Alternative Futures: What If

The winters in the northwest are so dark and cold. In the never ending story of ones and zeros I study until my eyes dry and glass over. LoFi girl sets the beat to my dread, and just for a second, I drift away through all the static and wonder, [[What if I made the music?->music]] Through the rain, beneath the night’s dark, wet street lamps sizzling from the cold, a loud crash of a dump truck’s greased hydraulics breaks that thought. Reality bites back and reminds me that I am a student. [[I should study to become a Computer Scientist->Computer Scientist]]. Wait. Why is my phone on? Why am I scrolling the news? Why does it keep whispering about power, borders, and new wars? [[Is World War Three about to begin?->World War Three]]

I stay in school. Different focus now. The laptop didn’t go anywhere. Same machine, new language. SuperCollider opens. A blank window. One line at a time, I start shaping sound. SinOsc, Pulse, Dust each one humming like a ghost trapped in code. The lab is quiet except for the speakers breathing. Noise becomes structure. Math becomes texture. It’s all signal, no melody. Sometimes I listen back and can’t tell where the program ends and I begin. Every patch feels alive, like it’s learning from me in return. Outside, the rain is still there. Inside, everything loops. [[I keep going. Maybe this is who I was meant to be.->the music keeps playing]] [[The noise gets too loud. I can’t tell what’s real anymore.->Computer Scientist]] [[You turn to the TV, all world powers have launched there missils.->World War Three]] [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

The TV is on. Evacuations are being addressed. Most major cities are gone. That’s where bombs fell. The feed cuts between rubble and speeches. Images of children trip over their own flesh as the heat strips it from their bones. No one changes the channel. There aren’t any left. Weeks pass. The air smells like metal. My mouth tastes of blood. The rivers turn black, then dry. People migrate. I migrate. Closer to water. The sky burns slow, and every night looks the same. [[Time stretches from here to eternity.->The Path]] [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

I graduate. The paper means less than I thought it would, but it opens doors. Now I spend my nights debugging systems I didn’t build and fixing code that someone else broke. The same ones and zeros, just with a paycheck attached. Sometimes I look out the window of the office and see the same dark rain I used to study under. Nothing really changed. The screens just got bigger. [[I stick with it, the future is bright->The future is not bright]] [[What if I walked away from this to make music instead?->music]] [[What if everything went offline in an instant?->World War Three]] [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

The future is not bright. The days blur together. Deadlines stretch longer than the daylight. I start to wonder if the machines are learning faster than I am. Half the time, I can’t tell if I’m training the model or if the model’s training me. Outside, the city hums quietly. Data never sleeps. My hands ache, but I keep typing. It’s easier than thinking about what else I could have been. [[Go back to work->The TV]] [[What if I walked away from this to make music instead?->music]] [[What if the networks we built turned against us?->World War Three]] [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

The TV is on. Every channel shows the same thing. Maps. Casualty numbers. All the world is at war. Any day now, the bombs will drop. The air feels heavier. Even the rain sounds different. They reach out from an intelligence agency. They say my code can stop the launch systems. I tell them it’s just math. They tell me math wins wars. Weeks pass. The lab feels like a bunker. Lines of code turn into commands that could erase millions. I stop sleeping. I just type. One line controls the failsafe. Another line can disable it. I wrote both. [[Run the code and stop the bombs.->You go back to work]] [[Let them fall. Maybe the world needs a reset.->World War Three]] [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

You go back to work The alarms stopped. The world quites. The headlines say “Peace Restored.” No one reads them twice. Outside, the rain keeps falling. I’m back at my desk. The monitors hum. The cursor blinks. Another day of ones and zeros. I open a new file. The screen waits. So do I... [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

Days turn to weeks. I stop checking the time. Every patch becomes an experiment in control. I build systems that rewrite themselves random frequencies, recursive delays. The room hums like a living organism. I stop naming the files. The sounds don’t need names. They just exist. Somewhere in the signal, I think I hear my own heartbeat. Or maybe it’s just another oscillator. Outside, the world keeps moving. Inside, my atoms are changing [[The feedback builds, the speakers distort, something breaks->signal lost]] [[The noise gets too loud. I can’t tell what’s real anymore.->Computer Scientist]] [[You turn to the TV, all world powers have launched there missils.->World War Three]] [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

It starts with a low hum. Then the signal fractures. The patch locks. The screen freezes. A sharp tone cuts through the room like static feedback. It doesn’t stop. For a second, I think it’s the speakers. Then I realize it’s coming from inside my head. The walls vibrate. The desk shifts. The lights flicker and die. Outside, something deep moves under the city. A rumble. A break. The sound I made becomes the sound of the earth. Everything is frequency. Everything is shaking. [[You turn to the TV, all world powers have launched there missils.->World War Three]] [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

The Path. The war ended. The world didn’t. Winters came and stayed. Ash fell where the snow used to. The roads filled with rust and silence. The ones who survived learned to eat what was left. Meat. Bone. Each other. The cities became tribes. Trade became ambush. Trust became myth. I built a bike from scrap. Steel, rubber, and noise. Enough to outrun the ones who still hunted in packs. I followed the maps north, toward the old water. Years passed. The body forgets what it was chasing. When I finally reached the coast, there was no ocean. Just salt. Just bones. The air burned when I breathed. The horizon shimmered. It was quiet. [[Nothing left to find.->Salt]] [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]

The sunsets through dark neon waves in the sky. The air hums low, like the earth’s last breath. I ride across the dead ocean. The salt cracks under the tires, glowing faint in the light. No gods. No masters. No sound but the engine. The horizon bends, and then I’m gone. Never seen again. [[Return to start->Untitled Passage]]