Lydia was lying in bed in a t-shirt that hadn't been washed in over two weeks. She was lying supine on her right side, & she was watching a video on her iPad. Large as a macbook pro display, the video (a historical retelling of a Civil War battle) was clear & crisp.

The iPad was on a nightstand with wheels. On one side was the ipad. On the other was a 2 liter bottle of diet pepsi. She drank from the bottle like an alcoholic drinking a bottle of whiskey after not being able to find a tumbler. Lydia had quit drinking over a month ago, so this was her way of coping with any pain that comes her way.

A month before, she had been fired from her lucrative job in tech. It was remote. It was part-tine. It supported her lavish lifestyle. Yet she antagonized the CEO & forced him to shut down the project. 

Her face also caused her horror. Horror. She was an MtF trans woman, & she had started to feel intense gender dysphoria over her face. Her face was handsome, fit for a male supermodel. For a woman…she just had to get facial feminization surgery. Yet money was tight. She came from money, but not fuck you money.

She was going to make some malware for a friend, but her bouts of sadness had decided to ambush her today, hence her supine position in bed, a bed that hosted both her restless bouts of sleep & her tortured spans of wakefulness. She tried to imagine herself sitting down in her office chair to slap together some code in C to make a rootkit (she remembered her friend's rootkit he named fruitkit). However, this image was faint, a whisper of pixels in the winds of her mind.

The only thing that existed for Lydia was this iPad playing a history documentary, with a retina display that could host thousands of very sharp pixels.