I dreamed

Windows XP is running inside the park camera. I know because the wooden fence has gone teal, that specific teal, and the lawn is tiled with clouds that don't move like real clouds move — they loop, eight seconds and back to start. Somewhere a hard drive I don't have is grinding through a boot sequence, and a fatal error dialog opens where the gate should be, asking if I'd like to send a report to Microsoft. I click yes. I don't know why I click yes. The dialog closes and the fence is wood again, ordinary, tired.

Behind it a shape that is definitely a person is definitely not moving, and I understand — the way you understand things only at 3am — that they are a downloaded copy of someone who left this exact scene forty minutes ago, running locally now, offline, replaying the last thing the camera ever caught of them: standing very still, deciding whether the lawn was worth staying for.