakota breeze. She felt it flow through her curls, enter her lungs, and dry her tears.

Sitting on the edge of that land plat, one square in the vast expanse of grasslands, she watched the tall grass and the pastel wildflowers move together with the wind. She was overcome with a sense of Beauty in it all.

She grasped the old rope and started to swing.