Welcome, my friend

It imprints itself on my brain that I am outdoors. Climbing up a hill. The smell of eucalyptus, the gentle California breeze and the vast meadowy expanse. Hobbling along, my knee sends me reminders now and then. What for? There must be some reason for propelling myself up the hill. Ah yes, this is my escape. My oneness with nature where there are no expectations, no responsibilities, no reasons and no what-ifs. Just being. I plod along placated by this resolution. A vista approaches. Quite beautiful, really. The tree is located perpendicular to the grassy horizon at exactly the proportion of the Golden ratio. Molecules race around in my brain and match the image to some noisy, long forgotten pixelated image from the millionth Internet search for Adams or Bresson. The match is not exact, of course. Its more complex than that. We don’t yet understand exactly how. But I can’t quite see the tree any more. I can only see a hazy version of the image in my head. The world has dimmed to a limbo somewhere between reality and my mental images.  I raise the device to my eyes. Photons bombard the sensor with information that activates electronic charge to cause numbers to appear on the display. Not quite right. I tweak and click. An array of pixels deposit themselves on a semiconducting surface.

 

Back home, I pour the pixels through an electronic duct into a larger electronic container. In the darkness, the device lights my face up with its flames of moving images. The hum of a magnetic drum confirms the transfer. In a moment, the drum will spin again and send electrons racing through the wire out to the socket on my wall and out blazing underneath the city roads and rivers buzzing around the country until they are gobbled up by a monster crouching in a dark air-conditioned building or basement. A monster with billions of tentacles that wrap around the globe and are arranged just so that the monster will stir and shake some of its tentacles to prod only those who are my friends about the latest happening, then the monster will go back to its crouch. Ah, Like. Comment. Like. Like.

The hike is memorialized, captured, trapped, consummated.

In the darkness, I stare at the thin slate of a metal box. A group of photons disappear into the little camera hole and disappear into the box. They emerge in a grainy, ghostly form to stare back at me. There I am. Thats the me thats in there. Straining for a life of his own, just like me. Welcome, my friend. Welcome, to the Machine.

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