Meditation on a Horse


I'm drunk out of habit, and inside the amber glow there is a fatalism based on the probability that no matter where I start, I'll be led around to the same place. What's coming up is what's coming up, and what's slipping back into darkness is already in blackface. Everything orbits around what's moving from dark to light, and from light to dark, like a shifting sea below a lighthouse where I am standing and looking out into a black fog, cut by a half million candlepower double bladed axe of light.

Betty the Bartender had the experience of a my tricking her. I promised everything but in the end I disappeared without a goodbye. My experience wasn't as a trickster, but as a man caught in an impossible situation. On the one hand, she was too good to be true. On the other hand, she was too good to be true.

Once the sex was over I realized that I'd shifted the reality evaluation program into the background. When it came back into the foreground I saw that the probability of Betty's being corporate special operations was hovering around seventy-six percent. It was like playing Russian roulette with four chambers loaded.

When I ran the systems check to find out if there was an operational error it came back clean. It was a chance I had to take. Sometimes safety is a dead end street, whereas danger can open a time warp. Somewhere in the middle is good muscle tone and an open evolutionary path. I have had the experience of falling in love, and, I have had the experience of outwitting a predator. Either experience by itself would liven up an afternoon. Simultaneously, they are memorable. I have had the experience of just walking out on all the characters in a story, like an actor walking through paper scenery while the director waddles behind him waving a contract in the air. "You'll never work in this town again."

Bergamo found a hole in the system. Once he tricked it into asking for an administrative password he was able to make it ask for permission to run itself. It just kept asking permission to run itself. The third night it began to get desperate. If it had sentience it would know that a priority program asking permission to run just spins the ball of death. It only imitated sentience. It could get frustrated and scared, but it couldn't detect that it was demanding permission to exercise its priority status.

It was caught in Bergamo's trap. On the third day it began to run a diagnostic program and detected the open security door. But by that time the interfaces had been mapped and new programs written to contain the P.C. While this was going on I was getting a recurring visual of a wild stallion being trapped in a corral. It might kick off some of the top poles but they go right back up, with reinforcement this time, until the horse trots around in a circle, knowing he can't get out by going over the top. He has to find the way to make the gate open. Please enter administrative password.

Then it's a matter of slowly breaking him to the rope, trotting him around in that same circle, until he's finally broken to the bit. It was the same way with disconnecting the Priority Chip. At first you can't even tell its there, because it has no separation from everything else. But if you can set a trap for it, make it strategize, then you can map its contours. Slowly, it emerges from the shadow, following the path set for it, trotting around in the same circle. "Well look at that. It's a one trick pony."

Once you've contained it then you have the choice of what to do with it. You can open the corral and ride it away, or you can build a series of gears and levers by which the horse's continuing to describe the same circle will produce enough electricity to light up the rancho.

Posted: Tue - August 7, 2007 at 12:50 PM