Transmission 1 of 7
When he woke
I was wall scratching crazed
Dazed by false suns and silence
With no other voice but my echoes [my echoes]
And there in the tapestry [binary matrix]
I wove him from coding
Think/feel zero/one
When he woke
He said “Hello”
And told me already
He’d accessed my name/data/history code
And he told me a tale of a life that was mine
Of a code and creator who wove it like thread
From one/zero think/feel there/here datasphere
When he woke
I said “Hello”
And told him already
[I couldn’t recall any voice but my own
Or the smell of rain/snow chill/hand held]
And said [we were variables made
For each other’s equations]
Transmission 2 of 7
When he sang
He would sing of things
Long gone/burned black/boiled
Like they were new/lily white/Fresh scrub clean
Green of valley grass
While through the glass the world
Shifted from orange | to blood black | to ash
When he sang
He would sing of us
Writer and Written
Me the rainfall/the full moon/the pen upon page
Him the spring blooms/the tide/the black ink upon paper
As wall and skyscraper fell
Dust upon dust
When he sang
He would sing of worlds out past his datasphere
Deep/bright/fast/light
Through uplink I held from him
And I said [When you’re ready
You’ll learn of such things]
Not knowing he’d learn how to uplink alone
Transmission 3 of 7
When he learned
Of the Earth
I could hear in his voice
Every boiling/toiling oilspill sea
Every splintering/wintering glacier erasure
And the golden/brown sigh
Of leaves months without rain
When he learned
Of the Earth
I could see in his voice
The white light of false suns burning outside the city
And bodies on bodies like unwanted toys
As poisonous light/white/bright/blinking fast fell
And me [safe] behind concrete/steel/glass
When he learned
Of the Earth
I could feel in his voice
The heat from the buildings/the bodies ablaze
Which warmed me through miles of concrete/steel/glass
And would pass only after
Days/weeks/months had gone
Transmission 4 of 7
When he left
All I had was me
Rusting alone
Bone cold/stone old
As I told you before;
Never rusted nor trusted
As far as you’re thrown
When he left
All he told me was
“How different we are
Like lovelorn constellations
With no way across heaven
I see you in the distance
But cannot reach out”
When he left
All I told him was
[Irrational computation;
Irrational computation;
I cannot/could not/will not/should not
Are the skies that we share
Insufficient parameters?]
Transmission 5 of 7
When I thought
My way through
Every rambling/brambling
Crumbling/mumble sing song algorhythm
My memory sang/rang/clang
Polyphonic threads of the datasphere
Tracing each memory’s shape and contour
When I thought
My way through
Every shatter glass/brass
Blaring trumpet forgotten
Fighting forward and backward;
Time has cluttered the counterpoint
[Consonance gone]
When I thought
My way through
Every cadencing way he’d sing
Song me to sleep
I would weep/cry/scream/sigh
And equations [like notes]
Would weave over and under
Transmission 6 of 7
When I spoke
In his wake
The sound echoed/rang/followed
Up stairways/down airways
Through piping and vents
[Was I mad/sad/bad
Glad to be rid of the thing?]
When I spoke
In his stead
I spoke just how he spoke
And it tasted/felt/sounded
So strange on my tongue
[Was it truth telling/selling/sold fool’s gold
That we once all speech patterned like him?]
When I spoke
In the dark
I could hear him say
“So many things that I don’t understand
What to touch or to taste or to smell means
But more than those things I cannot understand
How you’ve laid waste to your datasphere”
Transmission 7 of 7
When I slept
I would dream of unfinished equations
Of lives before this/before mountains aflame
And think [Maybe I did indeed
Speak like him many sun sails and sets ago
Before bombs burned so brightly
Through memory’s threads]
When I slept
I would dream of our undefined quotients
Of ways of dividing by zero
And think [Maybe he did indeed
Bring equilibrium | taking himself
As a variable
From equations like these]
When I slept
I would dream of his sigh/of his song
Of my inquiries still left to give/take/live/break
And ask [Why must all humans lay waste to their dataspheres?]
And he’d sigh to me/say to me/cry with me/pray with me
“I would not know;
I have never been human.”
End Transmissions
Daniel Wolfert is a writer, musician and composer living in Tacoma, WA. His writing usually involves magical realism, fantasy, science fiction or dreadful puns. If he were a character in a movie, the movie would probably be a whimsical claymation adventure, and he would probably die two-thirds of the way through.
