Chapter 3
Zi looked up the word 'ersatz' on her hand-me-down mobile phone. Words were not her friends. She did consider herself reasonably good with computers. The way movies showed computers or computer people always got her goat. Hardly anything in real life happens in real time or with cool computer noises. Things happen in fits and stops, trials and errors -- all without sounds.
She thought 'ersatz' applied to her. So be it.
She put her hair in a bun. That's the only do she has ever liked. She just shifted the location for variety. Whatever she ended up with, she usually liked it. Not that she didn't care how it looked, she just liked it. Almost always. Today was a good hair day per usual.
Ready for the day, she moved to her work area. Her apartment was a single room with a large window on the east side, a kitchenette by the door on the opposite side, a queen sized bed in the middle, a couple of chairs away from the foot of the bed and her two nearly empty work tables were placed right against the exposed brick wall -- one right under the window and the other to its left away from the window. She felt that this room had personality but she had made sure that the place was scrubbed clean after she bought it.
She liked to setup her laptop so that she can look out the window on days she expected to think more than type. Get some sun in the process. She preferred to code in front of the wall because it was easier when looking at the screen for longer periods. She was not sure which table to choose today.
She instead sat on the swivel chair and started experimenting with conservation of momentum. She spun around in the chair, extending her limbs and drawing them closer alternatively. Then repeated the experiment, direction reversed, to avoid getting dizzy. That's what she believed anyway. She liked symmetry too.
She wondered how she got the name Zi. She couldn't remember. Logic said that she should ask her parents. She couldn't remember them either. Puzzled, but not showing it, she tried to recall any faces from her memory and realized that she didn't know what she looked like. She scanned the room for a mirror. There wasn't one. Her hand-me-down's lenses were scratched to the point of being useless. She turned to her laptop calmly. No frown on her undefined face. The laptop was sitting in front of the window.
"Just as well", she thought and rolled her chair over to it and woke it up. She couldn't recall which application controlled the webcam. She just typed webcam on her keyboard, the input going nowhere in particular but a suggestion came up anyway. She started the app, the webcam LED came on but the lens was covered in the smallest black tape. A slight frown crept on to her face and disappeared without a trace.
She considered not touching the tape. She didn't know why that thought came to her. She reached out towards the tape and blacked out.
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