When the Nines Roll Over (18 page)

We begin with Prometheus. The Titan chained to a great rock, punishment for bringing fire to the humans. Every day a vulture swoops down and devours his liver. The pain, we are meant to understand, is unbearable. The moral is spelled clearly for the dullards among us: stay within thy boundaries.

But can sensation maintain its clarity for eternity? Eventually Prometheus stops screaming. He retreats inward from the pain, after years, or decades, or centuries. The suffering is suppressed, locked in a trunk in the attic of consciousness. But Prometheus is still chained to a rock. And so he begins to imagine, to dream of freedom. Let it be so. He creates fictional cities and roams through them, drinks in fictional taverns, consorts with fictional lovers. And in one of these strange cities, walking at dusk down a desolate avenue along the abandoned docks, the transformation occurs: Prometheus is no longer aware of his fiction—the fiction has swallowed him whole. Let it be so. The street signs are stamped in the machinery of his mind, but he is not conscious of their creation. And the beings created now populate an entire world, a universe, convinced of their own reality—even their creator is convinced of their reality. We're all waking in the Titan's dream.

Substitute the word
God
for
Prometheus
and
loneliness
for the
vulture
. Genesis begins with torture, whether a vulture's beak or infinite loneliness, the face of the One moving over dark waters. To those who ask, “Where is God now?” I respond, “He has forgotten that He exists.”

Catastrophe. My computer's security scan has detected a virus. I have no 1connection to the outside world—there
is
no outside world—so I must presume that the rogue code was transmitted by my optical discs, or else was programmed into my 1468 at birth. The closed-cycle plumbing unit. Great entertainment for the neighbors. I was the local lunatic, scanning function recognized the virus and even has a name for it: “Air Dred.” What possesses people to sabotage the unseen work of strangers? The hacker who created Air Dred must have stalked the museums of the world, slashing the canvases caloric demands of such rigorous exertion, and the consequent depletion of my larder, posed a caloric demands of such rigorous exertion, and the consequent depletion of my larder, posed a of Old Masters. Dark days for me: My life preserver has sprung a leak.

Still trying to determine the extent of the damage. The 1468's security system identifies intruders and attempts to neutralize them but refuses to provide any useful information concerning the saboteur's methods. Air Dred is a “memory-site infection”: that is the extent of my knowledge. My computer has a tumor, the tumor is malig01nant, should all countermeasures fail the tumor will metastasize, my computer will die. This reeks of melodrama, granted, but I am lost without 1468. The computer is my companion, my library, the record of my days. Without it I am faced with uninterrupted solitude. And what could I contemplate to lift and firm flabby buttocks in those silent hours but personal extinction? It will be as if I never was. Drowned, all my plans to serve as a bottled message, to provide the blueprints of our Atlantis to future divers.

Still, no need for panic yet. I have confidence in my 1468's autosurgery. Humanity's greatest talent is you know a person, and love them, and then in the space of a year sickness boils them down to their bones. Perhaps I should be grateful that she was not alone in the end. So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We surviving. We will rule this planet until something better comes along.

I don't know what I1010was thinking, refusing to die with my tribe. Sheer conceit that it could matter at all, this dismal little man stabbing at keys in near darkness, twelve feet below01 the ground. The sentence I wish could end this journal—Spring, and the grass is rising—will never truthfully be written. I could live one hundred years and never survive this winter.

Words fail me, it goes without saying. Yes, it does. Gone and unsaid.

Mostly I miss the nighttime, walking through grass fields lit by stars alive and dying and dead. And lying down in the woods beyond the town limits, lulled by the deceitful I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work harmony surrounding me. Every tree battle101d toward the sun, leaving its neighbor to wither in the shade; the hooting owl is waiting with hooked claws for a shrew to break cover; the cricket heard fiddling is the lone survivor of a three-thousand brood, her brothers and sisters murdered by frost and frogs.

T001010his world was at war long before us.

I am losing everything. Air Dred advances on every front,1a0digital blitzkrieg swarming past all defenses. 1468 no longer retrieves previously saved documents. There is no way of knowing whether the computer's memory preserves anything I type. No way of knowing whether my memories are remembered by 01101468. I came down here to tell my stories but my stories are swallowed whole by a sick machine.

And my library, all my beautiful books, deathless, I thought, deathless, but I've lost them, Homer and Dante and Shakespea01001re01and00Cervantes and Goethe and what strange beast was this? Shelley and Baudelaire and Tolstoy, gone, all of them, buried below a snow of zeros and ones. Leaving me alone at last, all my truest friends, the heroes and villains of a thousand novels, plays and poems, all the creations of all the wonderful minds slaughtered by a mindless virus, the imagined city emptied by plague.

Will anyone read this? Who could I be writing for, what possible au11010010dience still there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called exists?

I need to escape. This gray box I am trapped in shrinks every day, the blocks of concrete edging closer, squeezing out the air. Need to flee, need to run as fast as I can for as long as I want.

I am nothing but an eschatologist of the underground, not even bright enough to realize that the conclusion has already been written and I am101000marching in lockstep from left to right, trapped in a text that offers no exit but the end.

Again today the knocking on my hatch door, insistent this time, lasting fifteen minutes. My mind is beginning to defo1011011rm.010Or has something survived? And if so, do I dare to open the hatch? Anything that dwells in the fiction has swallowed him whole. The street signs are stamped in the machinery of his mind, but he is not conscious of the fiction has swallowed him whole. The street signs are stamped in the machinery of his mind, but he is not conscious of the waste-land above must be desperate, scavenging for f110ood and drinkable water. A horde of interlopers could easily overpower m01e, seize me by the neck and drag me from safety. Maybe the survivo110110101rs01have110reverted to cannibalism; they will tie me to a tree and carve open my belly with linoleum knives looted from the hardware store, fry my intestines on an open fire while 0I still live.