Quantum of Melancholy

** The character in this story is a victim of Dementia. This is a creative exercise in her view of the window, which may or may not exist in the real world, and her mental/emotional state.

***

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. Melancholy gazed at the grey sky, her thoughts fusing with the rain as it gently pelted the glass outside the window. The world she knew had gone long ago. She had no idea how many years had passed and couldn’t even imagine the expanse of time in front of her, but then there was no time for that. She had to reach someone and let them know the end was coming.

She’d tried for years to warn them that The Agency, as well intended as they may have been in the beginning, had become the killer of human minds. The reward for all her efforts was loneliness, this small window to nothingness. She softly pushed a wisp of long silver hair away from her face, and then let her hand drop to her lap, useless. How could she reach anyone, when she couldn’t even get beyond this window?

This was Cal's room. She'd never been able to think of it as anything else since they took him away. The first night in that confined place hadn’t been the worst because he had been there to hold her hand. The slow progression of captivity without him had rendered thoughts of things she should have done, how she had failed… what she did not do.

In the world out there, nameless faces passed. She tried warning them that the end was near, but they gazed dumbly at her, unheeding her pleas for them to see what was coming. Dumb gazes soon turned to sympathy as they looked through the glass as though viewing some animal in captivity at the zoo.

The only solace from the misery was to turn her face away from the view. As she did so this moment, a spartan room with no personal effects, no art and very little light awaited.

Melancholy and her husband Cal were among the few who had been born before The Agency took over. She held memories of a less complicated existence. Fond thoughts of her brothers entertained her momentarily though they were both gone now, lost to Stalag camps, when they were far too young to be at war.

Rolling her wheelchair away from the window for a moment, she was struck by the memory of her mother and stopped moving in the middle of the room. How kind she had been.

“Mellie”, she whispered the name her mother called her by, and the odd refrain of it in the room pierced her heart for a moment. Suddenly, the smell of vanilla extract from her mother’s cooking permeated the air, mixed with the sweet-smelling cologne she'd worn. Breathing deep, sadness overwhelmed Melancholy and she sobbed.

Almost as quickly as the sadness had come, it was gone. Fearing that someone might see her tears as weakness, she got herself together quickly and focused on the fact that her mother had enjoyed the good fortune to leave this world before it was taken over by the more diabolical men of The Agency… the ones that had imprisoned her and Cal in this plain little room.

She had seen the way the new technology worked from inside the beehive and in their minds, she could never be allowed to share that with anyone. They'd had bugs all over her house. She knew too much, and they had to stop her.

Melancholy and her husband both had jobs at the Pentagon when news of the first experimental version of the “Emo-Algorythmic Spike Enhancer” (EASE) software was leaked to the press. She warned the press rep not to report it until there was concrete proof that the code would work, but they didn’t listen. In little to no time, shade-tree developers were in the foray and a distorted version of EASE was born.

What had begun as an experiment to promote endorphin-filled thought patterns to encourage people, began affecting their minds in strange ways. Within days of the release of the new code-strain, riots erupted like volcanic spurts all over the world. People were looting anything that looked even remotely like an engine or technology with the hope that the new code, (or drug as she had deemed it), might exist within it: and they destroyed anything or anyone who stood in their path.

The Agency had created nothing but chaos and destruction - all due to an innate unhappiness algorithm.

In-depth studies had shown that happy people were more successful, more productive, more apt to pay taxes, to vote, they were just “more”. In the beginning stages of EASE, there was a push to get a new drug started for "higher thinking" out onto the market, but it was too risky. No one wanted a nation of zombies killing one another for a new drug… and yet, that is exactly what happened.

Of course, the Agency quickly gained control of the coders who put the destructive code into place. What the Agency was not aware of however, was that so many had figured out a way to write their own codes, further distorting the true nature of a person, that there was no way they could control it all.

Forced to stay home by the men who were following her, Melancholy had been sitting in front of her own window watching the mailman that she knew didn’t belong there, when they arrived to take her. She fought them, to no avail.

Thinking then of her adult children, how they had helped the Agency take her away, Melancholy’s soul sank within her. She could understand why they put her away, but it crushed her all the same. Her children, after all, spoke to disembodied voices at their houses to turn on lights and other devices. They had fallen prey to the algorithms generated by those devices. It was only a matter of time before someone found out where she was and extinguished her knowledge for good.

Rolling back to the window, Melancholy gazed out at a single red bird sitting on a stark, naked branch. The rain had subsided, but the grey sky remained. Gazing at the lovely bird, she longed for gentler times, for the times when Cal could still hold her, when her children were small, and she could still take them to see her mother.

As she peered through the glass, distorted by the weather of the day, she remembered how her mother would stand at the window and wave goodbye until she couldn’t see them anymore. At the time, it had seemed an irritant to Melancholy but now, she would give anything to see her mother through that window before her, waving goodbye.

Footsteps in the hall broke her concentration, but she couldn’t lift her hands to move. Gasping for air, she realized that they were coming for her at last, and there was nothing she could do.

Melancholy soon found herself lying in bed, breathing slowly, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. The people there kept calling her "mother", but she knew better. Then a familiar face appeared at the window. Turning her head to make sure she wasn’t dreaming, she knew that face the moment she saw it, and warmth flowed through her.

“Mellie.” Her mother whispered, gazing at her from the window across the room. “It’s time to come home, child.”

Melancholy carefully raised her eyes to see the faces surrounding her, their unfamiliar countenances were wet with tears and lined deeply with sorrowful grief. Her world had been this way for so long that she forgot it, and only memory remained. Closing her eyes to the grief, she quietly faded into the soft drone of voices and weeping. Gliding to the window and touching her mother’s hand on the glass, Melancholy was no more.