Your Creative Co-Pilot
She stared, frowning, at the blank screen.
The suffocating whiteness engulfed her, snuffing out any sparks of inspiration.
As her peripheral vision shimmered and her brain began to hiss with the rush of an impending migraine, she scrunched her eyes and rubbed them, a little too hard.
"I have to do this alone."
Her finger instinctively slid from her eye to the tiny bump behind her right ear. Long since healed, but it often throbbed like a phantom wound at times like these.
She circled it with her fingertips and hesitated.
"No."
Forcing weary eyes open, she squinted at the brief through fast-narrowing tunnel vision. The words swirled into nonsense. Was this easier, before? She couldn't remember.
Creativity. Inspiration. They made the process ours. We were in charge, the directors: the Co-Pilot filled in the blanks. Enhanced things. Took our spark, and fanned the flames.
They were always her ideas.
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She sighed and scrunched her eyes again. These migraines were coming more often. And they had no respect for deadlines.
"Just a quick boost, then."
Her finger traced back behind her ear, found the bump and gently pressed. That familiar click. Then a sudden sharpening of focus, like twisting the dial on one of those antique manual-focus cameras her grandfather used to collect.
A weirdly anachronistic reference. Did she make that connection? But before she had a chance to consider it, her aching mind burst into kaleidoscopic action.
Like a firework display barely under the control of its button-pusher, ideas began to spark, fizz and crackle. The shimmer in her peripheral vision became a pulsing strobe as her pupils dilated and her fingers accelerated to an ecstatic blur, filling the screen with words.
12 hours later, she found herself slumped awkwardly on the desk, head thumping, brief solved and sent for feedback.
She headed to the kitchen to brew a strong coffee before reading her idea.
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Part of Destopia, a casual dabble in some (very) short fiction exploring one possible dystopian future for design