You're scrolling through that article everyone has been talking about, the one about the diet drug meant for diabetics. Though it was originally meant to maintain insulin levels, the drug is now prescribed to celebrities and commoners who want to lose weight. They gain back every pound the moment they stop injections. Your closed bedroom door muffles a high electronic ringing, whose metallic pitch is so constant it's become like a penny on the floor of this apartment: just permanently there. Lately, things stay wherever they're dropped.
     Your mother, only sixty-seven, died last month. In her long-established will, she left you this two-bed-one-bath, a 1986 baby blue Ford Mustang, half a million dollars, and her gym membership. She loved when you participated in even her most fleeting hobbies, but sweating on the same humid elliptical she rode mere weeks ago feels impossible. Baby, are you eating healthy? You really should be eating healthy. You hold the softening stomach you swear you don't think much about. You wonder if the doctors who prescribe the diet drug think about forever.
     The article lists some celebrities speculated to be abusing it, names highlighted in blue. These link to a celebrity gossip site, which links to Instagram, which links to several ads for a resort in Mykonos, which links to the resort website, which links to an about page, which ends on a broken link for a since-deleted Facebook page.
     Staring back at you is the sparse login screen for a social media platform that seems to be sputtering out its final, dying breaths. You made a Facebook profile in high school, haven't even logged on in at least ten years.
     Do you remember the passwords you created as a teenager? Passwords used to be like neighborhoods where nobody locked their doors—no capital letters or minimum of twelve characters or at least one symbol required. What was important back then? Have we always created passwords based on significance?
     Your fingers glide across the laptop's timeless, unchanged keyboard, allowing muscle memory to type out three words with no spaces in-between: uncannyvalleygirl. A long forgotten inside joke between your mother and sixteen-year-old self, its meaning now irretrievable.
     A stale notification waits in the sidebar: a single poke from someone named Zoe Collins, a relic from the site's infancy. A poke used to mean—what? An ironic gesture? A digital plea for attention? You click through to the profile.
     It is a page in memoriam. The Zoe Collins who once poked you on Facebook has been dead for nine years.
     The electronic EEEEE in the bedroom fades as if to stop, then restarts seemingly louder than before. Lately a series of digital sounds have bloomed throughout the apartment, emanating from the online devices you forgot were online. Of course there's your own cell phone, tablet, laptop, and corresponding smart watch, but there's also everything your mother purchased online while she was still alive: the thermostat, the fridge, the security camera, the doorbell, the coffee maker attached to an app, the slow cooker attached to an app, the dishwasher attached to an app, the smart light bulbs, speakers, blinds and TV, the EKG monitor hidden away in your medicine cabinet, and others which haven't announced themselves yet. Your mother once said these devices made her feel taken care of.
     You don't understand how or where they're all programmed. Their soprano notes chirp, an uncanny call and response coming from every hidden corner of the apartment. Discordant malfunctions in whatever room you're not. Last week, the Nest cam chimed three times, but when you opened the door, no one was there. The feed didn't show anyone waiting and you didn't watch closely enough to see the footage waver, only saw the reflection of your own face in its dark display.

EEEEE

Morbid curiosity has you seeking a cause of Zoe's death. Social media remains cryptic, suspending her followers in a permanent state of wonder. To find clues on how someone died, you need to turn to the official obituary's directed donations. Memorial Sloan Kettering, addiction recovery centers, if you or someone you know is struggling with etcetera. Zoe's is frustratingly brief, opaque:      

Zoe Collins of Twin Lakes, California transitioned into her next life on Saturday, April 3rd, 2014. Zoe loved to bake, host dinner parties, and jog through her neighborhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She is survived by her younger sister, Rochelle. Information about the service and funeral home.

     You have never been to Twin Lakes, which means you must have met Zoe in adulthood, likely somewhere in New York. Over the course of your relatively short life, you were born and raised in Los Angeles, lived in lower Manhattan while attending NYU, spent one disastrous summer internship in Boston, moved to Brooklyn, then six-months ago, returned to the Sherman Oaks apartment of your teenage years.
     It's impossible to recall how you know people from that early era of Facebook. Back then, you friended everyone but never spoke after the request went through. Maybe you sat next to them on a flight, got locked in the bathroom with them at a house party, flirted with them on the subway once. Chance meetings faded with time.
     In the afterglow of the obituary, you click into your photos and scroll years back, eventually landing on a North Shore sunset. The photo was taken on what was supposed to be a mother-daughter trip to Hawaii, booked when your mom still felt well enough to go. You ended up going with an old roommate instead. The waves lapping at an empty beach reflect from the computer screen onto your face, so that it looks like your blue eyes are locked in the crest of a wave. A Pacific winter preserved in indigo.
     You post the photo with no caption, the first to your Facebook feed in nine years. The image suggests you might be somewhere other than this dark living room, surrounded by the furniture of your childhood and the unpacked boxes of your adult life.
     Close out all tabs then immediately click back in. Scroll through Gmail Inbox 56,438. Scroll through Instagram. Return to Facebook.

