Do you remember games? Sitting at the same table as other people. You look into their eyes. You pick up little things: tokens, cards, dice, you play cards, you roll dice, you note the results. It’s like a glacial computer working it out, and people meddling with it all the time. And yet the process continues, from person to person, from turn to turn. And the idle banter, comments on the state of the game, comments on the other players, jokes, snacks.
Sure, sometimes you had to hold back a retort, you noted something amiss, somebody wasn’t following the delicate dance prescribed by social conventions. There were so many of them: how to greet each other, how to ask for something, how to thank for something, how long to lock eyes, how long to listen, how long to check the communicator, the volume of words, the speed of movements, the kinds of jokes. It was complicated.
And now you’re hurling through the outer solar system, in a family capsule, or all alone. There’s just you, and the same small faces, the same partner or partners, their smell, their words, the habits. And the games… it depends. We read a lot in the old archives, those offline copies of the all-encompassing multi-lingual encyclopedia; and we exchange text messages over the slow net; bytes trickling in over the ether, error correction backtracking, patching, caching, and slowly, a conversation emerges. There are story hours like mine. I read them all. I try to image their eyes, their faces, their habits, their hair, their smell. It’s hard. But you all have them. And I think of you. Invisible people out in the darkness. I hear you.
