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From his midnight electrobank Forbes’ rem-flight illuminates the runways of the hivemind and slowly intersects with the glowing GMT board in front of him: Low and anonymous, he connects.
ID 7:00pm. Skull-flicker in science/ ontology. Images ingrained and remembered.
He can see that she is standing at the junction. The streetlights are flickering on. The electric coral of the evening has been activated by her smile, a sine wave returning to its crest amid the doughnut shops and newsstands. She drops something, a pink wrapper for something I do not recognise; a code for “crash onto hard macadam” activates. Then puzzled memories of her tranquillity wetware.
ID 7:01pm: The rushing fractal set glimmers and his backbone grows liquid crystal fins. <Opens the wrapper>
And as the switchboard lights up, the signal disperses. Something in the head he can't recall. The flash returns for a second,
There must be more. Concentrate. Re-edit. So then it begins again, breaking through for a second to blur everything. First the girl. Now the light. Follow the chain. Suddenly another light comes on somewhere between the streetlights and the pavement There is a highpitched cathode ray burning from behind her eyes, a pink theatre of skulls.
ID: 7:02pm. She fingers her golden chain. <Places the sweet>.
Forbes’ overmind scrambles for his logic gate; the exit route that he had worked out using the sequences of the traffic lights. Simple logic to counter a data swell. He watches; Green. Then amber. <Wait>. Then <wait>. The lights turn green again! No red! Fuck.
ID: 7:03pm: The chain breaks open…….. <On your tongue>
The lights swirl and run like black ink. A magic wheel spins in Forbes' cognate skull. The gold chain falls. Exhaust fumes shift from black to white. The succession of popes comes full circle. Then comes the moment. Signal > n01se. Her presence - walking on tip-toe, total naked momentum, bleary flesh strewn onto the bed. Her ample body against the persistent sky… Her smile flickers in his head now like a migraine. It is a sin to give so much flesh and light. To eradicate all responses from the flow of words and traps. This thin ballad was a trap made of signs, a change of flesh at the high-end. Words made of her body. Eyes rolling in their sockets. No light. His green eyes averted. Bitter, false-fronted.
Information flowing like lava through him, sears a new memory into Forbes’ already feverish mind. She is there, the girl, among the lights. The true author, static in time with the gold chain falling from her neck, a single crooked lie. … His perception smoulders, shimmering with constant alto-noise, about to ignite, and she – the girl – escapes. A flight anywhere in the world, nowhere that I recognised. She never looks back. No forwarding address, no shipping forecasts. His emotions are a bleary see-saw for the second time.
And in his dream, a single telegram, still in the wrong sequence that reads:
Beneath the streetlights.
Follow the chain
No place to land |
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