THREE WINDOWS

 

Marta has lived in the same house since she got married. In the dining room hangs a worn crucifix and a television turned on with no sound: mute news from a world she no longer understands. Her daughter, Laura, arrives once a week from the city with a bag full of things and a hurried expression. Aimé comes behind her, cellphone in hand and earbuds in her ears, like a declaration of independence.

That afternoon, a relentless rain breaks loose. The three of them are trapped in the house.

“The roof is leaking again,” Marta says, looking at the damp stain. “If your father were alive…”

Laura sighs. She knows the sentence will never end.

“We could ask for a quote through the repairs app,” Aimé suggests without lifting her eyes from the screen.

Marta frowns.

“App? What’s that?” she asks.

“An application, Mom,” Laura explains. “A phone program. They send you a builder.”

“And how do I know he’s not a thief?” Marta crosses herself. “Before, you knew the neighbor, the neighbor’s son. Now strangers come sent by that… artificial… intelligence.” She spits out the last word as if it were a bone.

Aimé smiles faintly.

“They’re not strangers. There are reviews, Grandma. Everyone uses it.”

Laura adjusts her hair, uneasy. She knows not everyone uses it. She herself is afraid, though she doesn’t admit it.

“I’d rather call Ricardo, the usual guy,” Laura says. “I trust a familiar voice more than a machine.”

Aimé looks up, annoyed.

“Ricardo? That guy overcharges you because he knows you’re trusting. I prefer something that analyzes prices and reputation. Besides, AI doesn’t get tired or forget.”

Marta slams the table with her bony hand.

“I don’t trust those things that talk and listen. They spy on us. They steal our soul.”

“Mom…” Laura smiles gently, but she feels an echo of truth in Marta’s fear. She, too, suspects that everything is being recorded.

Aimé lets out a short laugh.

“Oh, please. The soul doesn’t exist for technology. It’s just information. Data. They help us.”

Marta looks at her with pity, though she cannot hide a certain distaste.

“And that doesn’t scare you? Being turned into data.”

“No,” Aimé replies confidently. “What scares me more is being invisible. The future goes that way.”

Silence. The rain beats against the broken roof. Marta strokes the tablecloth with trembling fingers. Laura feels suspended between two worlds: the solid past of her mother and the liquid cloud of her daughter.

When Aimé goes to her room to get her charger, Laura takes advantage of the moment.

“Mom,” she says hesitantly, “don’t be afraid of it. These are different times.”

“It’s not fear,” Marta says. “It’s sadness. They pulled the ground out from under my feet. People used to talk, ask for favors, trust each other. Now they talk to a machine.”

Laura doesn’t know what to say. She has just been fired because an AI can do in minutes what used to take her hours. She hasn’t told Marta yet; she doesn’t want to hear “I warned you.”

“Maybe they’re useful for good things,” Laura murmurs, more to herself than to her mother.

“How?” Marta asks.

“I don’t know… helping in hospitals, teaching languages, keeping people company…” But she remembers the nights in front of the screen, unsuccessfully searching for a job, and the sentence breaks, remains unfinished.

Marta watches her, senses the crack.

“It hurt you,” she says, with the certainty only mothers have.

Laura bites her lip and says nothing.

Aimé returns, waving her phone.

“Mom, Grandma, look at this: a chat that writes personalized stories. I told it our life and it made a story about three women in a storm.” She reads aloud a few lines in which the three of them appear turned into fantasy characters.

Marta listens in disbelief.

“That isn’t writing. It’s… stealing other people’s words.”

“No, Grandma. It learns from books and texts to invent something new.”

Laura feels a chill: the job she lost was precisely editing texts; now a machine writes stories about her own family.

“I don’t like it,” Marta says firmly. “It doesn’t understand what it feels like; it just stitches pieces together.”

“And what are we?” Aimé says, raising an eyebrow. “Pieces of memories, of experiences. We also learn from others.”

Laura looks up. She’s surprised by the teenager’s lucidity.

“Maybe she’s right,” Laura admits, though it’s hard for her.

“No, my daughter,” Marta says, shaking her head. “We love. We doubt. The machine doesn’t.”

“I’m not so sure either,” Aimé says. “Sometimes I wonder if it understands more than we think.”

The conversation is cut short when a thunderclap shakes the house. The rain intensifies. Aimé smiles: “Look, the app says the storm will end in an hour and that there are builders available tomorrow.” Marta seems about to protest, but she stays quiet, worn down by the dampness and fatigue.

At night, each of them stands by her window. Marta looks out at the soaked patio. She thinks of her youth: handwritten letters, visits from neighbors, a world where everything had a face. She feels she lives in a time that shattered like a dropped plate. Laura looks at the city in the distance, lit by digital advertisements. She thinks of the dignity she lost when AI did her job better and cheaper. She feels split: she needs to adapt, but she longs for what was hers. Aimé gazes at the screen reflected in the glass. She feels the vertigo of a vast future, full of promises and threats she doesn’t fully understand. She wants to move forward, but deep down she fears becoming something that will no longer be human.

Three women, three ways of looking.

One fears tomorrow because it destroyed yesterday.

Another survives with nostalgia and anger.

Another runs toward the future even though it frightens her.

The house creaks. Outside, the rain keeps falling.

And, in silence, each of them understands—without saying it—that they live under the same roof but in fragmented worlds: one made of memories, another of losses, another of algorithms.