Neurodancer
So there I was, jacked in again, soft-wired via slender smart-chipped nano-strands snaking their way up along my veins and into my cerebral cortex, into the dark heart of the cyber-verse. The muffled techno head-throb of an open-door dance club pounding the latest club hit, a re-working of a track off of Sha Na Na Remembers Vol. 5, the black, rain-slicked street pregnant with deep, lush Bowzer moaning.
Dip-duh-dip-duh-dip-whoa. I arch my back and tilt my head horizontally upwards, my immaterial cybertronic form staring up pensively as though out through the God-Eyed display screen, impotently into the black shadow of the unseen yet worshipped monitor. My senses, my every pain, taste, touch, smell, etc. have all transferred themselves into this blinking cursor form, the hollow shell of my physical body slumped far away above me over a keyboard. I could let it all slip away, I think to myself, on some level yearning. It would be so easy. Let it al flow down into this urban electronic sprawl. And yet the Dance calls me back. All those years of tap training my mother paid for, the car-pooled rushing back and forth, every Thursday evening at 6, right after Hebrew School. Ah. The fabulous siren call of the Big Broadway Number. The sense memory touch of an Ethel Merman bellow shatters the echoing siren of the Cyber-Gov appointed Somnambulance, racing through the grid, on the lookout for sleepwalkers, those who've detached themselves from the flesh, rudderless vessels. Wide-eyed, unblinking cursors, dilated zombie-walking into a fluorescent infinity until they wordlessly fall off a cliff of the matrix. The abyss calls to me. And yet.
I force myself to concentrate, unjack myself from the grid. My nonexistent phantom-limbed eyes glaze over, move upward, into a forehead that isn't there, and I feel myself raising, like a spirit out of its cold body, back up into the wet, bloody flesh above. I sink sickeningly back into my body, and feel a dribble of saliva escape from the mouth I now quickly order closed, anxious for the display of rehearsed routine I've breathlessly prepared for my audition. A bag of Fritos lays beneath me, a copy of Backstage to the right of my head. I sit suddenly straight-backed into my chair, hear my mother calling, the station wagon warm and ready. I am ready to go on board, my feet whisper insistently against the floor, like a tribal drumbeat. On the Good…Ship…Lollypop.
Sequined shirt. Stiff white slacks.
Jazz-hands!
My eyes come alive. I shut the console off. Mother is calling. The Dance awaits.
She has an Abba Greatest Hits cassette cued up and ready. I jack myself, Neo-like, into the back seat.
Fabulous.
So there I was, jacked in again, soft-wired via slender smart-chipped nano-strands snaking their way up along my veins and into my cerebral cortex, into the dark heart of the cyber-verse. The muffled techno head-throb of an open-door dance club pounding the latest club hit, a re-working of a track off of Sha Na Na Remembers Vol. 5, the black, rain-slicked street pregnant with deep, lush Bowzer moaning.
Dip-duh-dip-duh-dip-whoa. I arch my back and tilt my head horizontally upwards, my immaterial cybertronic form staring up pensively as though out through the God-Eyed display screen, impotently into the black shadow of the unseen yet worshipped monitor. My senses, my every pain, taste, touch, smell, etc. have all transferred themselves into this blinking cursor form, the hollow shell of my physical body slumped far away above me over a keyboard. I could let it all slip away, I think to myself, on some level yearning. It would be so easy. Let it al flow down into this urban electronic sprawl. And yet the Dance calls me back. All those years of tap training my mother paid for, the car-pooled rushing back and forth, every Thursday evening at 6, right after Hebrew School. Ah. The fabulous siren call of the Big Broadway Number. The sense memory touch of an Ethel Merman bellow shatters the echoing siren of the Cyber-Gov appointed Somnambulance, racing through the grid, on the lookout for sleepwalkers, those who've detached themselves from the flesh, rudderless vessels. Wide-eyed, unblinking cursors, dilated zombie-walking into a fluorescent infinity until they wordlessly fall off a cliff of the matrix. The abyss calls to me. And yet.
I force myself to concentrate, unjack myself from the grid. My nonexistent phantom-limbed eyes glaze over, move upward, into a forehead that isn't there, and I feel myself raising, like a spirit out of its cold body, back up into the wet, bloody flesh above. I sink sickeningly back into my body, and feel a dribble of saliva escape from the mouth I now quickly order closed, anxious for the display of rehearsed routine I've breathlessly prepared for my audition. A bag of Fritos lays beneath me, a copy of Backstage to the right of my head. I sit suddenly straight-backed into my chair, hear my mother calling, the station wagon warm and ready. I am ready to go on board, my feet whisper insistently against the floor, like a tribal drumbeat. On the Good…Ship…Lollypop.
Sequined shirt. Stiff white slacks.
Jazz-hands!
My eyes come alive. I shut the console off. Mother is calling. The Dance awaits.
She has an Abba Greatest Hits cassette cued up and ready. I jack myself, Neo-like, into the back seat.
Fabulous.