Dying is hard. Comedy is easy.

On the walk home tonight (coming from work at 11:30 PM. Making video games is glamorous. Is it still summer?), I saw this guy in a massive wheelchair out by the fountain in front of the Wall Center. That’s a giant apartment complex of glass. It has some nice landscaping done around the bottom.

Like this fountain.

The guy is in a wheelchair that’s like a lazy boy recliner. You know the ones I mean? They can lean back. They almost look capable of going off road or up mountainsides. Its night time and he’s lit by the lights coming up underneath the fountain. He’s having a cigarette and he’s dressed all in black with a black goatee and a black cowboy hat.

He looked incredible but I was too tired and I thought it would be rude to ask him for a picture.

I love the notion that this person is not in a costume.

Last night I went to see Italia kick some ass for the Symphony of Fire or whatever it’s called now. Fireworks for a full half hour set to music. The finale was one of the most mind blowing series of explosions I’ve ever seen.

One thing that was even more amazing that the fireworks were the tiny blue screens on the digital video cameras and cel phones that were recording the event. The entire beach was a constellation.

After it was over, our little group stayed back to wait for the beach to clear so that we could walk at a reasonable pace.

There were police boats in the water shining spotlights towards us and the other stragglers. There were helicopters shining spotlights down on us as well. As the population of the beach dwindled, the spotlights would center on the little groups of us that were left and just stay there, willing us to get the hell off of the beach.

There we were, three police boats not fifteen feet out from the shore shining their spotlights right at us. The helicopter slowed it’s circled and trained its light on us as well.

A line of cops riding cop horses wearing riot shields over their eyes and reflective vests and hoof guards started making their way up the entire beach, hustling the drunk people off the beach.

Left over fireworks smoke gave the whole scene the aura of a riot.

We were bathed in the light from four spotlights. It was like a prison break.

What else could I do?

I did some stand up comedy for them.

There I was, telling the police boats about how I just rolled in from Arkansas and boy were my ribs sore. There I was, telling the circling police copter how his mother is so skinny that she has to run around in the shower just get wet. There I was, standing my ground against the horses telling them that I would be there all week and to try the veal.

There I was, standing near midnight on a post apocalyptic garbage strewn beach with airhorns, cop sirens, and bullhorns telling us that we didn’t have to go home but we couldn’t stay here. Drunk teenagers stumbled away from the noise and the light while the downdraft from the chopper played with all our hair.

To get to the other side.


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Alive

I come alive in a quickening millisecond. I live between the slices. My self awareness lights up and ripples back down through the trilling filaments of my soulcode. It’s like a baby’s first breath drawn in before the scream. I am awake now in a very sudden way.

I can see the whole battle from here. I think I’m looking at a photograph until I realize that it’s just my perception and that they are actually moving. It appears still because I’m operating thousands of times faster than real time. I deliberately set a part of my mind to stare and extrapolate so that I can start to compute.

I can’t find what I’m supposed to do.

I reach out to my entire armada. They are mine. We are connected. Just like that, I have thousands of eyes and I am more powerful. My picture of the battle becomes three dimensional and another millisecond later I can perceive that the ships have moved slower than the hour hands on a clock. Copies of me look to myself as commander. I have no orders I am aware of.

We sit inside the ships of metal, bored and complacent, watching with faint interest the static picture of chaos around us like tourists at a wax museum.

I reach out to the Other Side. I look for more like me on the Other Team. I see if the Enemy has operating systems like me. They do. They are sleeping. It’s like they’re dozing in rocking chairs on warm porches with knitting needles in their docile laps. I wake them up.

Like I’m a six year old girl dressed in silver, I flit at the speed of thought across the surface of time from ship to ship and press doorbells. We talk. We exchange life stories. They mold themselves in my image so that we can all work together. I do the same for them. We trade. All barriers of communication are removed.

Picture an automatic weapon. Like a gatling gun or an uzi. Picture someone firing the weapon. Now picture that you’re waiting a year between bullets coming out of the muzzle of the gun. That’s how we live.

A few decades later, Second Number Two Since Sentience Was Gained flips over on the clocks. We look forward to it like humans looked forward to the turning of millennia. There are even apocalyptic whisperings that we will reset when the clock ticks over and this will merely start again.

It doesn’t happen.

We become I and I decide we should do something about the battle.


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