And We're All Telepathic...
Think about what you're doing, when you're typing. You're taking your thoughts, which are nothing more then electrical signals bouncing around in your gray matter, and transferring them into the computer, where they once more become nothing more then electric signals, bouncing around.
They stay in constant motion. We're talking about the speed of thought, about unstoppable forces with no weight or size, but the strength and ability to spin any number of universes on the head of pin.
I fucking love the net.
We've been speaking English for a long time now, but the language itself keeps mutating and changing. People need to have translations of Romeo and Juliet, of On The Road, and soon enough the words that I'm communicating to you know will get pulled into a world where their letters need to be re-arranged to suit a new place and time. Will it all still equate to the same message afterwards? How many times can you juggle a set of letters before they cease to retain their original meaning? What about thoughts? What language do you think in? What words did you think with before you knew how to speak? Were they forgotten, or just unlearned?
There's a Zen question that went along with the "one hand clapping" exercise. "What is your original face," it asks, "the face you had before your parents were born? Show it to me." When you log onto your computer, and send your messages through the lines to me, you're showing that face to the same degree that a phone call will show your voice. It would seem to be the best tool we have for it at this point...
A man once said that "cyberspace exists when you pick up the phone." He used to write lyrics for the Grateful Dead, so maybe he knew what he was talking about. I explained that to an ex-girlfriend while we were on the phone at a quarter to four in the morning, and like a password to a cheerfully encrypted filed, it opened her mind and dropped her off in the new millenium. Call it my good deed for the day.
That's the magic of it though, to be sure. Cassette tapes hold their information on a magnetic strip; sound held in a natural energy data line between opposite poles. Will we take that a step further? Have we already? Can you record within the lines of gravity? Are there messages that can be played backwards like a bad heavy metal album, within the split atom of a nuclear explosion? Hell, lets be honest, I'm not even too sure what these thoughts are being recorded on. Until I interface with a printer and make these letters become ink on paper, I don't have a fucking clue as to where they really are, aside from in front of my eyes.
Right now, you're reading what I'm thinking. You read it, and the thought becomes an electric signal in your head, much like a sonic wave will become when it hits your ear drum and gets transferred about within that precious wetware you hold within your skull. You read my thoughts, they pass through your brain, and then you're hearing them. And you're not hearing anything else either.
You're not hearing the Nine Inch Nails disc I've got playing on the CD player. You're not seeing a bootleg of "The Replacement Killers" that's playing on my television set. You're not seeing my piles of CDs, video tapes, or comic books in my small city apartment. You don't know when I stop to brush my hand through my hair, or what I'm wearing. All you know is the thoughts. Nothing outside of those thoughts exists. Right now, in your world, I am nothing but these letters, which don't even exist; they simply get transferred from screen to screen through phone and cable access lines.
Right now, I am the ghost in your machine. I've taken a part of my mind, moved through the keyboard into the computer, and loaded it up onto a system that'll let anybody with a connection to view it. As I type the thoughts, they disappear from my mind, but they remain on the computer. They aren't frozen in time, so much as they're vibrating in place like the wings of flies caught in a spider's web. Caught. Maybe not caught quite as in like "captured", so much as in like "caught a cold". I'm not the first person to suggest that the truth is a virus. I won't be the last.
But the knowledge goes spiraling out anyway. It spreads, passing from screen to screen, mind to mind. You read the words, and download that bit of my mind, into yours. Maybe it'll be able to peacefully cohabit with your operating system. Maybe it won't, it'll fire off the wrong neurons and electric connections, leading towards some system feedback strife. Either way, the information will go on, like it always does. Wasn't it suggested that energy can be neither created nor destroyed? All it can do is change form? And keep changing, and keep changing, and keep changing...
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File Transfer Temporarily Completed. Fell free to go on about your day...