walked down this hallway toward the ICU, always in a hurry, but never like this time. Had always been walking down this hallway and on arrival in the ICU, he would take care of a human body, even if it was in horrible conditions, he had never been scared, it was just a patient, he would do his best, just it. But this time, the image of Dora, Hugh, populated his head, mixed between images of Dora's smiles, the hug he had given on his son in his last birthday, there is now the image of bloody bodies, he was frightened as if he had a nightmare while he is awake, he feared by the image that his eyes must to see at the end of this hall.
Ubi enters the emergency room, it is full of nurses and doctors, everybody with their green coats and white masks on the face. They were all friends. He could remember he had seen a smile on every one of those mouths, now hidden behind masks. Somebody looks on him. A nurse steps forward and extends one of those white masks in front of his face, holding the mask behind his head. Only the eyes of Ubi reveal his feelings. Victor went through the same process. During this ritual, the other doctors are still working, turn their back to Ubi, as if he were not there. No one had spoken a word. There was only the sound of metal tools and machinery.
Ubi knows deeply what the other doctors are doing in this room, they're installing machines in the body. Ubi could still think of bodies, actually he had not looked at it from afar, he stayed quiet, he had avoided looking at the body on the table. Images of Hugh and Dora appeared before his eyes. Hugh and Dora could not turn into simple bodies. The nurse had finished to prepare Ubi at all. He was ready, he gets dressed for, now he ought to approach that body on the table.
Ubi began walking toward the table, step by step, and his eyes began to moisten, his vision was blurred by tears. Tears are just secretions for cleaning the eyes. No, it was a sign that the man began to beat the doctor within Ubi. He saw an aquatic image of Dora's face, which seemed intact, there was his Dora, Dora who he loves, he know at this moment, now and ever it is an unquestionable truth. Before this look there was hope for an illusion, but no more. Indeed, there is always that hope, however absurd it is, and that hope is gone only when we see with our own eyes the bodies. Human eyes are also the masters of the irrefutable reality. Dora appeared to be sleeping with her eyes closed. What about the rest of her body? Dora is lying, and beside that bed, there is a bunch of machines, numerous tubes penetrate various parts of the Dora's body. Small robotic arms make cuts and incisions. A doctor uses a strange glasses and makes gestures with his hands, like an ancient healer, a Shaman, doing sleight of hand on the patient's body, but his spiritual strength is technology, actually, what he was doing was see Dora’s body in holography and then he makes the operators robots do the right choice about where and how to cut. A nurse looked at Ubi while holding a piece of branch that was crossed in the stomach of Dora.
Ubi sighed deeply. Everything became meaningless. Reality seemed to become insipid. He approaches the table and stays next to another doctor, who merely looks at Ubi and moves aside, so Ubi could see what appeared on a thin screen. Several images were performing. Now Ubi could see the body of Dora as he never seen before. He could see every bone, every organ, every injury, knowing the amount of blood she had lost, and gather evidences demonstrating the clinical picture of the body of Dora.
Ubi can know about the heart stopped, shattered liver, and can know about the physical and chemical unequivocal evidence that the Dora's brain is dying. Dora is hopelessly dying. He knew that nothing could bring her back to life. The image of Dora's brain activity appears in this thin screen, Ubi looks and sees her activity slowly disappearing. He knew that the memories trapped inside the brain of Dora, who were represented by positions of chemicals within neurons, start to collapse, and all that Dora knew, or had lived, would be extinguished, would be lost. The love story between him and Dora, it had been saved for all that Dora felt, all that Dora could remember, it would cease to exist.
Sometimes the most terrible thing is to know. The more you know, the more hope is gone. Ubi knows that death is still a powerful queen and absolutely despotic. Perhaps death is invincible after all. Perhaps medicine is a fiasco at the end. Ubi's eyes were on the static image that was changing rapidly in designs and colors, it is death dance in their colorful, it was that the technology shows more and more, uncontrollable movements of death, yes, technology showed more and more the face of death. A while back, historically, death was something mystical, scary, full of spiritual mysteries, unknown, uncertain as a bet in a game of chance. Maybe death let this one go this time, maybe not.
