A Song Lost in Space
On the other side of the firewall, and through the interface
“I’m just a song lost in space, I’ve got a universal interface. I could say that I love you, but that bird already flew and all I really wanted was a taste.”
There was no love affair between Bergamo and Veronica, aka, Space Water Defense Contractors. It was business. Specifically, it was about his doing a job for Space Water on the other side of the firewall. Veronica was made in Japan, so she didn’t like to rush straight into business. “That was your real name?” she asked. They lay across his bed, which seemed to float above the floor, the platform being inset and mirrored.
“What?”
“Your real name. You said it was Tony Soprano?”
“Yes, my parents named me after some television gangster at the turn of the century.”
“Why would they name you after a gangster?”
“He was a blue collar father figure who fit the archetype predominating in the United States about that time. Other than that I haven’t gotten a satisfactory explanation of how they picked the name for me, other than that they were bohemians, and related to the working class. I didn’t like the name because it seemed like he’d named me after a product, and I could have as easily been ‘Mr. Goodbar’ or ‘Harley Davidson.’”
“Except Soprano really was your last name?”
“Middle name. My last name was Artise. My father was originally from Tuva; he traveled around the world with a troupe of horsemen. They started out with elaborate displays of riding, but things changed after he met my mother, who was an artist and set designer. She went to see the riders, all wearing these native Tuvan costumes and singing while they turned somersaults and lit on a horse’s back as easily as a wasp on a pear.
“Normally, she wouldn’t have gone to a riding display, which she thought of as something like a rodeo, and it really was I guess. But she went because her lover chose it as a special event to set the stage, after a late dinner, for a heart-to-heart relationship talk. He tried to explain to her that while she was very special to him, he had to be free to see other people. This bored her to tears because it made him sound like a fool advertising the fact.
“He kept talking on and on about his needs and his wants and after a little while she was certain her needs had disappeared. The only place to where she could escape him was into sleep, which is where she went. And no sooner had she opened the gates into the other world than the horseman came. He was standing on a horse with no saddle, a large, muscular war horse, which trotted proudly around the perimeter of the estate on which she lived inside this dream.
“She looked around and saw that all the art on the walls and in the gardens and even in the architecture itself — this is the odd thing about dreams, trying to interpret something like happy art — but the closest she could come, she said, was that the Tuvan horseman made her art happy.”
“Happy art,” Veronica repeated. “So, she knew he was the man for her because of this dream?”
“No, she saw a business opportunity. She was a fine artist, but like most artists she was living hand to mouth. She saw that this rider was trying to do more and more difficult things because he was basically like any boy trying to impress girls. But he made her art happy, and if she could incorporate him into her artwork, it would be alive.
“She would create sets and themes and lighting and sound and at the center of it there would be a creature half horse and half man.”
“Thus the title of her book.”
“That’s right, ‘The Satyrist’ But enough about me; how did your parents meet?”
The question caught her off guard and she flushed. Her embarrassment was his accomplice, waving him on through the gate for a quick robbery. She was caught between having to deal with the question or just letting go of it, and when she let it go, she had to make a space for it to fall though. In a moment of faraway eyes she let him access restricted files, and right at her bedtime. The self-replicating factory was humming to life as her eyes closed and she joined the network.
Gigantic corporations and cooperatives were condensing their operations down to a single cloned person. The corporation had literally become a person, a dna computing network cloned into the chemistry, and there was an interface which ran operations outside the ego identity, which had a very narrow view of what was actually going on. The identity program was running in the background now. Veronica was sleeping. She dreamed Bergamo was going through her purse.
Bergamo ran the restricted access files and found what he had suspected he would find. It was a patch by which she had edited the download. Corporate security didn’t anticipate his having made a copy of the original and stored it with separate encryption. Or so he thought. “So let’s have a look underneath the patch,” he said. He saw her lips move but she couldn’t wake up, now. She was busy producing Taser gunships and other specialty items for control of earthbound populations.
There was no switch to an external perspective this time. There was acceleration. He could think of it as standing on the nose of a rocket ship but there wasn’t detectable resistance, so the acceleration was pure, and he knew he was moving at the speed of light, that he was light, when he crossed the firewall.
The event horizon of a black hole is the edge of what can be observed, and so what can be known to exist, before the light is trapped in matter. The light at the edge is like the smooth water at the edge of the falls. The image left on the event horizon is always out of reach, like Narcissus’ reflection.
All that can be observed is the place where the object or person was last seen, and last transmitted light back toward the observer. Like the seashore, where life is abundant at the interface of land and water, the event horizon has the rich commerce and loose control of an International Zone.
The town where Bergamo found himself was another factory town, but this one wasn’t run by humans or by their clones. This one was operated from inside the black hole, where the gravity is so strong it can crush Superman into a kidney stone. All the organized activity at the event horizon was projected there by something living inside the black hole. What beings could live there could not be imagined, but because they had to be unimaginably dense, they were called Sinkers.
Bergamo had understood his ego would be instantly annihilated if he crossed the firewall, but he felt the same as when he was in Ash Fork. “Time stopped at the outskirts of town.” The voice was in his head, but if he was in a black hole everything was crushed down to one thing, and time barely moved at all. So nobody was really outside anyone else here.
“Then how does anything happen here?” Bergamo asked. The voice replied. “It doesn’t matter.” “Doesn’t matter? It’s nothing but matter. Light can’t even exist here. Right now we’re probably in a universe the size of a cannonball.” “There is light here, but, it’s reclusive.” “Doesn’t get out much?” “That’s right.”
Bergamo laughed. It was a hopeful sign.