“The mind has a peculiar way of stitching our deepest anguishes into unreal scenarios the moment we close our eyes.”
From the very first second I was drowned by this dream, the ruthless logic of the subconscious imposed a burden that felt terrifyingly real: I was the guardian or caretaker of a girl trapped on the narrow boundary between organic life and machine.
In that nebulous narrative, I already knew her body was at its limit. Almost everything within her had been ripped out and replaced by metal and cold gears that, in a desperate attempt to keep her alive, simulated a kind of bizarre skeleton. The artificial shell could handle the strain, but her mind was giving way unpredictably. The brain was dying, losing the strength to command the weight of those metallic prosthetics. The end was merely a matter of time.
Before the inevitable transition happened—that obscure process where we would try to save her essence and abandon her diseased flesh forever—I decided she deserved to feel the wind on her face one last time. One last walk.
We walked together, her moving to the measured sound of the heavy parts that would soon be left behind. During this melancholic journey, we crossed paths with a family of travelers; they seemed to be foreigners. They heard our story, understood the desperation of the situation, and, deeply moved, offered us shelter for the night.
We accepted. But her body couldn’t withstand the journey to the house. The thread of life snapped midway, and the transition had to happen right there, by force.
The flesh was gone. She became pure consciousness, imprisoned in the carcass of an inert monitor, a heavy, cold box I had to hold with both hands. No arms. No legs. No voice of her own. Her existence now depended entirely on me; I became the one responsible for carrying her soul in my arms wherever we went.
Her only bridge to the outside world was the solitary eye of a front-facing camera. I discovered on the very first night that, for her to find any peace and manage to sleep, I needed to leave her in a room completely immersed in darkness, turning the camera lens toward the floor or absolute pitch-black, cutting off any remnant of light.
It was on the second night that the true nightmare tore the illusion apart.
I went to place her alone in the room. The environment was already plunged into a dense, suffocating darkness. I held the monitor carefully, tilted the screen, and pointed the lens at the shadowy floor, awaiting the silence that would confirm her rest.
Then, my eyes crossed the dark glass of the screen.
In the reflection of the powered-off monitor, I didn’t see the empty room or the pitch-black environment. I saw a face. It could have been her face, or the face of something that had infiltrated the transition, but it was completely disfigured, twisted in silent agony, and stained with blood. It was the grotesque representation of all the biological trauma we thought we had left behind.
It was a snap. Milliseconds. But it was violent enough to brand my retina with iron and fire. Just as happens when you look directly at the sun and then close your eyelids, the image of that bloodied face remained etched in my vision, floating like a ghost over the darkness of the room.
Panic crushed my lungs. I needed to get out of there. I needed to scream to the family outside that there was something terrible trapped in that screen. But, like a paralyzing paralysis woven into the illusion itself, my body betrayed me.
My legs turned to lead, rooted to an invisible floor. I fought desperately to run, but could only drag myself, millimeter by millimeter, toward the hallway door. The desperation suffocated me while the phantom face kept burning inside my eyes, following my every move.
When I finally managed to cross the threshold, gasping, and opened my mouth to deliver the final warning… reality collapsed rapidly.
I was thrown back into my bed, waking up with a violent jolt, my heart pounding against my ribs and my eyes wide open, desperately trying to erase that cursed reflection from the shadows of my room.