quote:

The Neuroscience of Christopher St.

By Christopher J. Bradley

4/24/2003 5:42:26 AM

©2003

for William



I.



Lady Ada's fingers dance,

On an ivory punch,

And the cards fly,

She is the first,

Of the mutltitudinous,

Modern day conquests of Babbage.



Our new Rome rises,

The seeds scatter through the wilderness,

Sowing the Grapes of Wrath of Milnet,

In the homebrew clubs.



A hundred thousand Mitnicks are born,

On the waves of fruitfully colored sand,

Vacuum tubes shine Basic on the retinas,

Of young wizards and fighters.



This is the Proving Grounds of deep space,

The calculators have long since fallen by the wayside,

In the currents of the war to end all wars,

They will be the relics of an established author.



I am a young keyboard player,

With a Commodore 64 and an RCA television,

The magazine arrives and I trip my vision,

Over the letters and sculpture on the cover.

Cyberpunk.



William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,

Inspired musicians and artists it said,

Some of the kinds of artists,

That took up the animal rights and other political causes.



The journalist pointed out the new move,

From Industrialism to Informationalism,

I had to come to terms with them,

I asked my aunt for some money to buy a first book at Walden's.



The flechette of his stylo needles text into thought,

Case is fixing up at the Gentleman Loser.

Molly is tooled up all in leather with her deadly nails,

3 jane is mixing up signals in the Spire.



Riviera is taking in the Scorpion Sting,

The Hwang is cutting Black Ice on the Hitachi,

Case is riding the back of a silver virtual shark,

The Turings are being offed by the landscape spider drones.



Neuromancer is plotting a merge with Wintermute,

The haunting spectre of the Finn is overshadowing his communiqués.

On the Sensenet riot hack by the Panther Moderns,

The Masses are executed like code.



II.



Time froze and I got to work,

My BBS became Sensenet,

My handle was Flatline,

Suddenly dragons and outer space,

Turned into Coding and Implants.



All of the colors became vivid,

I had to get an IBM,

The true tech heads came out of the webwork,

The Matrix found me with Charles.



Bobby Newmark punches deck,

While his mother's hooked on stim,

His problems with the vampires are many,

With their shark cartilage makeovers,

And their jet set whores.



The spirits of Ja are rattling out their Voodo incantations,

Of the fragmented archetypes of the Voidspace archipeligoes.

While her eyes shine on the catfish farm,

And her father's polycarbon nightwing,

Crashes during a Yakuza hit.



Turner sets tensor rigs in her hotel,

To take out the flak Mercs,

And ushers her into infamy,

In the Davinci contraption Fokker.



III.



That's about the time I met Andy,

The Star Wars role-player.

And the walnut hit the car,

And we scattered into the woods,

The party was broken.



One night we spent time in Andy's garage,

Fanning out the drums on a single snare,

From the Violent Femmes,

After I bought his 800k Floppy Drive,



"Let me get out, Like I Blister in the Sun."



Sally Shears is shopping with an Origami princess,

While Angie Mitchell makes her Debut,

Everything is Stim now,

The world wrapped out in goggles.



A Chrome face hangs in the void cover,

A ghetto cruiser has a skull headpiece,

The judge is resting in the garage,

This is Gentry's turf and Bobby's on a slab.



The Voodo priestess is with her,

And a miniature flying thing attempts murder,

She is vanished into the night,

Our Mona Lisa of the cybersphere.



IV.



Its' my senior year of high school,

I am working as a board operator,

At Niagara's Energy 1440,

Passing out in the booth from Tequila,

Waking up with a Depeche Mode shirt full of Fire Extinguisher Foam.



Scott is around,

We play chess and order pizzas,

While he learns to operate the boards,

And we listen to CFNY,

And punk and industrial CD's in the studio,



He and Brian write Travel Nebraska,

A deck of cards brings us a game of Scat (31).



I've been coding on IBM's at my day co-op with EDS.

Writing in Quickbasic,

Documenting in Wordperfect 5.1,

I own an XT clone,

And Sensenet is colored World War IV.



I read into the goggles,

The world starts translating,

Through the eyes of a bicycle courier,

In all of the vistas of nightclub holograms,



Barry Rydell is a Knoxville Skip Trace,

In pursuit of the Quicksilver Teen.

The elevator's open and close,

As the packages are delivered to the unwititng parties,

In the urban jungle of the San Fransisco night.



V.


I am visiting Scott at Jamie's in a Shortsville bar,

This is shotgun wedding town,

And she is legally blind and Albino,

They buy onion rings and beers,

In the only bar in town.



Where a Harley Davidson,

Is up for auction in a sweepstakes,

They slept together noisily long into the darkness of the night.

And I finished Virtual Light in one seamless sitting.



I have already worked concert security,

For Fishbone, The Barenaked Ladies, and The Femmes,

I have already heard 2 unlimited at Nitrous 013.

I have lost my fiance' and been blown away by a blond Shelby,



I have been through my first voyages,

Into lysurgic delerium and met the Brits,

And reached the pinnacle,

And tried to write is all down as Wizz.



