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Weary arboreal branches, squeezed tightly inbetween electromagnetic waves, leaned

towards a mosaically tinted window. A tall girl with short-cut blonde hair was finishing her
work, adding a final stain of teal in the corner. A photonic splash of respective teal colour
started dancing across the wall, joining the already established polychromatic mosaic of
bodily pink, acid green, naval blue, and more.

The city was unintelligibly mumbling with constant noise, averaging out to static stupidity.
Those weary arboreal branches, squeezed gruesomely inside electromagnetic cacophony,
had no other choice but to continue pumping nutrients, even though the cell membranes
grew thinner, and the growth rate was tragically decreasing.

This was applicable to most bodies within the city. Most bodies felt like they are surrounded
by nothing but hostile gibberish. Like the world itself is a dampener on their agency.

Even bodies of capital felt restrained. Their cryptofinancial metabolism swiftly pierced the air,
it seems they were the ones inhabiting the electromagnetic cacophony — and yet.

"Kena... Oh god, what are you doing!?"

"I'm painting the window." Kena replied, slightly startled but not losing composure.

"Why would you paint the window?"

"I figured the light is too monotonous."

"Wha- Kena, this is not how lighting works."

"Said who?" — Kena whispered to herself, putting the brush in a cup filled with water.

"I'm practicing rhetoric for public speaking, Kena, not for arguing with landlords. You're
gonna do something with this until our rent is due."

"Something? What exactly?"

"Kena!"

After her roommate left, the tall girl with short-cut blonde hair felt enveloped in silence. It'd
be nice to go for a walk at this time of day.

She stood on the sidewalk for a while, observing her colourful work from the outside.

It was like a message. Among thousands of actors in the urban milieu — birds, germs, cyclists
and bicycles, rentable scooters, cars and fumes, CCTVs and UAVs, chats and arguments —
somebody must be in possession of a decoder for Kena's message. A receiver for her signal.
If not, why would she have the incentive to send the message in the first place?
Is she the addressee? She from the future, perhaps?

No, these feel like the wrong questions to ask. Instead — what is the message about?

"...So, I just, like, didn't want to go on with this kinda shit..." an overheard piece of a
conversation, emitted by a passing-by client of a scooter rental service. His name is Anton,
and he can't have a phone conversation without renting a scooter and circling around the
block in frustrating repetition. He's an expat.

Is this it? Is it just about how Kena had enough of precarious fatigue, how she's sick from
living in an alienated space? So she just compulsively vandalized the flat she's renting,
without even becoming aware of the implications of her actions? Is she a victim of late stage
capitalism?

No, this is a boring take. Kena didn't want to be a character in a Breadtube video.

A Google octocopter buzzed in the distance, taking its daily seamless panoramic snapshot of
local streets; methodically digesting them into Google Streets. They had their time to be just
streets the rest of the day, but data tracts demanded daily sacrifices. So, this uncomfortably
oversized drone was swallowing visual input through its optical mouth fanged with infrared
light.

The drone flew in a straight line above Kena's head while she started walking towards the
park. A polychromatic message on her flat's window slided down the drone's visual throat
and proceeded to travel through one of Google's digestive tracts. When it reached the
servers and pattern recognition algorithms that resided there, some things have been set in
motion.

"Hey, everyone! I have a question for you all. What are some bad guys in games you actually
kinda agree with?"

"Does it have to be games, Anton?"

"Alright, movies, books, whatever," Anton replied with a slight contempt for himself.

This reddit-tier nerdy chit-chat is usually what filled the halls of this particular cafeteria,
where junior computer scientists and interns shared their nutrition. Establishing different
cafeterias for different degrees of competence somehow boosted team performance, so this
practice was more or less adopted in all Datamelt offices. Resulting echo-stratas allowed
everyone to feel more welcome at their place in the pyramid.

The senior and management cafeteria was, in turn, filled mostly with silence, disrupted only
by occasional conversations on work-related matters.

"Honestly? Machines from the Matrix."

"Ooh, edgy!"

"I can elaborate if you want," Joan replied patiently.

"Well, go on."

Joan suddenly discovered that his coworkers all stared at him with what felt like a mix of
anticipation and irritation. He was never really able to figure out what parts of those
emotional mixtures he conjured himself, and what parts were there in the first place.

