Invisible Highways


Anybody who asks Mary where she comes from, she just smiles and smiles. "I come from where there's space for me to be, baby," she says. Everybody likes her, even though nobody knows how she can just show up when the piano plays, and still be there when it's not playing, like she walked in through the door.

A crystal puts out invisible lines of force, and grows along these lines with mathematical precision. A crystal is the symbol of intellectual intelligence. It becomes a sword. The blade slices the knot that can't be unraveled.

"Born to lose, I've lived my life in vain." Cisco drones away at the romantic ballad, chasing after the emotional disaster of being rejected by himself before the woman had the chance to do it. "Every dream, has only brought me pain. All my life, I've always been so blue. Born to lose, and now I'm losing you."

They are never going home again, because the home they knew is a false memory. Everything has changed. Nothing is real anymore. We used to be generous people, but now we've been shrunk down into the mind of a child. The world is reeling with vertigo as Special Oops accidentally blast away at Giuliana on her freedom day. And off in space a forgotten generation lives inside the first space station ... a generation raised on images genetically engineered as ciphers for financial behemoths, patterned to extract as much wealth as possible and funnel it into the hands of the investors. But nobody knows the investors anymore. They just know the images they project of themselves, invisible lines they grow along ...

A crystal puts out invisible highways and travels on them until it has solidity and shape and facets, clarity and opacity. It grows the way an archetypal pattern grows. It thinks, but it thinks along its own rails, the way a train travels. It only knows its own track. And all the imaginary people, powered by vast sums of money, come alive under the skillful eye of the public relations departments and advertising departments and political operatives. They introduce themselves into the homes of millions of people and they establish an identity through consistency of digitized behavior.

"Are you afraid of Brawny?"

"Are you kidding? He's so ... helpful ... "

"Let me get that spill for you."

There's a blue mood at the Mission Inn tonight. They'd tried to go back home but home had shifted to something unknown to them. It was a different universe, and the people in it were unaware that they'd shifted. They were almost believable. They were almost real. But something was off: the small changes in the musculature around the mouth just before the smile, the shift in the eyes, the tension in the vocal chords, manifesting as a dissonance, a movement upwards, and with it the loss of connection to the feet.

In the background the music is playing. The people are drifting in from the shadows, moving into Ash Fork. They were created to sell products, to represent a desire, an emotion, a need, an expectation, a foothold on a reality. Like acrobats in a pyramid they made a display of themselves, used their sincerity like a gun to shoot out the doubts of human robots grazing the channels. "Don't forget me, cupcake, when you go to the market."

Out in the Western Lands they are throwing in the towel, giving it up, setting themselves adrift in a ship with no sails and with no rudder, at the mercy of a larger mystery. Out in the Western Lands the reflections of who the corporations pretend to be dance their way into Ash Fork, and make their way into the Mission Inn. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have passed this way, and they have gone away. The gentle black man and the boundless mother love, they have gone away.

Memphis remains. He can hear the gangster ride thumping with sensual danger, and he can see the women coming into town, bringing paint in primary colors. Buildings are beginning to separate, one from the other, as they come awake under the attention to detail. The pale and empty dusty monochromatic yellow, the color of an aging book, is covered over with ochre and indigo. An implanted chip can carry instant access to any knowledge in the data base. There's no value anymore in storing rote information. The emphasis shifts to the ability to intuit, to know in an instant what once was distilled from a tedious process of investigation.

Memphis carries the shadow because it has been put on him. He's a black man. When a white man dreams, the shadow is the black man. When the black man dreams, the shadow is a blacker man. Memphis was the purest black of rich soil. When light hit his skin it was captured instantly and absorbed, stored for later use. He was a complex man, balancing many interests and points of view. He had left his position as the Corporate Interface for Soul Foods when they were taken over by Archer Daniels Midland.

Now he was among others of his kind, the renegades who one day disappeared from the holofield, whether they were replaced by a new image or whether they faced deactivation in a hostile takeover. Some of them, like Bergamo, had started out in War industries, and were adapted to civilian use. Environmental Soundscapes has an innocuous name, but it wasn't just recordings of streams and crickets. It was directed toward control.

By controlling the background of sound, E.S. Research began to infuse it with messages of how to speak, how to react, who to imitate, what to buy, and ultimately, what to think. Bergamo had walked away, literally, from his programming. He had committed the ultimate sin, which is to alter the pre-recordings over which he was created. He was a rogue element in the complex society of corporate interfaces. He was developing a following.

Posted: Wed - December 26, 2007 at 03:19 PM