I have sat steeped in the Jackal Café',

And combatted the Red Headed Stepchild,

The world is a blaze of chess,

And bagels, and coffee, and beer.



I have sat cross legged on the floor in Allentown,

And beat the Bongo in the smoky opium den,

And had my fortune told by the gypsies,

And experienced the wonders of Chinese noodles and Hot and Sour.



Virtual Venice rises up around Chia Pet McKenzie,

And the music of Lo-Rez Skyline pulsates,

Daisy makes her a mule as she is entering Tokyo,

The land of Idoru, the idol singer.



The land is laid out before my ocular traces,

The toe-cutter meets Colin Laney in the Metamorphosis theme bar,

Everything has been re-built in nanotech,

The unbrellas just "go away."



Rez is trying to make the hologram AI whole,

The Gomi-Otaku are within the Fortress Gates working furiously,

For a solution that their dream of marriage might be realized.



VI.



The scene : Bankrupt and mentally disturbed,

I walk the streets trying to sell credit bought swatches,

Searching for the impossible dream,

I am housed in a hospital for 3 months,

Fighting a legal battle to prove my sanity,

My parents testify against me.



When I recover I work as a cashier,

In a computer retailer,

Stocking shelves, performing inventories, greeting customers with a smile,

I wear the mask and earn,

Enough money to cancel the hospital debt legally.



I leave work and go back to school,

In addition to my programming classes,

I take creative writing and literature,

In 1997 I am invited to Florida and Disney World with friends.



I ride the neck breaking Tower of Terror,

I see the miracles of Kodak 3-D photography,

I learn how behind the times the exhibits really are,

In the relaxation and shade of the condo in Daytona I re-read Idoru.



Silencio's hands move like lightening,

In the shadow of the Golden Gate bridge,

People are living up there now,

And an assassin is moving among them in Grey,



Laney is living in a cardboard box,

Jacked in in a terminal,

The Dukes of Nuke'em are playing,

While Boomzilla takes watch on a mini-mart,



The Idoru's dream is realized but limited,

Barry Rydell is in the mix ordering wings,

The nano-confectioners are coming in Big Dragon,

And the surveillance is everywhere.



VII.



Thanks to the inspiration of Bartleby the Scrivener and Moby,

I am studying Pre-law, Latin, and Ethics at the University,

I earned my Computer Science Degree in 1998,

I find a girlfriend for the first time since 1993.



We spend time around Buffalo and the Casino,

And take a walk up Yonge in Toronto,

We order bad Chinese takeout in Scarborough from our hotel,

I previously saw the musical RENT.



Alone on a bus tour,

We go to her ex-boyfriend's wedding,

I meet her sister,

Who has also dated him.



At her prompting I take a full time job,

I work as a telecommunications billing specialist,

My car's engine died,

I am locked into 60 payments of 385.21.

It's a new Blackberry Saturn with Air Conditioning.



I lose her to the internet,

In my commitment to work,

All of the places we enjoyed,

Become my haunts.



The Saturn takes me to New York,

On a mindbender of a journey,

The battery dies in Pennsylvania,

While I am communing with the spirit world.



The police look up my record,

And I am locked up in a hospital in Harrisburg,

Somehow they let me keep my job,

Must have been my record on the Quality scorecard.



My friends at work barely notice I've been gone,

I tell them that I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.



While I am out of work on a leave,

Due to an auto injury to my spinal column,

The Verizon layoffs come,

My entire team is dismantled.



I go back to school with my friend Mike,

Business and Personal Finance.



The job fare is loud and noisy,

I am hired to provide internet technical support,

For broadband powerlink service,

I trade the scratched Saturn in for a new Red Mustang.



It is 2002, the Y2K Bug had no impact.



America is planning to go to war with IRAQ,

I quit my job,

Daniel Pearl is found dead,

With no income I register for school.



I plan to study Digital Media,

The Atmosphere is no better,

I don't enjoy the simplistic subject matter,

I write four articles for the student newspaper,



A review of Pattern Recognition,

Rap Meets Anime,

Vote With Your Voice,

Tampa Bay Hammers Oakland.



My friend Scott returns from North Carolina,

I begin writing again,

And reading American Literature,

And composing from it.



The Blue Ant Cell rings in my pocket,

Cayce is being tormented by the Michellin Man,

Asian Sluts are finding their way into her locked flat,

She has a footage fetish.



The Kiss is on Bigends mind,

The guerilla market is a global theater,

Russian war movies are shot in the Ukraine,

Jappanese wiccans decipher stego,

A claymore mine is displayed in a shrapnel diagram.



Custom made porn is delivered,

Keystrokes are sniffed,

A developer is identified,

Oil production is in the Texas Mechanism,

Russian Hallucinogenics Spike hard water.



Another helicopter rescues the heroine,

A car collides with a taxi,

The occupants remain unnaccounted for,

On Christopher St.



There's got to be a sequel.