@mc5punk 1 October 2025 more from that month

Short story: The Echo of Screens

The night he decided to try the app was one of those unpromising nights: fine rain against the windows, the city shrunk into yellow lights, and he sitting in the kitchen with a cup of lukewarm coffee that no longer warmed him. He had heard about the app on a forum: random video calls, anonymous, a chance that opened doors to faces from around the world. He wasn't looking for entertainment; he wanted to understand something he couldn't name. With a mechanical gesture he downloaded the app, accepted the permissions and, part curiosity, part cynicism, pressed the button that connected him to the unknown. First connection: the class A group of children appeared, a grid of small faces lit by screens. It was a virtual class — that was clear from the notebooks, the digital blackboard and the teacher who, off to one side, tried to keep order. But one of the students, sitting near the camera, spoke with a voice that cut through his classmates' laughter. "You know nothing! You're useless!" the boy shouted toward another screen, his small hands waving like invisible whips. The protagonist watched the scene with a mixture of fascination and horror. The other children laughed, some covered their mouths, the teacher frowned and gave a look meant to impose calm. "Carlos, lower your voice," the teacher said firmly. "This isn't a fight." "But she started it," Carlos replied, pointing off-camera, his mouth in a grimace of anger that did not fit his age. One of the children, the target of the aggression, looked small and flushed, his eyes glassy. At one edge of the screen, another student's mother whispered something to the camera, as if she feared the anger might be contagious. The protagonist felt his throat tighten. There was something cruel in how easily verbal violence unfolded under the fraternal light of childhood. He watched as, after a few minutes, the teacher asked everyone to be quiet, to breathe. The screen flickered and the connection dropped. He was left with the image of the angry boy burned on his retina like an unresolved question mark. Second connection: the wounded ego The next person luck connected him with was a woman wearing her hair in a hurried bun, impeccable makeup, and an expression that fluctuated between pride and indignation. She spoke in a language he didn't fully understand; her tone, however, was universal: wounded. "So you mistook me for a trans woman?" she said to the camera, eyes burning. "What kind of joke is that? Who are you to decide who I am?" He didn't answer. The app's anonymity allowed him to remain a spectator, ear and eye to an intimate rage. She breathed deeply, adjusted a bracelet and continued. "My name is Natalia," she murmured, with a gesture that demanded respect. "I work, I pay my bills, and you, invisible user, what do you know about me to label me?" Apparently the matter had been a prior misunderstanding: another user had mistaken her and left a contemptuous comment. Natalia moved with contained tension; it was clear the insult had touched something deeper. She spoke of days when people looked at her as if she were a mistaken discovery, of the feeling that her identity could be reduced to a trivial error. "The worst thing," she said, "is that it was easy. A name on the screen, a label, and they had already put me in a box. Does everyone feel like a judge now?" Her voice broke slightly, and in that instant the mask of anger let vulnerability show through. The protagonist noticed that, beneath the pride, there was fear: fear of being seen only as an object of ridicule, of an identity built with effort collapsing from the lightness of a click. When the connection changed, he remembered his own reflection on the screen and the unsettling similarity between the woman's indignation and some of his own defenses. Third connection: the proposition The third call opened a window onto another intimacy: a Russian couple, in a living room with heavy curtains and a low lamp, introduced themselves with nervous laughter and an invitation that hung in the digital air. "Hello," the woman said with a mix of mischief and calculation. "We're Olga and Dmitri. Would you... like to have something with us?" Her voice was direct, the camera focusing on her décolletage as if measuring the reaction on the other side. Dmitri smiled, a tall man with a trimmed beard, a figure that projected confidence. His hand appeared on screen in a gesture that mixed invitation and test. "We don't do this all the time," he added. "It's an... experience. Virtual, of course, but intimate." The protagonist felt the space close in as if the screen were a curtain being gathered to open a private stage. There was no aggression, but a strange offer: sex as digital commodity, intimacy packaged and put up for sale in a stroke of pixels. "No, thank you," he replied in the most neutral voice he could. The refusal was barely a whisper that crossed the screen. There was silence, then Dmitri raised an eyebrow and Olga showed slight disappointment, as if the negativa interrupted an expected script. "Alright," Dmitri said finally. "Not everyone wants it. Good night." The connection ended with a simple goodbye and the protagonist sat staring at the screen in the gloom, feeling he had witnessed a small theater of desire. Uninstalling The app stayed on his phone for a few more minutes, the