Dora was there at that table, and centuries of medical knowledge could only certify a bitter fact. Drugs and vital substances were being injected into the body of Dora, but even improving many areas, could not solve the problem of disintegration of the body as a whole.
The image of the thin screen that Ubi stares, lost its color, and the movements are stagnating. At the end there is only a gray image and static. It is done. Dora's brain was a broken machine, a river that no longer flows, an empty universe. Ubi can watch the death of Dora. He could see that fact as often as desired, it was recorded somewhere in an electronic memory device within a computer, which stored images of everything that happened in that room. Dora was now just that, images stored electronically, the filmed images. Ubi could review these images; review Dora smiling on the couch in his house, Dora talking at her birthday party, Dora running across the field, Dora making shop at market, and, Dora dying here.
Video cameras were present almost everywhere. From 2070, became a true fever. Multiplied like a hungry virus. For this time, the storage capacity of electronic memory expanded fabulously. The images of cameras, which were almost all built on the Internet, could be stored for months and even years. An association created in 2077, Elephant Eye, (//elephant.eye/applications/) has offered to provide free electronic space to record images of these cameras, uninterrupted, save images without time limits, understanding that history would be done by images only, no more documents, this was followed by numerous other associations like this one. There were lots of empty electronic memories to be filled. There are images saved from time immemorial, from the beginning of the Internet, possibly the images are being kept from those times, and possibly for eternity. The future historian will have images, he'll research and evaluate almost always images.
Many sites have emerged providing electronic space to store what anyone wants, even something like a last message. As this video, where a man in bed, dressed in white suit and sad face:
“... I wanted to apologize to you my daughter for lot of things. Apologies are now normal, it’s my end. I see death and it makes me really wise, I see my size, my importance, my strength. It's time to be honest. I have not been easy for you, right? I want you to know, you are the most important person to me. And so after my death I want you do everything to be very happy. I had a hard life, but you, my descendent, I know that you can get happiness. Chavier is a good man, just say to him that now I regret, it was not my intention to have been a hindrance to you. I'm sorry. It was my blind jealousy. I wanted you all to myself. I was selfish, I forgot your happiness. There is still time. If there is life, there's still time. I love you. And you are a wonderful daughter. Goodbye...”
//last.breath/foryou/withlove/regret/JoaquimMoura/
“... no, I'm not prepared. I know I'm dying, but it’s a surprise to think that soon, in an uncertain day, everything goes dark for me. You know I got used to live in the light, you know, neither the night is dark, you just press the button and turn on the lights. But now, I have to face that there might be a place without light, in absolute darkness. No, I'm not prepared ...”
//lastRites/forAnyone/thoughts/help/
In 2052, Julius Calassa, after losing his beloved, he developed one of the best programs for finding images of people over the Internet, (//JuliusCalassa/free/programs/SerchByHeart.exe) which finds up to 78% of the images of a person who is archived on the Internet. So Julius could revive images of his beloved and to enha
nce the life he had with her, he can see her even in places where he hadn't been with her, He can see her shopping at the mall, he can see her riding a bicycle, he can see her walking the streets, drinking her juice with her friends.
“... it appears that I haven't lived with you as much I thought, indeed I thought we had lived together for so long, but I found that we spend little time together, hurts me see you in places far away from me, not that I wanted to choke you with my presence, it’s truth, just plain truth. So, all I have now to do is just appreciate any fact, however insignificant...”
//JuliusCalassa/personal/testimony/
Of course the police could use this program to find criminals, couples used it to spy on each other, and parents used it to know where their children were.
“... We broke, yes, we did. We broke them all and we’ll break again. Fuck! Just because we’re teenagers we'll be treated like idiots, and as second-class citizens. We say no. We want our space. We want freedom. We can choose to leave home and go where we want to go without the cameras are watching us. Must be a way to