April 8, 2020, 6:56 p.m.
What link was it again? I try the first link, and then the second. Where, in cyberspace, is my Zoom class? I land in a meeting where there is no one. The whole meeting is just me staring back at myself in an empty room in a distant corner of the internet. I become uneasy and exit.
I try another link and there are my classmates, in little cubes, Brady Brunch style, some visible, some shrouded in darkness, some in New York City, some miles away.
The professor starts to speak, but mid-sentence she disappears, her tether to the meeting—to our reality—severed. Where did she go? She reappears, dazed.
The professor asks a student what he thought of the reading. He starts to respond but freezes, suspended in time. His classmates push forward without him; anyone with sub-par internet is left behind. The Zoom game is cutthroat.
The professor asks, Can you repeat that? You were frozen. But when he does, she is thrust, again, out of the meeting by an unknown force. She re-enters and we continue the class. At the end of the meeting we disappear, falling one-by-one off the edge of the virtual world.
MC