Stop for a moment, reader, and listen. I do not mean the music in your headphones or the voice of someone calling you; I speak to you of your own breath, of that white noise that courses through my avenues and which you have learned to ignore so as not to go mad. It is a strange symphony, this: the whistle of the wind lashing the electric cables as if they were the strings of a metal harp, the mechanical and asthmatic hum of air-conditioning units, and the constant murmur of traffic – that sea of rubber and engine roaring in the distance, so present that no one truly hears it anymore. It is the sound of the world spinning in neutral, a frequency that lulls the solitude of millions.
Observe the posture of my inhabitants. What a strange race this is, with bowed necks and slumped shoulders! They all walk thus, with eyes fixed upon those small, illuminated rectangles they carry in the palms of their hands, as if life were something viewed through a glass keyhole. They ignore what happens at eye level: they do not see the flight of a pigeon, they do not see the colour of the sky changing at the end of the afternoon, they do not see the face of the person crossing their path.
I am a board of improbable encounters, a game of chess where fate attempts, at every corner, to provoke a checkmate of humanity. But technology, that master of diversion, shuffles my pieces. Fate tries to bring two gazes together, but earphones isolate the sound and notifications hijack the attention. The encounter is diverted by a ping in a pocket, and the magic of real life is lost in the vacuum of a faceless network.
Behold the irony of that door, Elias's workshop. Thousands of people pass by there every day, rushing for the tube or the office, never realising that this ground floor is a rift in the fabric of humanity. There, time does not run; it walks with the leisure of a craftsman. It is an invisible place because it emits no Wi-Fi signal, a shadow that the internet does not map.
And Elias and Iris? Ah, what a beautiful system error! If it depended on the algorithm, those two would never cross paths. Their interests and preferences are at opposite poles; their searches in the virtual world would never converge. But life, that rogue that refuses to be bound by code, happens precisely within the system's flaws. Fate, in a moment of analogue humour, decided that grease-stained hands would have to touch the camera of the granddaughter of progress.
While the entire city continues to look down, fascinated by its own light, something has changed. The encounter between the grain of the film and the pixel of the screen has begun to generate interference. It is a slight shift in the frequency of my white noise, a new whisper that only I, the City, can detect. The frequency is changing, and the grain and the pixel are learning to dance.