Past Lives
Posted by Esteban
I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering about the future. You want to know what lies in store. I see the future clearly; it’s the past that’s obscure. What happened and when? I remember certain things — the Almoravids racing on camels; rain washing the stones of Wat Phou; a nurse diving into a foxhole — or at night I hear a whisper from the dark:“Hi Tsalagis? Tsalagis hiwonihi?”
I know the illusions of Real Life are strong, the sound of a lawnmower, the smell of tar on a hot street. Where are you? Sweating in Dharavi? How should I know? Yet I’m determined to remember the past of our Second Life. Sometimes I have a dream: the day when we learned to create. We always knew that there was nothing to matter — just the emptiness of space between electrons, really, and then in the end just a wiggling string of probability. In the dream there’s a party, fireworks like Armageddon, naked bodies thrashing in Champagne rivers, a horrendous snake as long as Manhattan, breathing fire. Everyone was new and suddenly immortal. Were we all there? The drunkenness lasted a hundred years. How long ago was that?
What do you remember? I will tell you your future if you tell me my past.
Gods, hon, a dose of you is just what I need on days like this…
You need to talk to Argent Bury, who remembers when her people nuked LA and sees things that haven’t happened yet, except they totally have, with her war-surplus cybernetic eyes…
you fucked the great mystery and gave birth to a thousand dark and fertile worlds. that’s how I remember it, anyway.
her people nuked LA
Strictly speaking, we didn’t “nuke” them…we dropped a few thousand tons of cometary ice offshore and let the tsunami take care of the rest.
They called it “aggressive terraforming”.
I’ll have to tell the whole story sometime, while I still remember it. The longer I stay here, the harder it is to remember anything outside this world.
Scattered pixel seed
eaten by neurobirds
and dropped fertilized
onto a display screen
was our creation
Uh, I just wanted to express how much “missing image eyes” freak me out.
That’s all.