icon a blue blot on the screen that seemed to pulse. It wasn't a sudden decision: he went to the settings screen, looked for the uninstall option and tapped it. The system asked for confirmation. He pressed accept. The app left as noises leave when you turn off a radio. But the uninstallation did not close what he had heard. What began as a digital experiment became a dim flame that lit memories and questions. Long reflections He lay down on the couch and let the rain dictate the pace of his thoughts. The night became a room of echoes. What had he actually seen? Three disconnected scenes or a mirror showing different angles of human nature? He remembered the furious boy, his uncontrolled anger, the classmates' laughter that turned humiliation into entertainment, and the teacher, a fragile authority. He thought about how technology allows cruelty to be improvised with ease: a distant recipient, a screen that dematerializes consequences. Where was the adult who should contain this? Where the network that must teach how to speak and receive, to hold anger, to show empathy? Then came Natalia, whose defense of the self felt oddly familiar. The offense that wounds pride reveals how much we rely on internal stories about who we are. A mistake, a misplaced label, and identity wobbles. The woman not only demanded respect; she insisted on being recognized not as a sum of others' impressions but as a subject with a history. The protagonist thought of the times he himself had silently reduced others to small stereotypes, of the simplifications he had allowed. The Russian couple showed another facet: the willingness to commodify intimacy, to turn desire into spectacle. His refusal was not a moral judgment but a personal preference; still, the scene made him ask about the limits between exhibition and exploitation, about how loneliness and curiosity intertwine in the digital age to build offers that, once, would have been impossible. Each image corresponded to a basic emotion: anger, wounded pride, desire. But beneath those emotions something deeper pulsed: vulnerability. The boy who shouts does so from an insecurity he cannot name; Natalia shields herself with the armor of anger because shame is too wet; the couple offers intimacy because human recognition in others has been replaced by quick transactions. Human nature, he thought, is not reducible to good or evil. It is a fabric of contradictions that the screen only makes more visible. In the distance between anonymous users, gestures are magnified: a laugh can hurt more because there are no tangible consequences; an insult can be sustained by impunity; a proposal can be both a bridge and a trap. And yet there are also moments of truth that occur without protocol: the teacher who asks for calm, the woman who claims her name, the man who respects another's boundaries. Not everything is moral ruin; there are sparks of responsibility. He wondered about his own role. Was he complicit for watching? A voyeur collecting impressions? The answer did not come clearly. Knowing he had observed and not intervened weighed on him like a small guilt. In real life he might have done something different: call the school, send a message, look for ways to help. On the screen, however, he chose silence. Did that make him guilty? Not necessarily, but partly responsible for his own passivity. A certain idea settled more strongly: anonymity amplifies dehumanization. When we don't see consequences, when the other is a pixel that disappears with a swipe, the bond that obliges us to empathy weakens. Yet the experience also showed that humanity is rebuilt in small acts: the teacher trying to contain, the woman reinventing herself after the insult, the man who respects a no. Those gestures are less spectacular but more decisive. In the early hours his reflection shifted to something more intimate: his own loneliness. Why had he downloaded the app? Was he seeking to see, to confirm, or to evade his own emptiness? The answer was a thread: he wanted to be a witness, a barnacle on the world without exposing himself. The screen offered him stories without commitments, a view without the obligation of touch. Having closed the app he thought he had shut a door; in reality he had opened a hall of mirrors in which he recognized fragments of himself: the violence he detests, the fragility he fears, the curiosity that pushes him to observe rather than act. At dawn, with the city washing itself of rain, he knew the experience would be a faint scar: it would not change his life suddenly, but it would mark him with a new unease. He decided to do something concrete with that unease. Not out of ostentatious heroism, but out of quiet coherence: the next day he would look for a way to get involved in his community, volunteer in activities with young people or participate in forums that promote responsible use of technology. Nothing spectacular, but a small action against the voice that shouted from the screen. The memory of the three scenes kept beating as if they were distinct pulses of the same truth: technology strips bare our contradictions and ensures that after every click some residue of responsibility remains. The protagonist closed his eyes and, in the dark, listened to the rain turn the city into a more human, less virtual heartbeat. He had deleted the app; he had not stopped seeing. Source of the images. Image created with Bing.