Snow
By John Crowley, first published in Omni
In a futuristic society, after his wife's death, a man starts re-watching her life through the hundreds of hours of surveillance footage recorded by a personal drone.
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Charlie is a good-looking man who married for money. His wife, Georgie, married him for his looks after her first husband left her with a lot of money after his death. He also left her a drone called the Wasp, which followed her around and recorded her life for posterity. The drone came from a company called The Park, located somewhere on the coast of California, in which the hours of footage from each drone were buried along with the people in an efficient, tasteful undertaking for the dead.
When Georgie dies in a snow sporting accident, The Park efficiently takes care of every part of the death. Charlie hasn't much to do but sign things, but though their reasons for marrying hadn't been too strong, the two had eventually come to love and need each other very much. So Charlie goes to The Park to access the footage of Georgie that exists there. He sees a wonderful memory of the two of them in Ibiza, but then realizes that the access to footage is entirely random, jumping around throughout the hundreds of hours recorded. He goes to talk to the director of the place about it, and then goes outside and properly weeps for Georgie.
Naturally he goes back, again and again. He strikes up a friendship with the director, and going through the footage helps him grapple with his own lost sense of direction and purpose in life. Then the footage starts to show him more footage in snowy scenes, in winter, which is strange because Georgie hated winter and avoided it at all costs, flying to tropical areas to escape it. The director tells a story about how it slowly becomes impossible to find summer in footage of the dead, giving Charlie a chill.
He doesn't go back anymore, thinking to himself that he still has some summer left in him. He settles in a nearby town, and is able to let go of Georgie, except for those occasional intensely vivid memories that hit him from time to time.
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