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Kaufman
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The Future is the Motherfucking Future
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your freckle-hinted nose like he’s ringing the doorbell to your soul.
You want to hope that even without meat and memory your intractable souls would still nestle against each other. And you roll on top of him, and there’s sweat beading on your clavicle and stains on the fitted sheet, and it’s perfect for what it is, which is imperfect, which is need, which is failing to find a way to climb inside each other.
Science fiction: there is no algorithm for this.
You want to hope that even without meat and memory your intractable souls would still nestle against each other. And you roll on top of him, and there’s sweat beading on your clavicle and stains on the fitted sheet, and it’s perfect for what it is, which is imperfect, which is need, which is failing to find a way to climb inside each other.
Science fiction: there is no algorithm for this.
*
Dad came over the mountains in a propeller plane, Mom came over the plains in a station wagon. Neither was born in a house with a television.
And my possible children will never know the sound a cathode ray tube makes when it’s turned off, the clunk, the fading whine only just audible in the upper registers.
*
Science Fiction: beings who exist as wavefronts, live their light-speed lives like ripples in a pond from raindrops or cast stones, measure their age by their diameters.
When Thomas and Lisa overlapped his first thought was, How thin she is. Thomas himself was thick for his kind, an event of almost a picosecond, where Lisa would pass through a fixed point in less than a femtosecond.
Their introduction was characteristically fatalistic, neither of them were young, but neither less than a hundred meters from their points of origin. Both showed spots of interference, wrinkles in their wavelengths introduced by background gamma radiation. Both were locked in numerous other associations, intersecting with others of their kind who they liked, loved, loathed, or ignored, but from whom they could never voluntarily escape.
Lisa, for her part, was a little frightened of Thomas, worried that her signal could get lost in his bulk. She had, after all, already lost a patch of x-ray passing through something heavy four or five nanoseconds back. She knew how brief her initiating event had been and dreaded entropy more than most. She never felt there was very much to her.
So the two silently conspired to ignore each other as best they could, and they succeeded for almost nine hundred picoseconds. Thomas was busy with a wave front named Tanya on the far side of his circumference. The two had engaged in generating new events in their intervening space, and though by their nature they would never meet – never overlap – these new lives, they took comfort and joy from the tiny
Their introduction was characteristically fatalistic, neither of them were young, but neither less than a hundred meters from their points of origin. Both showed spots of interference, wrinkles in their wavelengths introduced by background gamma radiation. Both were locked in numerous other associations, intersecting with others of their kind who they liked, loved, loathed, or ignored, but from whom they could never voluntarily escape.
Lisa, for her part, was a little frightened of Thomas, worried that her signal could get lost in his bulk. She had, after all, already lost a patch of x-ray passing through something heavy four or five nanoseconds back. She knew how brief her initiating event had been and dreaded entropy more than most. She never felt there was very much to her.
So the two silently conspired to ignore each other as best they could, and they succeeded for almost nine hundred picoseconds. Thomas was busy with a wave front named Tanya on the far side of his circumference. The two had engaged in generating new events in their intervening space, and though by their nature they would never meet – never overlap – these new lives, they took comfort and joy from the tiny
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