It has been some time since I collected and read my science fiction books as a teenager, I'm staring at forty years since those halcyon days. I bought Dan Simmon's novel Hyperion in paperback back when it came out. That was thirty-one years ago, it may be time to read it. Two other paperbacks I'm revisiting leisurely are the aleph by Jorge Luis Borges and Case and the Dreamer by Theodore Sturgeon. My preorder of the Jeremy Robert Johnson novel The Loop came in, and I've begun reading it. I was about one fifth of the way through The Erstwhile, by Brian Catling. I fished out an old Robert Heinlein paperback, The Past Through Tomorrow, and have begun reading its first short stoy, Life-line, Heinlein's first published story. With my Doc Savage paperbacks and Michael Moorcock stacks alongside my Philip K. Dicks and Stephen King books, I'm a book dragon protecting its hoard.
With Dungeons & Dragons and popular movies having seeded the blueprint we're being force-shaped into (along all the remaining science fictional ephemera and its fantasy horror accessories) the startling revelation is exactly the truth that's being hidden which is nothing short of the fact that we're all subject to the delights of paradise here, subsumed through a refractive prism for best containment. Long since the heyday of the legend of the Grub Bros rolled out into its denouement have I noted the mirror neuron aspect to our virtual reflected realities. With the added insight of how Google and then sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have rendered us into living product for micropimping corporations to make money off international advertising, it's not difficult to see how we've been primed as real flesh estate; in an almost Cronenbergian sense, we've kept the mantra of 'long live the new flesh' close at hand, but in an altogether unexpected way that's preparing us for full on interface with it. It's been given a lot of names now, but its just known as the grid.
The thing about the grid is that everyone's has an interlocution factor based on the amount of years experience they've gathered online. The more years and time they've spent weaving and being woven into the digital fabric of the world wide web, the greater the digital psionic power amassed, the more powerful an expenditure of force, if need be. I know myself since I built my first computer twenty-five years ago and accessed the John Shirley bulletin board being used at the time. I made the decision to log on with my own first name as the user. This was critical for me to be the other cat on their besides John who was using his real first name. The remaining majority hid behind exotic handles like Q the Inert and El Queso. The old bb shifted over to being hosted on darkecho.com, and from there the Board With A Nail On It continued to flourish until a lot of us migrated over to Myspace.
Music being the primary motivator for a lot of us gathered together over there, it became a place which tended to gravitate around bands and the scenes they represented. Then it started to fall apart and everyone moved on over to Facebook. At least a decade went by before some began to notice not everyone who got on board at the get go were still on here. To those who kept returning on their PCs and their smart phones it may take a lifetime to never know. Sometimes I think we're clinging to each other because we know that we're the grid. Individual human lives. Spread across the USA like a tapestry of lit candles in a field of stars. Ultimately life is shaped by our dreams and sometimes if what you believe in is real then hanging in there for too long can never be a problem because sometimes it takes way more than that even for it to come into fruition but if its a dream that's what they do. No matter what you think life's trying to teach you now believe me dreams do come true.
It's not always our dream where that ends up happening to. Some folks out there make it. Or so I've heard. A good portion of them fake it, mark my word. That doesn't mean they didn't take it. Far from it. They've taken a lifetime to break in to the finals. These people are there for the recitals. We're all raw input as performers for the ai algorithms to map out in aggregates. What they're poised on the cusp of a moment to decipher, we have always known in our hearts and minds forever. Better become wary of what we might gain in an exchange. It's what we choose to lose that we so quickly learn how to forget.
