SURFACE Conceived by MATIRASA “infinite egos collapsing into nothing”
A young woman returns to her hometown after years of living in the city. On an old train cutting through fog-covered hills, she sees them for the first time, transparent red spheres floating silently through the air. Strange, she thinks. But somehow beautiful.
When she arrives, life in the village goes on as it always has, women having their backs scraped on front porches, healers burning incense until the smoke dissolves into red spheres, fishermen pulling them from the sea without a second glance. Everyone knows. Everyone stays silent. Not because they don’t care, but because this trauma has been passed down through generations. Each generation inheriting the same condition, the same helplessness, too exhausted to fight something that existed long before they were born.
The spheres are not natural. Deep in the forest behind the fog, hidden in ruins, lies an ancient laboratory, not a relic of the past, but a fragment of a future that fell too early. The organisms inside escaped and have been multiplying unchecked for five hundred years. This oppressive system has survived not because it is powerful, but because people have grown too tired to question it.
When the young woman calls her mother for the last time, no one answers. Her mother is gone, taken along with the trauma she had carried alone for so long. And the young woman stands there, in the silence of the village, surrounded by red spheres drifting without purpose.
There is nothing left to explain. Nothing left to ask.
SURFACE – about a wound too old to heal, and those who have just arrived, wondering why everyone is silent.