Witnesses

Lena called on Thursday, for the first time in six months.

“Are you still writing?” she asked instead of hello.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Why?”

“No reason. I just wanted to hear the voice of someone who still writes.”

We fell silent. Wind rustled in the receiver - she was outside, a rarity these days.

“I disconnected from the Feed,” Lena said. “A week ago.”

“Completely?”

“Completely. Now I walk around not knowing what to think about. Before, there was always something to watch, read, listen to. Now - silence. It’s terrifying.”

I understood what she meant. The Feed generated content in real time, specifically for you. Created it perfectly. You woke up - and it already knew your mood. Sad? Here’s music that doesn’t try to cheer you up, but gently sits beside your sadness. Anxious? Here’s a story that will live through your anxiety for you and lead you to relief. You never had to choose. There was no need to choose.

“Why did you disconnect?”

“I noticed I couldn’t remember yesterday. Not a single day. They’re all the same. Good, smooth, identical. As if I’m being fed intravenously. Not hungry. But I’ve forgotten the taste of food.”

---

We met on Saturday, in the park by the river. Lena looked older than six months ago - or maybe I’d forgotten what people look like in daylight.

“Tell me how you write,” she asked. “I don’t understand why you do it. Who reads it?”

“No one,” I said. “Almost no one.”

“Then why?”

I thought about how to explain. Before, it would have been obvious. You write - publish - get feedback. Feedback gives you strength to keep writing. The feedback loop.

But the loop had broken. People stopped reading human texts. Why would they? The Feed generated texts tailored precisely to each reader - their pain points, their vocabulary, their attention rhythm. My stories were like letters in a dead language.

“I write to understand what I think,” I said finally. “Until I write it down, I don’t know what I wanted to say.”

“But you used to say you wrote for people.”

“I used to, yes. Now - for one person. For myself.”

Lena was watching the river. A few ducks swam against the current, and I suddenly thought that they might be the last ones still swimming somewhere by their own will.

“Don’t you feel lonely?” she asked.

“I do,” I said. “But not because no one reads. Because there’s no one to talk to about what I’ve written. Everyone has forgotten how.”

---

That evening she sent a message: “I turned the Feed back on. Couldn’t take it. Sorry.”

I didn’t reply. What was there to say? She wasn’t to blame. No one was. Some people can live in silence, others can’t. It’s not a virtue or a sin. It’s just a fact, like eye color.

I sat down at my desk and opened the file with the story I’d been working on for two weeks. A story about a woman who had forgotten how to cry. Not a metaphor - literally: she wakes up one day and realizes she can’t remember how it’s done. The body forgot.

I was writing this story for Lena. Now, probably for no one.

I kept writing it anyway.

---

A month later I ran into Pavel - we had studied together once, in another life, when people still took courses and sat next to each other in the same room.

“You’re a writer, aren’t you?” he asked, as if it were the name of a disease.

“Used to be,” I said. “Now I’m more like a monk. Or a madman. Depending on your perspective.”

He laughed. Then grew serious.

“You know, I sometimes think - what will remain? Of us, of this time. The Feed doesn’t store anything. It generates anew each time. Nothing remains.”

“Nothing is supposed to remain,” I said. “It’s not an archive. It’s a dream. You don’t save your dreams.”

“What about your stories?”

“My stories are messages in bottles. Unlikely anyone will find them. But the act of throwing - that’s mine. No one can take that from me.”

Pavel nodded. I’m not sure he understood. But at least he listened, and that was more than I’d gotten from most people in recent years.

---

That night I finished the story about the woman who had forgotten how to cry.

The ending turned out like this: she’s riding a train, looking out the window, and suddenly - for no reason, no cause - she feels a tear running down her cheek. The body remembered on its own. Not because something sad had happened. But because it was raining outside, and the drops on the glass looked like tears, and the body recognized the shape.

It was a bad story. Too simple. Too hopeful.

But I left it that way.

Because hope is also a testimony. Testimony that someone was still capable of hoping when there was nothing left to hope for.

II

Three years passed.

I still wrote. Still no one read. But something had changed.

Others appeared.

Not many. Maybe a few hundred people in the whole city. We recognized each other by indirect signs: by the books in our hands, by a strange gaze - not diffuse, like those who watch the feed through lenses, but focused on the outside world.

We didn’t organize. Didn’t start movements. Didn’t protest. We just met sometimes, drank tea, sat in silence together.

One day a girl came, maybe sixteen years old. She sat in the corner, listening to us talk. Then asked:

Why do you do this? Meet up, talk, write texts that no one reads?

I thought about how to answer. All the familiar words - “meaning,” “creativity,” “humanity” - sounded hollow. Like coins of a currency that had gone out of circulation.

“We are witnesses,” someone said. I think it was me. “We bear witness to the fact that things could have been different. That people could live differently. Choose. Get bored. Make mistakes. Write stories without knowing if they’re good or bad.”

“And who needs these testimonies?”

“Maybe no one. Or maybe someday someone will peek out of their cocoon - like you are now - and wonder: what was it like outside? And then our testimonies will be all that’s left.”

The girl was silent. Then said:

“I want to learn to write.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe to understand what I think.”

I smiled.

That’s a good reason. The only one that still works when all the others have broken down.

III

Lena died five years later. Not from illness - she simply ended.

That’s how people said it now: “ended.” People in cocoons lived long, their bodies maintained perfectly, but something inside faded gradually, like a fire with nothing left to burn.

Doctors called it “saturation syndrome.” A brain that had received perfectly calibrated stimuli for too long lost the ability to want. Not depression - depression requires suffering. This was something else. A quiet, gentle fading.

At the funeral - if you could call it that - I was alone. Her family sent a standard generated condolence message. It was perfect: warm, personal, with perfectly chosen words. For some reason, that was what frightened me most.

I went home and wrote a story about Lena. Not about her death - about that phone call, five years ago, when she said: “I just wanted to hear the voice of someone who still writes.”

The story was short. Three pages. I didn’t know if it was good or bad. I no longer had a way to check.

I saved the file.

Then opened a new document and started the next one.

---

*Outside, it was raining. The drops on the glass looked like tears.

The body remembered on its own.*