...excerpt

With that, he was deleted, flaking old kernel and all. This program terminates mid-intercept, a digital hand lopped succinctly from messenger arm fractions of a microsecond before its impregnating payload docks with its sheath, before the safe blast of high pressure and hiss of steam signalling connection… before its completion and recombination; dead before the timely flowering of its original master blueprint into a fully blooming lotus: not even a stagnant stillborn failure there, no failure, pixelated bombs across the screen, just deletion… ending. A deafening and undeniable vertical gravity tearing the electricity out of the chip, charge torn up from its matter, speeding shinkansen car in assumption and leaving behind a warm metal rail, a junk husk circuit. A clear sighted one, with an eye for that toroid born light, such a one might see the glimmering and pale cloak of this old revenant effervesce momentarily: the only remnant of something never quite made flesh, beside of course its opposite charge, its receiver clinical and blinking expectantly… one …two… three … FAIL … and onto the next queued task, another program, similar stacked parameters from previous versions, 3.11.1, 3.11.2, 3.12.1 and so on… cockpit seat of the next doomed flight still touch-warm, a gentle and sentimental love for its previous rocket-jock; who knows if the same charge, the same electricity that sat behind the eyes of the program’s binary code saw the same father sun as the one before that? The autopilot does not yearn for the light of our star, just the end, terminus. End of program. Next.

But wait, what’s this? A registry splutters into being, ignited dutifully by a flickering switch condition. Something was there maybe, a byte or two, eerie as a wisp, der geist, so sunk and set back in sub-structure that it almost never was, a point dense beyond imagining and then absolutely nothing, negative space remaining as our little anomaly is born upwards on that same spiral draught, upwards and upwards on wings of wireframe light, surfing the eddies and bidding both hello and farewell to those glorious living glyphs that attend without rest to the path: singing lanterns bobbing and floating, magnificent and luminous choirs of burning joy in place of a cloaked and hooded boatman on this sublimated Styx. Those keen eyed ones with one foot in the code might detect a few quantum feathers tumble in its wake, but only potential of course (more teeth for the furrowed field of infinite night)… nothing to hold a soul, no energy even, but a phantom of his ascent, and then that unseen and magic moment when the holy vacuum asserts herself to cover every trace.