Author: Andy Burrows

Vimy Ridge, Northern France

The path rose gently toward the memorial. The grass was cut close, almost meticulous. White stone surfaced and resurfaced through the green: names, dates, absence rendered orderly.
The exhibit sat low to the ground, set back from the main flow of visitors. No banners. No queue. Just a small structure of glass and stone, designed not to interrupt the ridge but to acknowledge it.
An orientation panel occupied one wall. He read it once, then again.

Exhibit Orientation
This system does not recreate events.
It does not generate images, sound, or narrative reconstructions.
What follows is an affective synthesis.
Personal diaries written contemporaneously with the events recorded here have been analysed for linguistic markers associated with stress, anticipation, dissociation, fatigue, and temporal distortion. These markers have been modelled to produce a bounded emotional field representative of lived experience, without sensory content.
Environmental data has been derived from long-term biological and chemical analysis of the ridge itself — soil compaction, growth interruption, mycelial rupture, and trace residues consistent with repeated mechanical shock.
These signals do not contain memory or intent.
They represent reaction.
The system aligns these fields briefly and attenuates them for safety.
No interpretation is provided.
Visitors are advised that meaning, if any, will arise after the experience.

There were no instructions beyond that. No reassurance.
He selected a name with the same surname as his from the list. A diary fragment existed.
At first, there was nothing.
Then a pressure — not emotional, not physical — a sense of waiting that had no object. Time did not pass correctly. Muscles held themselves ready without instruction. The body anticipated something it could not picture.
It wasn’t like remembering.
It was closer to standing inside a pressure system that had once passed through a human body.
The feeling did not crescendo. It simply persisted, then thinned.
The system shifted.
What followed was harder to place.
This was not fear, or grief, or even discomfort. It was resistance — a recoil translated into something his nervous system could register. Compression remembered without memory. Growth interrupted, resumed incorrectly, interrupted again.
Not feeling, exactly.
Reaction.
The sense that something had happened here repeatedly, and that whatever lived here afterward had adjusted itself around that fact, not healed from it.
Then nothing.
The alignment released.
He became aware of his breathing, of the room, of the faint sound of voices outside.
He stepped back into the light.
The ridge looked as it always had.
Two children played while a guide spoke in measured tones about strategy and sacrifice. Someone adjusted a camera.
Everything was correct.
He noticed, with mild surprise, that the words he usually reached for — bravery, necessity, tragedy — did not arrive.
Not because they were wrong.
Because they no longer seemed to apply to what he had just felt.
The land did not contradict them.
It simply did not use them.
He walked on, past the rows of names, the polished marble, the careful symmetry.
The memorial held the dead beautifully.
The ridge itself had not forgotten what it had been required to absorb.
And for the first time, standing there, he understood that remembrance had never been about accuracy.
It had been about distance.
The exhibit did not remove the distance by showing him more.
It removed it by letting his body register what remained once the stories had done their work.
He left quietly, joining the flow of visitors, carrying nothing he could easily explain — only the knowledge that some assumptions, once dissolved, did not need to be replaced.
They simply ceased to be useful.