She’d expected cold.
Not the real sensation, the simulation didn’t have those kind of haptics, but maybe something. Maybe some kind of a hint, a tingling at the edge of perception. It didn’t register that way.
She’d thought the cold might feel threatening. It wasn’t. It was stillness. It was clarity.
The landscape took a little while to render. Blurry, pixellated, a flickering horizon. But then things snapped into focus, settled into something that felt remarkably complete.
A thin forest surrounded her. Tall, slim, leafless trees reached out upwards into a gray sky. All the branches were edged with white. And flurries of white flakes drifted around, not obscuring anything of worth, maybe blurring it around the edges of the scene. There was movement, but all the sounds were padded and muffled.
She stood still. The simulation wouldn’t respond to her, just continue on its path while she watched, and felt.
A quiet, slightly artificial voice, sanitized and monotone.
“Welcome. Temperate Deciduous Biome. January. Epoch 2. Child-safe interface engaged.”
There was a sound. A faint, grainy, crunching sound. She turned around.
Figures emerged, a group of adults and children, bundled up in heavy clothes, walking slowly through the snow. Every time their boots pressed deep into the surface, it released that same muffled, alien sound. One of the kids bent over, picked up a handful of the snow, and threw it at another. The party laughed.
Madison was unmoving. She was startled at the richness of the rendering, old as it was. She wasn’t part of it, the rendered snow fell right through her outstretched hand. A ghost herself. Not even a ghost. She was just a shadow, watching rendered shadows.
And yet…
She shivered.
Her spine tightened. Something deep in her nervous system responding. Goosebumps rose on her arms, but she wasn’t nervous, wasn’t afraid. It was like her body remembering something even though it was something her mind had never known.
It hit her, she felt it in her core. A deep, broad, faint…ache. The sense of a world that genuinely knew this place. Snowball fights. A stranded train. What it might be like to kiss someone in this frost. Moments unimportant to anyone except to anyone except the people who’d lived them.
That went beyond data, or even history. It was a sense of loss.
There was a beauty to that.
She stayed for an hour.
It took a while before she felt ready to talk about it.
Not because she wanted to keep it a secret, nor felt like she had to. More that she couldn’t really shape words that she felt would translate.
Her short report didn’t focus on any of those feelings. It was more formal. A focus on archival integrity. Her success rate in recovering data, and the fidelity of the simulation. Factual, rigorous. All true, but hollow of the poetry she’d felt.
She was surprised when somebody noticed.
Just a few weeks later she got an unexpected invite to speak. Just a small seminar, twenty or thirty educators and curriculum designers. Some of them still students. She presented her findings, summarized what she’d seen in the simulation.
There were a few smiles in the audience when she played the clip of the children throwing snowballs. A couple of tilted heads, unsure what they were looking at.
“Do you think it was…fun for them?” asked one attendee. A short woman, maybe mid-twenties, a badge saying she worked in early learning.
“They seem like they’re having fun, don’t they?” Madison said. “So I think, at least sometimes, it was. Although some of those other records…sounds like it was inconvenient, too. Maybe even dangerous. A lot of contrasts.”
When she explained the picture book, nobody seemed to get it. She read the passage about the world getting quiet. Nobody laughed at it, but nobody looked like they were moved by it. A couple of them took a note or two, that was it.
She was wrapping up when one of the children…she hadn’t realized there were children, but there she was, maybe seven or eight…raised her hand.
“Is it real?”
Madison hesitated, “Yes, it was.”
The girl nodded, firmly. Like it made all the sense in the world to her.
Later that day, Madison sat by the window of her apartment.
It was dusk. The city was lit in quiet, electric, blues and oranges. Cars and drones passed by, fading from sight behind the heat trap towers. Ambient weather signs showing low-risk.
She thought a little more about the simulation.
Snow wasn’t just cold. She knew that feeling had been illusory. But it had been a pause. Snow felt like a break from the world, to stop and exist in a space that you could take time to notice.
Perhaps for the first time, she realized why records like this hadn’t…couldn’t…survive a rebuilding. Why it was sometimes erased, forgotten. She understood why people might have tried to hold on too tight, and why if you were trying to architect a new world then you wouldn’t have been able to allow it.
Nostalgia is dangerous when it might make the past feel more real, more desirable, than the present.
Maybe at one time that had been the case. No more, though..
Now snow could really just be a story.
A ghost.
A fairy tale of a flurry of white that used to mean something.
She leaned back and closed her eyes, let herself imagine it again. The hush fell over everything. The stillness asked nothing of her.
Just one more time.
Then she let it go.