The Way We Were

Seneca465 crushes her cigarette into the ashtray and looks out the cafe window at all the other Senecas and Roberts and Margarets and Franks rushing down the street. As the other Senecas walk by, she gets fleeting impressions of what they are feeling but the other models are blank slates to her and she has to rely on the secondary signs of body language and facial expressions to guess what they are thinking. If she thinks back far enough, she can remember the first Seneca as she was before the days of the sickness when she became one of the last of her kind with viable genes. If she squeezes her eyes tight and really concentrates, she can remember a day that the first Seneca stared out a cafe window and crushed her cigarette while watching hundreds of complete strangers walk by. They were all blank slates, just foreign bodies rushing by each other with no shared memories or emotions. Though the memory is there, she can hardly wrap her mind around such vast loneliness.