EEEEE

Zoe's profile is fossilized nostalgia. It is a decade, paused.
     It is also true that she had a lot of friends, or at least people who actually remember her. There are paragraphs written over photos of bachelorette parties, recreational kickball games, medical research trips abroad. In your mind: a flash of Zoe wearing scrubs, her hair a mess of black curls gathered on top of her head, askew. But sifting through her page, it's impossible to distinguish a memory from a photo. There is one image that grabs your attention in its complex, vivid now-ness.
     Zoom in: A group of friends in their early twenties gather in an enclosed backyard which, based on the orange brick of the surrounding apartment buildings, is likely somewhere in Brooklyn or Queens. The picture is shot from above, as if someone climbed the fire escape to take it. Mismatched food dishes and half-empty wine glasses cover a long, makeshift table. Some guests look into the camera, raising their drinks as if to toast the photographer. Most are lost in their own conversations.
     Zoe is in the foreground, touching the arm of another woman, comforting her or listening to a secret. Zoe's heavy eyebrows are furrowed, not angrily, but with intent. She wears blue denim, a fitted white t-shirt, Nike Blazers. Classic. Nothing that could place her in any one time. Her hair hits her lower back, frizzy with August humidity. Her shirt lifts when she leans towards the other woman, who has your same short blonde bob, your same far-apart features. But is not you.
     An iMessage pops up on your screen, dragging your attention away from the photo. You realize you've been leaning close enough to feel the laptop's hot, electric breath on your face. Your friend Sloane asks, Are you coming out later?
     Something is happening at a bar forty-minutes away in traffic. Sloane has been texting a lot since she heard the news of your mother.

EEEEE

Last week, Sloane invited you to her birthday dinner at an outdoor patio spot in Venice. You had forgotten her birthday altogether—still don't know which day it is—but figured the restaurant was mostly a straight shot off the 405. Dragging yourself into the bedroom with its incessant beeping, you threw on a mandarin-colored crinoline dress whose singular bizarreness indicated it was exorbitantly expensive. Your mother always told you no one looks good in orange, and yet…
     Rummaging through lightweight jackets, you had spoken aloud to no one: Hey Google, what's the temperature outside? To which Google stuttered, right now in ManhattttttBosLos ANGeles, it is 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Another malfunction left unacknowledged. Instead, you grabbed a leather jacket, didn't look in the mirror, then ran out the door, the electric whir of the auto-lock behind you.
     When you arrived at the restaurant, small plates already peppered the table. Girls' hands hovered over the spread, carefully ripping apart pieces of prosciutto and spearing olives with little forks. Phones hovered above hands, capturing their slow and purposeful movement. No one looked up at your arrival. Sloane told you, Sit!!!
     Saddling the seam of two hastily put together tables, you sat next to Carmen, a woman whom you'd only ever late-night stalked on Instagram. In real life, you could see the coral blush blended into the apples of her cheeks, and how her dark hair picked up the colors from the rosy patio lights. You remembered it curly, like Zoe's, but maybe she had straightened it for the night? You arranged your crinoline dress which suddenly seemed to take up too much space, and whose orange seemed to break apart into pixels of yellow and red. For you, this dinner passed by slow and stilted, like a video struggling to buffer.
     Pause from above: two women conversed for the first time. One looked like an expensive dessert made of blonde and cream and orange gauze. The other wore muted earth tones and seemed serious, like ordering a cheese board at the end of a meal.
     Double click closer: they spoke about work, where they grew up, how they both knew the birthday girl. They didn't know which questions to ask, because both knew more about each other than what had been said out loud. The blonde feigned ignorance and asked if the brunette liked music, even though everyone "likes" music and she already knew the woman was an events coordinator at The Bellwether.
     Closest, pixelated: Carmen talked about booking semi-famous bands and very famous afterparties, but you became distracted by your own facial expressions as you listened. You wondered if the wine that tasted like juice was getting you drunk. The food on the table remained perfectly disassembled all evening, nothing spilled or stained. A flurry of photos flashed as the main course arrived, then again at dessert. You barely touched your peach semifreddo. Lights dimmed and the music grew louder. You shouted into Carmen's ear, communicating nothing.
     The later the hour, the more unfocused. Food looked like globs of color, and Carmen spoke so intently at your mouth you thought something was in your teeth, but then her lips were on yours, all-consuming, and you kissed her back hungrily because you hadn't actually eaten anything all night, and even though drunk people yelled across the table at each other, they had stopped speaking in a language you recognized. The speakers screeched out a song you hadn't heard in a decade, a cacophony of digital blips and crashing sounds and scrambled lyrics not quite what you remembered. It came out when you were in college.

