Spirits in the Wires Read Free

couldn’t actually recall any of it. The details of the experiences, I mean. The sounds, the smells, the tactile impressions associated with them. All I knew were the bare bones of cold facts.
    I studied the explosion of pigeons in the painting they’d used in the poster for the Rushkin show and tried to make sense of how I could be in my own bedroom, but have no sense of where it was or how I got here or anything that had happened to me before I opened my eyes at that moment.
    And I was strangely calm.
    I knew I shouldn’t be. Somewhere a part of me was registering the fact that none of this was right—neither the where and how of where I’d found myself upon waking, nor my reaction to it.
    I had the strongest sense of being temporary. A shadow cast by a light that was about to move or be turned off. An image in a film that the camera had lingered up on before moving on.
    I held one of my hands up in front of my eyes, then the other. I sat up and looked at the reflection of the woman in the mirror on the back of the dresser.
    Me.
    A stranger.
    But I knew every inch of that face—the blue eyes, the shape of the nose and lips, the way the blonde hair fell in a sleepy tangle on either side of it.
    I swung my feet to the floor and stood up. I pulled the flannel nightie I was wearing over my head and faced the mirror again.
    I knew this body as well.
    Me.
    Still a stranger.
    I sat down on the edge of the bed. Plucking the nightie from the floor, I hugged it to my chest.
    An odd notion came into my head. I had a sudden impression of some other place, a pixelated realm that lay somewhere in cyberspace—that mysterious borderland of electrons and data pulses that exists in between all the computers that make up the World Wide Web. I could almost see this deep forest of sentences and words secreted in a nexus of the Web, and as I did, I sensed some enormous entity swelling up out of it, a leviathan of impossible proportions that had no physical presence, but it did have a vast and incomprehensible soul.
    The thought came to me that I was a piece of that entity. That I had been broken off from it, born there in that forest of words and sent away. That I was separate, but also still a part of that other. That it had made me up through some curious technopagan ritual, given me flesh and then set me free to make a life for myself in the world beyond the endless reaches of cyberspace.
    I know. It sounds like science fiction. And maybe it was. But it was magic, too. How else can you explain a computer program that was self-aware? Some voodoo spirit, itself made of nothing but ones and zeros, that was able to create a living being out of neurons and electricity and air and send it off into the world to be its own being.
    The island of calm I’d sensed before whispered to me through this whirlpool of disquiet and speculation.
    In a normal person,
it said,
what you are experiencing would be considered madness.
    But I already knew I wasn’t normal. I wasn’t even sure I was a person.
    Finally, I lay back down on the bed and closed my eyes.
    Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe when I woke up in the morning I’d remember my life. I’d be myself and just shake my head as I went about my morning, dimly recalling the very strange dream I’d had the night before.
    But in the morning, nothing had really changed. Only the force of what I was feeling had.
    I could see normally as soon as I opened my eyes. The sensations of dis-association and confusion I’d experienced in the middle of the night were still there, but they weren’t as intense.
    This time I was able to get up and get as far as the door of the bedroom. I looked down the hallway into familiar/unfamiliar territory. I/my body had to pee—but it was something I only knew from the pressure in my bladder. I knew the mechanics of how I would do it. I knew where to go, to lift the lid, and sit down. But I couldn’t seem to call up one