She traced her finger along the pattern at the top of the box, zig-zagging across the surface.

Colored particles, each spherical and about an inch across, began to fill the room. It was seemingly random at first, but slowly, patterns began to emerge.

“So. My focus is on space, not time, and this is wonky,” she said. “So, initial capture is going to be all impressions since the date I specified.”

Each figure was a smear that filled the room to the point things got dark. Skin-tone spheres began to cluster into groupings that looked like faces, but where one person walked across the room, every space that their face had occupied began to get the dots.

The room filled to the point that it began to get dark. The faint ambient glow of each dot became more apparent.

“This is messy,” Chris said.

“Yep.”

Finer dots began to appear, piercing the larger ones and replacing them in clusters. It took minutes, and I was reminded of using the internet in recent months, when the servers were first going online. Each image load had taken twelve passes, each pass taking a minute or two.

It wasn’t only resolution that mattered, though. Each person had been in the room for extended periods of time, and each one was a smear of every action and movement they’d taken while in the space.

I folded my arms, walking around and through images, looking for ones where a face stuck out without smearing one way or the other.

“Color isn’t accurate, by the way,” Kenzie said.

“Good to know,” I said.

One face, a woman, strawberry blonde, with one tattooed arm. I could see the impression she’d left where she had slept on the edge of the bed, but had climbed off the bed on the opposite side.

I could see other activity, with a lot of flesh tones.

Going by profile, there were two men, and there was another woman who wasn’t present much.

“And… resolution is as good as it’s going to get,” Kenzie said. “But some are sharper than others, where one person or thing was still for a very long time. Sleeping faces and stuff.”

I peered down at the sleeping face of the woman.

“Who are these guys?” I asked.

“Give me… five, ten minutes. Maybe fifteen or twenty. I want to sweep and see what we can pick up.”

Thin lines that formed cubes began to dance around the room, seemingly at random. Where each cube touched a face, they began to roll along the track formed by each blurry caterpillar of merged images, pausing now and again.

There was one, however, that wasn’t looking for faces. It moved along the chest of dressers, pausing on the bible that lay on one shelf. It went over to the television, then the VCR. The longer it wandered, the more frantic and jerky it seemed to get.