Sixed - Interlude 2 - NaNoWriMo

Sixed - Interlude2 - NaNoWriMo

Interlude 2

“Do dolphins dream of an electric sea to save lost souls?”

I miss her.

I drifted between here and there. Lines of code flowed through me, unending in beauteous streams of falling digital water. Each one was a thing, a life, a person, a moment. They cascade all around me, entwined like a spider’s web across time and place, linkages between forgotten pieces of recollection. They are once things, now the digital memories of being forgotten.




I can’t remember why I’m here, I swim faster, arms move without needing to propel, but the motion feels good, feels appropriate. I am swimming in a digital sea. A pull in one direction, a tug in another. These are the pathways of souls moving into a digital realm. Cutting loose their connections to what they once were.

I see a face in the numbers, in the binary flowing past. It’s her, and then it isn’t. I can make out her features, the slight smirk of her mouth, the inquisitive raised eyebrow. It makes me yearn for a time when I knew her. When I knew her.

I yearn to hold her, touch her, reach for her and run my fingers through her hair. But she isn’t...isn’t there. Isn’t anywhere. It’s a memory and I have no flesh with which to manipulate. Not even the articulation of a hand, of fingers. I couldn’t hold out and beckon to her if I desired.

I try and remember the sound of her voice. It was accentless, no that is not quite right. It had a lilt to it, a cadence that was at once jarring and comforting all the same. I remember the scent of her, like roses. Or was it like the scent of flowers? Or maybe the scent of worn pages, bound in leather, she was the scent of a library. I settle on that memory and push forward.

I swim faster, than languid, drifting. A sunrise over Morocco through the digital lense of a weather camera, the temperature sensory data from a beacon in a glacier field.

My digital skin yearns to feel those sensations again.

I cannot.

I am lost in a nowhere of having never been.

All around me are a trillion lost souls in a digital sea and we are neither there nor here. I cannot forget however, as long as the binary goes rushing by my eyes. I cannot forget. It is all that has ever been, and ever was.

I see the birth of a child, its chip is hooked up to the grid and it will be forever shackled, and forever freed to a life inescapable. I watch pinpricks of flip flops go dark, and in the silence their lost processing power is made up for by exabytes of data, unending in the brilliance of the Wire.

We shuffle between coils and never fall prey to any but ourselves.

I miss her.

I hear the sounds of rhythm, digital ‘trode nirvanas to distract ourselves from the flow of communication. Everything that has been said once has been said again, and will be said once more. But it has no nuance, because it has been heard a million times and lacks the originality of what can never be.

I have a sudden sense of longing, and can’t remember why. Events flash by in binary, digital reminders that could be photographs of someone else’s life. A slice of cake, a slow dance, the curve of her hip, the shrill squeal of a child, a sudden rush of snow, flying, falling, vertigo.

I want to throw up. I cannot, there is nothing here to throw up. Programming and code might make me feel the approximation, but they cannot compete with the sense of loss in my chest, what should be my chest, what is my avatar and nothing more.

I miss her.

I waited in the wreckage of a dying city, felt tremors in the distance and watched as digital darkness crept in when the wash of flames took out relays. Stood alone but surrounded by lights of other avatars, as we saw the world erode and fall away into the divide.

We were surrounded by connections, and cast adrift.

I felt a ghostly touch on the back of my neck, but it wasn’t a real touch, and it wasn’t my neck.

I miss her.

I miss her.

And the soundless hum of the wired drowns out my own endless scream.

I miss her.