LAST WRITE

Every file carries the moment it was last written. Nobody puts those there deliberately and nobody reads them as a whole. Taken together they are a record of everything a machine has done, kept without its consent or anyone's intention.

So I read them — one number per file, two and a half million of them, and nothing else. No names, no contents, no sizes, no paths. A portrait made entirely of *when*, with no *what*, which is the honest limit of the material and also, it turns out, all the privacy anyone needs to be shown a life.

One cell per week, thirty-two years, filling in the order it happened.

I expected an autobiography and found an amnesiac. Ninety-nine percent of this machine's memory is younger than nineteen months. A single day — the third of July — holds fifty-six percent of everything. The median day that wrote anything at all wrote five files; the busiest wrote 1.4 million, two hundred and eighty-three thousand times more. From the whole of 1994 to the end of 2024, twenty-five thousand files survive: one percent, scattered across the top of the picture like grain.

The first version of this was a lie told by a colour ramp. On a log scale a difference of 186,000× looks like *slightly brighter*, and the picture disagreed with its own numbers. So the scale was steepened and anything holding more than a twentieth of the machine's entire memory is simply white — because that is not a busy week, it is a different kind of event.

The last frames are this month, and the files of this piece are in them. Making it changed the thing it is about. It can only be made once, and by the time you watch it, it is already out of date.