/\
                              /\  //\\
                       /\    //\\///\\\        /\
                      //\\  ///\////\\\\  /\  //\\
         /\          /  ^ \/^ ^/^  ^  ^ \/^ \/  ^ \
        / ^\    /\  / ^   /  ^/ ^ ^ ^   ^\ ^/  ^^  \
       /^   \  / ^\/ ^ ^   ^ / ^  ^    ^  \/ ^   ^  \       *
      /  ^ ^ \/^  ^\ ^ ^ ^   ^  ^   ^   ____  ^   ^  \     /|\
     / ^ ^  ^ \ ^  _\___________________|  |_____^ ^  \   /||o\
    / ^^  ^ ^ ^\  /______________________________\ ^ ^ \ /|o|||\
   /  ^  ^^ ^ ^  /________________________________\  ^  /|||||o|\
  /^ ^  ^ ^^  ^    ||___|___||||||||||||___|__|||      /||o||||||\       
 / ^   ^   ^    ^  ||___|___||||||||||||___|__|||          | |           
/ ^ ^ ^  ^  ^  ^   ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||oooooooooo| |ooooooo  
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 

morning light seeps into the cabin windows, pale, feeble.
the sky is clear. 
"it's june", you think, reflecting in an instant on how that word,
the month-name, has lost its onetime familiarity. its borders dissolved.
mornings are chill, days long and bright.

you move to extinguish the fire, there is work ahead, but a
melancholy takes you. has already taken you. has never left you.
and instead you sit. 
and pick up one of the few dozen books left and begin to read again.

***
SYNTHETIC PIRACY

She was seated at a computer terminal, her fingers
moving across the keyboard with admirable coordination and logic, 
as if manipulating a marionette.
“Computer terminal,” she thought, and then, “Why
terminal?” A vestigial word from an earlier age of
computing, from a time when a single mainframe
brain served a local network of clients, points of
access that possessed no computing power of their
own, spokes on a wheel, termini. 

The histories of the computer and the network were entwined but not always aligned, she
knew, describing a form not dissimilar to the double helix. 
Early computers were all about the network, depended on it, 
although these networks were fairly limited and specialized. She pictured the
engineering department of a British university in
1977, where each computer was indeed a terminus,
a nerve ending dependent on a central VAX computer to which it submitted a queue of problems to
be solved in turn, and each terminal hosted a shaggy
young man engaged in electronic communication
with colleagues at CalArts, all jointly coding an 
open-source, text-based video game with a strong
Dungeons & Dragons flavor. Noncommercial networks, 
new postwar universities, open-source programming, international cooperation, 
text-based video games: all conspired to suggest a moment of
unsurpassed idealism. 

She glanced briefly at her screen and saw lines
of code unfurling, then saw her fingers tapping away,
and momentarily felt like an absent-minded bricklayer. 
But what was the thing she was building? Was
it possible to step back and survey it as a freestanding structure, 
or was she building something more
like an underground system, impossible to regard
from without, maybe a web of irrigation ducts?

The ’80s brought personal computers, hundreds
of thousands of them, and this ushered in a second
stage in the relationship of computer to network.
Most of these PCs were sold without any means
of connection, and this was fine, because networks
remained esoteric, and anyway this was the era of
word processing and desktop publishing and desktop
everything; it was about setting up a self-empowering,
self-sufficient digital world: the family computer,
the home office, the small business. Networks persisted, 
of course, but were invisible to the majority of 
new PC owners, who didn’t even know they existed,
and didn’t care. Personal computers were originally
made so as to be programmable by their owners, but
newer users were no longer particularly interested in
getting under the hood, so those aspects were hidden. 
Many are interested in the idiom of a form, she
told herself, few in the grammar. 

This middle period was just a blip, though,
providing cover to people behind the scenes, who
struggled to make networks palatable and profitable. 
The ’90s brought the web browser, and soon
everyone was hooked in to the network again, and
once more it made sense to speak of terminals. Then
you had the rise of the smartphone, and tablets, and
now the latest personal computers resembled the
earliest: little computing power of their own, mere
clients relying on a centralized brain located in the
cloud, overwhelmingly operated by shaggy young
men comparing notes on early video games. She
pictured a cosmic cat-o’-nine-tails: millions of whip
strands of unimaginable length encircling the globe,
lashing and flaying and ripping shit up, all joined at
a single, sturdy grip. And who held the grip?
***

...

there's no computers out here. 

...

there might not be any more computers.

...

...

you remember the night you arrived. 
the dm from seth that morning. "5918 any port in a storm"
the night the light left the horizon.
with a suddeness you stand up
and go outside.