Scarlett Wardrop

encapsulation.                      

you can trace the tracelessness like a virus, a bug that caught its teeth in the data and rearranged
it. it leaves marks. signatures. these can be followed, burrowing through tunnels, emerging to
resurface every so often. I mark them with text, violet on the dark screen.

I like to think a muse lived here. by muse, I mean saint. by saint, I mean saturn flecked with rings
and spun from the silt. cyclone. patron of the winding. left-behind webs, the only markings of her passing. my eyes on the screen. hoping a pattern will emerge. reconstructing what once was here,
the driving force, the core of this place. the gape, a star, a voluminous bloom of current. fed into
the loam. traced through the tracelessness like a virus.

and like a virus, the anomaly spread. and, like a virus, I will pick up on its chemical trail and
follow it until the end. until the last remnants leave this place. where lights flicker on the leaves.
an ivy screen. projecting what once was here. a loop. a stream enters the view, grainy, black and
white. the current grows, fed by rain. ebbs in the daylight. the scene cuts to black, loops over
again. I trace this data too, marking anomalies with violets.

encapsulation II.                    

violet has never been bioengineered. but it has been shortened. expressed on a lower
frequency. perhaps the tracelessness of this place will reveal itself in the overlooked spaces,
behind rotted tree stumps. shrinking under leaves. trickling through the crawl space. where I
remain, hunched over the screen. a network connection severs. coaxes me out of the dark and
into the outside dusk. I want to peel back the ivy and there it will be. the trace. what once filled
this basin. what fog conceals.

a crack and acid rain drips off the leaves in thick, glossy drops. they reach the crumbling dirt.
soak into a dry creek bed. I cannot easily measure how deep they go. but the acid cannot
replace current. cannot flow strong and changing, what once was here, now withered and
gone. my sonar reveals new structures have formed. rigid in place.

gemstones embedded underneath. these bright crystals could loose themselves and pile at my
feet. what I might find if I pluck one. grind it to its smallest pieces. take it back to the crawl
space. prepare it. agar on a slide. slip it into the microscope. record. and what I may find,
withered at its core. a delicate twined structure. a two-pronged genome imprinted in the loam.
a whole history spelled out in base pairs. anomalies I can trace. reconstruct a rough timeline. a
protein folding, unfolding. the full trace. the flowing stream, blinking violet on the screen.