Occupational hazards
Fri 9 Nov 2001 by mskala Tags used: fiction, nov01, scifiI guess every line of work has its risks. Too much time in the lab and those innocent pretty little droplets will whittle your brain down to a nub of harsh organometallic white noise. Climb one too many towers and even if you don't fall the RF will get to you. Keyboards and carpal tunnel, you get the idea. Sure, I'm being obscure and I don't even really know half the shit I talk about, but those are parts of the price for who I am.
It's waking up at three and stumbling to the washroom and staring at the patterns in the linoleum computing their distribution and then translating into the frequency domain, not for any reason but just because you cannot do anything else because you aren't even awake yet but the part that does that stuff never sleeps because you'd die without it. And maybe the universe wouldn't even exist if you weren't always watching. It's the paranoia that follows you down every corridor and along each street and that doesn't go away even with drugs because the drugs and the therapy only chase away the phantoms of your synapses; limited utility if they really are out to get you. It's the structures of meaning, one layer on top of another, arranged in Naples and elsewhere, the four and the five and the ten and twelve and the twenty-two. Everything has to be a number and every number has to have a meaning and every meaning creates the corresponding thing, back again.
And the minutes tick by and then the date rolls over and you start a new one and it's exactly the same only completely different, days full of words one on top of another, and sometimes you think nobody's reading and sometimes you read that everybody's thinking and sometimes it doesn't matter but always it's everything. Close your eyes and the cables detach, you're shooting off into the void, on a voyage of ten thousand light-years behind your eyelids. Bring me back a moon rock, please.
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