"I think what people don't get about the Matrix is that it's less of a spectacle and more of an
ecosystem. Remember that bit with Smith and Morpheus? Where Smith says that humanity is
a virus and that it corrupts every ecosystem it contacts."

"Right."

"Yes, so machines managed to finally put humans into an ecosystem that they won't disrupt.
The Matrix. All human agency is drained down to the simulation, while what remains in reality
is pure productive function. You can't mess anything up when you're nothing more than a
source of energy."

Five seconds of silence, diluted with continuous clinking of cutlery and unrelated chatter
from other tables.

"Huh, Joan, I guess we know what side you'll take in the impending AI apocalypse."

Joan shrugged.

"I think it's not impending, I think it's already there."

"Eh, you can't get more edgy than that, guys. Game over."

"Yeah, pretty much," Anton agreed, looking at Joan with a smirk that is hard to interpret.

Joan started working at Datamelt in what was almost a statement of faith. He chose this
company for his university practice specifically because of numerous controversies associated
with it. Including, but not limited to stratifying employees across cafeterias.

He brings his own laptop to work and self-identifies as a neocameralist. He tones down the
brightness on his screen to read blogs of edgy online philosophers when he takes breaks
from processing datasets. He despises everyone at his competence strata and works very
hard to level up and operate among professionals. He loves Datamelt.

Today Joan was assigned to do live tests for some kind of neighbourhood wealth evaluation
software on data received from Google. This software was supposed to take in processed
visual data, that is photos of neighbourhoods, and use pre-detected patterns as cues to
estimate average wealth for said neighbourhoods. Datamelt has been doing a lot of urban
planning contracts lately.

So, Joan sat in front of his laptop, comparing the software's output with wealth estimations
provided by economic analytics. That was pretty much the job. Smooth, undemanding, and
surely paving Joan's way to promotion.

Until it wasn't; some kind of seemingly random aberration in visual data kept messing up the
software's predictions. It was so pervasive and elusive that Joan nearly lost his temper,
which is very unusual for him as a person. He was aware of this and decided to take a break.

During the break, he scrolled through edgy blogposts, where pseudonymous creators
advocated for full corporate sovereignty of Moscow-City and executive installment of a
diarchy in US. Simultaneously, he empty-mindedly scrolled through visual data he just worked
with, not really engaging with it. This data basically looked like photos of random streets and
houses, where algorithmically detected objects and patterns were outlined with coloured
bounds. Both windows were open on the screen of his laptop, each occupying half of it.

An hour of scrolling later, he sat in front of this very screen, stunned by what he's observing.
An impossible rhyme.

In the left half of his screen, Joan witnessed an eye-injuring ultracolourful clutter, as if
somedoby overlayed a bunch of highway maps in a graphics editor and increased saturation
to an objectionable degree. He was not bothered by it — for the reason that the kind of
articles he usually reads often employ exactly those kind of illustrations.

What bugged him is the fact that in the right half of his screen he witnessed an absurdly
similar picture.

It looked like somebody pumped up the algorithm with custom synthetic drugs. Joan glanced
at the metadata for the corresponding image set, and the number of detected objects read "-
477293".

"What the fuck," Joan whispered to himself, trying to make sense of the input to his optical
sensors (which happened to take the shape of eyes), supposedly having as much struggle as
the software he was assigned to do live tests for.

When he manually turned off the coloured outline of objects detected in the photo, he
observed what seemed like an ordinary photo of a city street, not much different from other
photos from the dataset. He stared at it for a while, until he noticed a mosaically tinted
window, slightly obstructed with leaves of a crooked-looking tree.

Joan didn't have access to the Google's pattern recognition software, so he couldn't just
replace the window with a blank white rectangle and see if it fixes things.

He felt helpless. He switched his attention to the left side of his screen, where a random
sentence from the currently open blogpost said:

"Weary arborescent org charts and cast iron governments, supported by thick electric fields
and swift financial metabolism, can't help but lean towards a window to the other side of
history. This window is covered in a vast collage of colours. Is it because the light on the other
side is polychromatic, or did someone just paint it this way? We have no other way to find out
besides venturing to the other side somehow."