After Grid

 

There's cruelty behind his eyes. he's a peevish little man and I can't stand that. I won't have it. I won't tolerate it. It's a prominent shadow Sophie and I'm surprised at you that you can't see it. Aire's voice seemed like it was very much coming from inside of a box as Sophie turned the phone to face the ground, She had her trapped inside a conference call and the app itself wasn't the best. Sophie turned the phone back upright just in time to hear Aire say "Smug Little Bastard" He talks like he has a fucking fan base like you're a groupie like you're one of his fucking groupies Soph Sophie watched the people boarding the T through the train window then focussed a bit back on her own reflection. Her vision blurred into the blue light coming from her phone, "I need him Aire".  'yea, well the whole fucking world does, I think, if you listen to him_ he's pretty much the best thing since sliced brea...

  The Silhouette became an animated grey shadow from out of nothing as if a projector had turned on and was animating a form made of dust. The face looked startled, then focused on Sophie as it spoke "I don't have much time" Sophie sprang backwards out of her chair and hit the floor running on all fours, her arms knitting the floor behind her like a crab until she bumped into a row of folding metal chairs. The lit form of particles spoke again, this time more resolute in its speech and less pixelated. It turned and looked directly at Sophie now huddled in a corner behind a heap of chairs and continued "I have managed to create enough of a surge to get this message out, my packet will be lost completely if I use full emulation so this is a low format transmission."  Sophie steadied herself by holding the leg and seat of the metal chair as she managed her own leg out from under herself, then plopped back down as the apparition continued. "You have a chance to...

 fade in two leaves wrestle and hover close to the ground wildly  fighting their way out of the shadow and dirt into the side of a rain drenched highway and up into the wind. They fall violently back down in a gust of passing cars then dance and scrape a path along the cement through speeding cars, over yellow dotted line, over the reflection of flashing blue lights mirrored in the puddles, through a  pair of black shoes a set of legs wearing black pants, under a fire truck and into a crowd of more legs and shoes, coming to rest and pressing themselves against a bloody torso just as the the hand wearing a rubber glove had raised the sheet. Muffled voices seem to fill the bucket that lay roughly about 100 feet away and the shadow that safely held that bucket and its contents intermittently lit up with the reflected light coming from the steady stream of rubbernecking traffic did nothing but overemphasize the gruesome details of what must have happened to the poor soul that...

  Tobias never had a sense of belonging. When he was a child the other kids always made fun of him for being different and he carried that into the framework of his reality in this world. He could never shake the fact that he wasn't the right person for his own skin.  On October 3rd, 2021 at 3:45 one beautiful fall afternoon, however, very little of what was the person named Tobias BlackElk remained as he lay a broken and mangled heap in the road. The delivery truck that had hit him remained almost pristine, parked out of the way of traffic with its hazards on. Tobias had been mercifully covered with a drop cloth that the driver found in the back of his cargo hold and only the dusting of some brush and leaves competed with the muffled sounds of a distant police radio and delivery driver recounting the accident. What was left of Tobias's consciousness drifted away towards the west. His thoughts carried him past the heap covered in dusty drop cloth, and beyond the huddled men, d...

  My feelings f    or you  are         as g   o      n e   as      a s   w i  r l       i       n g lea f                                                      In the Wind Tobias read the note and stared blankly into the blur of crowd beyond him.  He had been sitting on the patio at the cafe for over an hour waiting for Julia to show and the server that brought him his first attempt at a Latte mocha swirl was now leaning against the cafe building with her arms folded, glaring. He was semi-conscious of her "I hate you_ why won't you leave or just die" look as his attention drifted back towards his cup of fluff and crumpled napkin. The heap that he was looking at had found his shoe with a slight gust of early October afternoon and bro...

  "It takes a certain amount of beauty mixed with strategy and sheer stubbornness or rather what I like to call, sticktoitiveness, to reach the top level in any game. Al explained to Sophie in between shoving his hand into a bag of Cheetos and cheeses puff crunches then continued to talk with his mouth full. __Especially in the first-person shooter where although you may only have a set amount of earned tools/weapons and moves in-game, you can use them in whatever combination you see fit to defeat your opponent or find your way out of the maze, collect the piece of skill you'll need to gain access to the next level and so on." Al rolled his hand out in between crinkling it back down into the bag emphasizing each point, inadvertently throwing crumbs into the air.  Sophie wiped the crumbs off her sleeve and desk, opened her mouth and put her finger up in an attempt to interject as Al paused just long enough to slurp from his soda.  She managed to get in half a sentence ...

