Where is the vista? And the fresh sea air?
I can only smell the laptop there.
The bright white light is for interrogation
The buttons are to be pressed
The gentle hum is the better to soothe you my dear.
Crying does no good. Leave the coffee alone now. Try it without.
Salt monster, succubus.
Job's wife turned and looked into the screen.
dry autumn.
I feel the leaves, the tendrils and shoots issuing from my hands and
that piece of skin on either side of the head just outside the eyes.
and the hardening of my heartwood.
Is something burning?
Salty wood smoke. From the driftwood on the regular shores of that world

in 'Contact' where Jodie Foster meets her dead dad.

[Symmetry and regularity.
The lolling rhythms of the code encourage dreams
and I find myself in the strange attractors of cultural memes
I pass a scene from The Shining, an old Rod Stewart song,
and the argument that the race can be improved through eugenics.
Key words spoken aloud from my coding reverie announce the orbit's
passage though the gravitational influence of a meme, each passage
slightly different than the time before and passing on to the densely populated
neighbourhood of Too-Much-TV. Around each season and every series lie these arbitrary memes
like clusters of butterflies beating their wings the path beyond is
chaotic and unknown. It ceases to have shape or interest, like that which caused the Big Bang.]

I am a carpenter in the world of 'Tron', building endless uniform walls and alleys
for some sort of motorcycle race to Out. Out to another In. And more walls.

The only proof of time is a paycheque.
The only experience is process. and soon the cheque is forgotten.
Time ceases to exist
And the laptop raises its head and squats down on the Capitol
Proclaiming the end to time in the Rapture's famous trumpet blasts.
Not the announcement of the beginning of a new age
But the knell of death
The ceasing of clocks.
We look up into the screen and are frozen into not time.
Not forever , but full stop.
We enter the great Untime of the laptop.

Mr. Steel works at Canlink, former employers of my boyfriend, where employees often face the great untime of the laptop.