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| Part One // Ending One // Ending Two // Ending Three Part One After the interview, when Dr. Aslet told me over the telephone that I was hired, joyous thoughts sprouted in my mind, exalted thoughts of the blood brotherhood I was to enter into at IBM. I went immediately to buy this suit, which looks entirely different today than it did when I first wore it, back in the 1970s; that first morning I walked miles through the streets and never took the train, despite the snow; I was shielded like an armored knight patrolling the king's woods on horseback, ejecting riffraff like sunlight off a chestplate. How powerful it felt, to walk up to that tower of black glass, what a forbidding place and I had access to it! That impenetrable black glass that reflected each onlooker back at himself, opaque to hobos, children, businessmen who worked in other firms, who were likewise probable to block our sight by similar contrivances from their own offices where untold secrets flashed and sparked from eye to eye and grin to grin, sparking and careening from the lenses of the hornrimmed glasses that were worn at the time. I wore this type of standard-issue spectacles myself, and occasionally in my moments of reverie, my eyes would reflect on the backs of the lenses, my eyelashes slashing a border into the irises, and I liked to imagine myself as Henry Kissinger, whose eyes peered through the same glasses at world maps, envisioning the actual missiles he would rain down upon foreign nations. If you can believe that, all that fiddle-faddle. I was proud to be a businessman, perhaps I need say no more, religiously devoted to the furthering of IBM as others further Jesus of Nazareth, and in my nighttime meal, which I invariably ate alone, I would imagine the offices of IBM spread further and wider, colonies established throughout the solar system with pressurized domes regulated by great halls of murmuring machines, and enormous black towers like steel bricks without any windows at all, which to Neptunian hobos reflects nothing but black abyss, but from inside a businessman wouldn't look out at squirrels jumping through the branches of a tree but comets leaping through a mess of stars, like a celestial kaleidoscope of sidereal otherworldliness, a world not only understood by the computers but that would work in concert with them, in the creation of intergalactic winds, urging the solar system into new development: the birth of new planets, planets populated by our machines, industrial planets which self-propagate and ship their products over an intergalactic rail system, all of which one scientist, who in my daydreams had the face and hands of Dr. Aslet, controls at one lonely interface. I began to elaborate upon this scenario in my daydreams, when I lay my head on my pillow and clutched and pulled the blankets around me in a tense bliss. When my mind gave out and I fell asleep, however, I would never encounter these dear visions. My sleeping dreams never ceased to irritate me and deviate my thoughts into senselessness. I would often dream of being enrolled in summer camp, enclosed in a mammoth, labyrinthine cabin built of decomposing wood that splintered, rotted, and broke at diagonals, exposing nails; and I rolled through this building on a fast wheelchair in search of my young cousin Geoffrey who had contracted a rare disease which had developed into infantile dementia, and I would attempt to find a door to the outside where he was to be with a group of sick kids playing ninepins on the lawn, and I would be horribly nervous and fearful of reprimand from some unknown authority who I felt was watching over my shoulder the entire time. This dream visited me every night so that each morning, before I donned my suit and made my way to the black tower, I awoke unbalanced, nauseated, and with the sensation of being a slug or some other lower life form. I began to hate sleeping. Then one day I received a letter from my mother who lived in the country. She wrote that my aunt had been installed in a hospital in the city and requested that I visit her to encourage her recovery. When I entered her room she was eating her evening meal in darkness on an ingenious one-armed table on wheels which created a small table over her bed. I interviewed a doctor about how I might acquire one of these for my own personal use, that I could afford such a table because I was well-off as an employee of IBM, etc. My aunt quietly observing, sweetheart. When the table was delivered to my apartment I assembled its parts and set my typewriter on top of it, and from here I typed my nightly daydreams before falling asleep, a practice which kept me awake longer into the night; I also took to setting a cup of black coffee on the table, and I began eating less food all in order to make myself restless. The first week I was able to stay awake until nearly two A.M. each night and my days at the office were filled with glee. I began to expand my daydreams into the workday as well, taking notes on practices which I could relate to our future colonization of the solar system. Our business would need to expand in many areas: agriculture, education, medicine, military, scholarship, masonry, trades of all kinds; more than I could even begin to consider. One Saturday night, deep in my plans, I became overwhelmed at the realization that the necessary computations were far too abstruse, and I decided to make use of a device I had fully ignored in the two years I had been employed at IBM: I watched television. A 15-year-old science fiction movie was playing, the sort of movie I ate up as a kid, but this time was different, I watched it with rapture, I saw glimpses of the future which seemed plain and palpable, able to be lived and possessed. I began staying up late every Saturday night to watch science fiction movies on the television, and I kept my suit on when I watched these movies to remind myself that I was not at leisure but at work, was still spiritually connected to the black tower. I brewed coffee in the electric percolator and drank it as I took notes on the films. I had never before given as much thought to IBM's inevitable encounter with extraterrestrials, to the various circumstances of language, deportment, and their own indeterminable prejudices towards us, as one must not forget that we to them are equally unpredictable; in short, over the weeks of television-viewing my original frustration remained intact: the variables are infinite, impossible for the mind to compute, which requires one to return to the development of IBM's mainframes, it was the black tower who had the gift and not me. I experienced a metamorphosis when Dr. Aslet, who oversaw my department and occasionally worked at the machine next to mine, informed me that for the past two years that I had been working at IBM, I was part of the development team for a project called Future Systems; he informed me that even he had no complete notion of what the Future Systems project was, but that it involved an entirely new architecture for our machines. At this moment I realized that I was not alone in my large estimation of IBM's potential, that I was indeed involved in a project which might outstrip my own thoughts by unimaginable degrees. I came to suspect, and then finally to know, that IBM's corporate hierarchy ended with alien intelligence; this revelation overjoyed me, and I began compiling all the notes I had been writing, unwittingly in harmony with the serene aliens which were my true equals, and late one Friday night after work I slipped this file under the door of Dr. Aslet's private office. This was the last memory I have of the following week, in which I didn't sleep one minute, after which I woke up under a tree far from the city, in a place far more beautiful than any I had ever dreamed of. |