EEEEE

Even now, that strange song still loops in your head. It plays over the clip of a memory with the gauzy filter of a dream: you and Zoe in an undergraduate physics class, sitting at the same workstation, sharing homework assignments, trading off who put more effort into labs, meeting each other for cheap coffee. You had a mild crush on her which faded the straighter she seemed. When the semester was over, the coffee dates stopped.
     An Instagram notification dings, and you look down at your phone: Sloane's posted a carousel of candids from the restaurant last week. Was Sloane sitting with her friends in a mostly empty bar, scrolling through her phone and thinking about a better night? The thought unmoors you. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Buried in the post is a flash photo of a blonde woman and Carmen, both blurry in frenzied motion, forever locked together on grid. The tag is the only indication the blonde woman is you. You feel long gone. You don't respond to Sloane's text. You won't be leaving the house tonight.
     On your laptop screen, Zoe smiles at you, crimson lips curled back over wide white teeth. Her stare is direct, but her mind seems far away, oak-colored eyes defocused on a point beyond the lens. Behind you. You glance over your shoulder, just to check. There's nothing there besides the Wi-Fi router's green lights gurgling in darkness, which suddenly shift to red.

EEEEEE

Internet cuts out and you can't navigate off the webpage. Zoe's stagnant smile is one that's waited seconds too long for the selfie to take. She is alive, face illuminated in her unlit bedroom, whose objects are blurred into nothingness. Heavy shapes and forms are outlined in the background. Overall, it's a strange photo, lingering on the screen like dead pixels.

EEEEEE

That same trill from your own bedroom moves to the bathroom to the living room to the kitchen. You stand, legs prickling and numb from disuse, two fleshy things not your own. Walk to the kitchen to locate the source of the high-pitched alarm, the fridge door slightly ajar. Closing it doesn't stop the noise.

EEEEEE

In the living room, the Bluetooth speaker powers on even though the internet is ringing red and dysfunctional. Sudden music blasts into the room and, again, it's a house remix of the song that might have been playing in the restaurant last week, only louder and with more shrieking, shattering glass noises.

EEEEEE

You shout VOLUME DOWN but the volume only gets louder, so you run over on someone else's legs and manually unplug the device, which stops abruptly on a lyric squealing SEE YOU ON A DARK NIGHT SEE YOU ON A DARK NIGHT SEE YOU ON A DARK NIGHT until you throw the speaker onto the floor. It cleaves into three quiet pieces of plastic.
     Zoe's frozen smile strains when you yank every cord from every outlet, when your phone cracks on the hardwood floor, when the watch that always tells you to stand up goes black forever. You stand on a chair to rip down the smoke detectors and the smart lights, and the room darkens save for the laptop screen stuck on her face. The electric ringing stops. You slam the laptop closed.
     Tonight, for the first time since moving back to this languid, lonely apartment, you will sleep in your old bed. In darkness uncontaminated by blue light, you embrace a quiet void, your soft body barely there. You are a mind made up of miniscule pieces of data and interests and memories. There's been a breach, but you promise to deal with it in the morning. Even as you drift to sleep, you wish a backup of your mother, of your self, had been recorded like Zoe, who was once a person, who was once a kind of friend.
     Zoe had reappeared when your mother was first diagnosed. At the hospital, you stepped outside to get some air and ran into Zoe on the street. On the sidewalk outside of Cedars-Sinai, she was wearing scrubs and holding a coffee just like all the coffees she'd held all those years before. She said your name like a question. She walked closer and saw you were crying, understanding immediately you were there for someone. You were still trying to figure out how you knew her when she put her arms around your shoulders, left hand holding a to-go cup that read "Zoe." Flashing back to the months of study dates, you returned her embrace. Spoke briefly through tears before she had to get back to work. She shouted back to you, Text me! Later you drafted a message, but her number was no longer in your contacts. You'll remember all of this tomorrow.
     Your cracked phone lights up with another notification. On this Day, Ten Years Ago. A Facebook memory—you and your mother smiling on a hike, flushed and sweating and desperately holding onto each other beneath the Hollywood sign—swiped away to let you sleep.

__

I wrote this piece into the infinite scroll, sometime after forgetting all of my passwords in 2022. It's an archive of how we engaged with quick-changing platforms at a specific moment in time. These are some things I was thinking of:

"The drive to instrument the planet, to make the earth programmable not primarily from outer space but from within the contours of earthly space, has translated into a situation where there are now more 'things' connected to the Internet than there are people." —Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth

What does it mean to lose someone in a posthuman world? How is somebody buried in an environment-made-digital? How are they exhumed by the digital-made-environmental?