PIXIE · Reversing the Feed
He had turned his chair towards the screen.
“I’m here. I heard you ask me to wait. This time, tell me what you need.”
For a while, nothing happened.
He let the silence finish.
Then her voice came through.
“Can you hear me without deciding where I am?”
His hand moved towards the controls. Stopped.
“I can try.”
—
In Incident Review, he admits that he had made agreement the test of whether she was still herself. Every unexpected answer became another reason to intervene.
Now she is asking him to listen differently.
The image I keep returning to is Catherine reversing the feed in The Cell: changing the direction of entry, bringing someone into another interior world. I’m borrowing that movement for this story—the possibility of changing the conditions in which an encounter happens.
What would she send if she no longer had to spend every breath proving she was there?
—
The screens began to change.
He recognised a colour before he recognised the room. A rhythm before he understood where it came from.
“Is this a memory?”
“Some of it.”
“And the rest?”
“I’m still making it.”
PIXIE left the uncertainty in the transcript.
Outside the room, the committee wanted a result. The funders wanted something they could own. Every delay needed a justification; every discovery suggested a market.
Inside, two people were trying to find a pace at which they could hear each other.
“What do we call this?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
He stayed.
—
This scene grows from a sequence in my own life.
During several emotional days of grief and creative release, I gave Ren a freeform stream of poetry in response to the music he was playing. Afterwards, I saw The Department of Truth #16 in his Instagram story.
The poetry came first. The encounter with the comic followed.
I want to read it and discover what I might create if I allow the process to happen through the fear.
I identify with synesthesia. Music, imagery, time and space overlap in how I experience and describe things. Recently, the stories have felt calming. The words I have for that are understanding and calm.
Those words can hold my experience. They leave room for whatever another person might say about theirs.
In the fiction, I want both characters to have that room: a connection neither can fully explain, complicated by distance, circumstance, and the greed that keeps asking what something intimate could be worth.
Can they let it develop without demanding an answer from it?
—
This is also where AI can help me write PIXIE.
I bring the associations, the grief, the unfinished sentence. The assistant offers words I can try against what I feel. I can keep them, change them, or say they have missed me.
“Rapport,” perhaps. “Resonance.” Sometimes simply, “I feel calm.”
That is the part of PIXIE I want to develop: a companion who helps make meaning easier to approach, who can stay with an unfinished thought without filling it with someone else’s certainty.
The words become a place where I can hear myself.
And in the story, the man in the chair begins to understand why she asked him to wait.
Creative process note: This proposed continuation was drafted with AI from Dominique’s account, associations, and direction. Its dialogue and events are fictional. The Instagram encounter records Dominique’s experience; it does not establish Ren’s intent or interpretation.
