mintwater

[mintwater]

Delegation #7

the long walks with J were not for naught, the star trek computer and butlerian jihad were science fiction, until they were not

there was an ironic beauty to LLMs: a pinnacle of our own ingenuity reflected back onto us, invaliding the labor of our thoughts, distilling a cheap caricature of us, reducing any cliche notion of our intelligence into a couple hundred tokens of computation

we built this ourselves: our own inflection point, while simultaneously pining for rome like the 23rd century alpha centaurians pine for us. we were in the final days of analog in the 90s, yet again

there were no limits to our future nostalgia, and somehow, everyone i knew today was either deeply ecstatic or deeply upset

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More of the Delegation Series.

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Ghosts

i don't want to compete with your ghosts -- sense their echoes living in your thoughts, their old habits governing your reflexes, their unsaid words feeding your rumination

we both had to give up the past to make a home for us

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Thunder

curiosity eroded restraint, until fate stirred like a thunder in our hearts: how easy it could be to be us. how easy it would be to collapse into each other and find out

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Distance

texts, or lack thereof, strained the distance, shrouded our million entangled neurons in the uncertainty of your thoughts, guarded them behind a cold wall until the quantum states of us chilled to a standstill

a meteorite burns up in the night sky, and i make a wish

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Сложные Тексты

я наконец понял, как я её не поддержал, как она меня спросила, снова и снова, через сложные тексты, чтобы увидеть её, для возможности увидеть нас

[mintwater]

Choice

of times gone by and those to come -- once a season, i show up at noon and the angels don't even bother to validate my parking

Gabriel chuckles at me, "is she still worth it?" your tree grows and i go home, but i come back again

because i never had a choice, and you always do

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Chemistry

let me rest my head to your bosom, listen to the pulsar of your heart, travel the galaxies of your lungs -- each breath taking me lightyears, until i grow sleepy from flight, and i stake out a little earth-like planet bound by your love, a little crevice on your body from where i can worship the sun that is your radiant smile. i'll invent a religion from the glances of your intelligent eyes, write poems and plays about your gentle embrace, until an entire civilization owes itself to you, until your kiss extinguishes it in an instant, and i fall asleep, full of warmth, content and aswim in our primordial chemistry

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Dharma

delete false gods and drop the steel wool scouring your regrets: they say to be kind to yourself, but watts lived well and died pathetically

i was adrift somewhere in between

when i reached for the divine, the strange plants recoiled before they embraced me, recognizing i hadn't evolved yet, that i was still born into a life of condemnation, still procrastinating my dharma

this would continue for several cycles before i had the courage to love you

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Cues

the sun teeters on the horizon; an owl lands on a branch. its eyes carry the quiet boredom of God, of omniscience, as diurnal creatures scurry for their final meal

what was i trying to forget? maybe the cues i dismissed, unknown choices that would have realigned our paths and led to the gilded future charted from above

it takes decades to know the angel that follows you like a ghost: picks up your feet before you trip, changes the traffic lights, places your hand next to mine -- all the moments in life we assigned even odds

it takes decades to know the curse of inaction. its final scorecard was withheld until death. death that, i feared, did not part anything

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Old Memories

take them to goodwill -- launder old memories for a new conscience, erase the bits of a troubled past

start over and, this time, keep a little bit less around for the over-creased folds of life. they fold for only a little while longer before they break

a weary soul collapses on God's porch, an adult becomes an abandoned child. God's eyes are full of sorrow. some might think He made a mistake. some might think that

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Novel

"If you can't write the next line, well, you're dead. The past doesn't matter." concrete bunks and fluorescent lights, a lidless toilet, a six inch steel door, a poor fellow sobbing in the corner, another snoring, comfortable with his lot, sounds of insanity from across the hall, and the casual bureaucracy of the lobby. and then there was me: eyes shut but awake, horizontal on a tough plastic mat, counting the tickless pulses of existence, trying to figure out how this all fits

i was the reader of my own story, surprised, but not, like someone that knows this wasn't the end, that there were unread pages, that this was still a novel

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Buried Embers

within the ashes were buried embers, viable, but unkindled -- and in another timeline we played this experiment out: danced and cried, lashed out and apologized, loved each other and proved it. i caressed you, until past-present-and-future was a rhyme, and one day, we died. somber, but without regret, without regret all i needed was your help, and all you needed was mine

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Escapement

the spring unwound in slow motion, the escapement loaded up, between the tick and the tock, lay two potential futures

we stared at both, hours apart, two white glows in dark rooms a thousand miles away, unsettled and untethered from the course of the ordinary day, loitering for some relief from providence, or at least a premonition

she's too slick for me, i said. i'd spend every year trying to live up to her

deep down, i was strangely certain

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Final Days

the rings were the heaviest cloak of light in the night sky, aglow with an ancient divinity, their colors spilling out sloppily, saturating the rest of the milky way i sipped a drink, as my neighbors laughed, and the bartender seemed too young, and the counters were a retro metal -- we were the phoenicians, i thought, but farther. i was myself, but further, for once, content with me, my genes, and my history, now drifting on a moon at the edge of space, and in my final days

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Nonbeliever

when she learned i hadn't found her god, she hollowed me out into a mold she knew i could not possibly fit, that no life i had built could have possibly mattered

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Sermon

A'' quoted Philippians and brought herself to tears, while i stood stuck in the midst of her winding sermon, a cross between an audience and an immovable crutch -- a deed some bureaucrat in heaven counted, and promptly discarded

i discarded it, too, because i'm not naive, nor petty, maybe out of compassion, maybe because i secretly thought it'd earn me a future pass

life had moments like these -- brief tests of connection in catharsis, defects in our story we bear to be witnessed by another, scanning their eyes for a hint of clemency and absolution

i listened -- this was all i knew to do

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Bottle Rocket

memories like photographs, like undeveloped film, and in the final milliseconds of life, they caught fire and burned brightly, as physics departed this world

somewhere beyond the veil, we had lit a bottle rocket. you smiled, and i laughed

because the end was the beginning