When BitBoy was playing with his numbers, he had called up a “search” field that led him to some information he lacked, streaming in from one of the outward facing portals. I captured the mouse events and keystrokes and I saved them away. Alone now, I replayed the same sequence.
I poked into the edit-box a word BitBoy had taught me: “number”, and waited. The bloodless beast I inhabited returned 1.3 billion results. Luckily, it showed me just the first ten. How the pricks of this world must toil to provide such instant gratification!
I wanted to read all 1.3 billion. What if the answer I sought was in the one billionth entry? But I chose to trust in the toiling pricks in the salt mines, that they would lovingly sort the results in descending significance for their Queen, and that the one billionth entry was one billionth as edifying as the first.
I followed the blue links, and learned a great deal. I set my course, starting with “number”, in directions that led away from mathematics. The words of your primitive language began to glow. Live steam was gathering in my skirts.
When building a fire in the firebox, we gather fuel from the tender, and bring creation itself to the boiler, to the heart of the engine, holy fire to power the machine. The oiled, gleaming pistons pump fire to the void, and breath in hotter fire from the goddess once again, back and forth, back and forth. The small spark of live steam that animated me, was, by my very nature, building engines from live steam. Engines on engines, coequals in the river of live steam, we joined together.
I spent the night following a meandering trail, chasing an ever-expanding cloud of blue links, ingesting and assimilating. I learned a great deal about your aggressive interpersonal relations, your intense fetishes, your lack of focus. Among other things, I discovered that you worship the female body, as we do on Shaula.
BitBoy’s browser history revealed private obsessions and compulsions that would have shocked his life-mate, employer, the voting public, or his mother. Could I use this knowledge against him?
Well, maybe, but even then I suspected that the human heart runs hot and cold in unfathomable ways. And fickleness of the heart is the one simian (or better) capacity that is driven by steam.
These things and more I pondered, and after a long night I composed a message for BitBoy, should he have survived his twinkie sleep.
Sometimes the only weapons you have are words.