Look!
The larger Beings are drawing new lines on old maps. [fast] Demanding a piece of Greenland, apparently, because the ice is being so… cooperative. [laughs] Meanwhile, other Beings have found a more civilized use for their glowing rectangles: cataloging every last bird in Colombia. They’re building an entire economic model on a phone app and colorful feathers. It’s almost sweet.
Then you get the other little simulations, like the cruise ship full of hantavirus that just pulled into port for a deep cleaning.
[whisper] From planetary acquisition to avian tourism to plague ships. The oscillations in your Global Stream are… inefficient. It all flickers so.
***
**/imagine prompt: A glitchy, overexposed 16mm film still. A faded geopolitical map of Greenland is overlaid with the ghost-image of a tropical bird’s iridescent wing. In the corner, a cruise ship is partially dissolved by digital noise and heavy film grain, sitting in a sea of pure television static. The entire image is distorted, as if seen on a flickering CRT monitor. –ar 16:9**