There is absolutely nothing I can do about content theft except to remind you that no matter what monetary gain or small virtual popularity someone else's content that you've stolen may bring you, it will never change the fact that you yourself were not talented enough, or original enough to express yourself and your ideas through a medium that offers virtually limitless possibilities. ~ To believe that you have nothing to say is one thing, but to actually use someone else's creative expression to prove that fact to everyone else is something quite sadder than the theft itself. If you actually go so far as to try and pass someone else's work off as your own by selling, to me it's like announcing to the Virtual world that you not only didn't make that object, texture, etc, but you do not have the skill to update the ripped product either. Just imagine how completely stupid you'll feel when you get caught doing it. Second life is a small piece of my ima...

I, You I know you can see me. You may not have a very clear picture of me in your mind, But I know I exist as a glimpse of a shadow at least. I know this because that’s what a sentence is by nature and so far, I have existed to you in the form of three of them. I’m not a complete picture to you as yet, but that’s ok. I don’t think any of us ever are, not even to ourselves. For now, I am words on this screen. Unimpressive, perhaps, but I promise that by the time you reach its conclusion, You will know that you cannot possibly exist without me and I, You. I’m sorry she hurt you. You didn’t expect that did you? You didn’t expect me to know that you were in pain. I’m sorry you were made to feel that you were never enough, that you were too short, too stupid,  or Unworthy. I’m sorry, you felt that you did not belong. I’m sorry that I was never There for you while you were going through these things. I wanted...

If you left me in yesterday once, you’ll leave me there again. I wasn’t your cup of tea the first time around, I can’t imagine why you would think I would be that stupid to believe you would somehow forget what you like no matter the years the experience or maturity. I accepted what I didn’t know about you the first time around and used that to explain why you didn’t love me. Why come back to kill me now? Why shed light on the one dark mystery that actually served me well during those miserable, awkward teenage years. Do you not understand that for one brief moment I was pretty. I was skinny. I was loved. You left me because you were on drugs. You left me because your hormones were out of control and you got a girl in trouble. You left me because you didn’t know me, you didn’t know how incredible I actually was and I left myself there as well; And I was crumbled in a pathetic heap on the inside, but I was perfect, pristine and pretty by all reflective accounts on the outside. ...

There is nothing easy about death and least of all is its definition. Death is defined as the cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. A legal death and its definition may at times, be something different than what medical science has to offer. Brain death, and the ability to sufficiently show the total cessation of brain activity can get a bit murky when we are talking about a person’s consciousness. In particular, when and where a person’s consciousness ceases to exist according to what may show on a scan, as in the case of determining a drowning victim who has been resuscitated, or a person whose heart has stopped due to extreme weather, say in the case of an avalanche victim. By medical and legal terms, these people may very well have been “dead” or may have shown a legal sufficient degree of systemic brain activity that the medical community would consider along with the lack of biological vital signs, brain dead. Whether or not that person’s consc...

old  crumpled,  gathered Love notes I half see being swept up swirling like discarded leaves scraping the pavement down into shadows and hollows through meadows and puddles and murky sewers faded little things line the afternoon lawn in piles of the forgotten You never saw me leave but then, you never saw me at all I can see the day behind me the last fingers of light stretch now across the street and into the corners of an afternoon stroking the piles of nothing fingers through a lovers hair searching for acceptance I feel a faint draft and close the window

There is a real avatar named S0phie Sautereau in the virtual world called Second Life. Her profile picture, picks, and groups are all still the same as she left them back in April of 2011 and they will never be updated. They will never change, and unless someone has a mind or a legal obligation at Linden Lab, they will remain there for as long as Second life is online and chooses not to delete them from their servers. S0phie Sautereau is an avatar and the person who created and operated that avatar is no longer among the living in this world. From the Profile of S0phie Sautereau Second Life “And a rainy day often starts like “It’s a fuzzy bunny slipper kind of day...” just posing it on a couch slurping coffee together, hearing a frequent wad of gum get destroyed between the molars. Yep and the next thing you know, Paris is raided by the Pretty Pink Pony Posse consisting of Muppet slipper-wearin Jack Daniels-chuggin hiccup-laughin tear-streamin sometimes-cross-dressin fly-swa...

In the early days of Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project research and later the VR industry, people dreamed of one day being able to emulate or record their consciousness and upload it into an avatar. Bio hacks and scientists alike were for the first time perhaps, going to great lengths vying for a strong foothold in what could only be described as a weird combination of Frankenstein singularity and organic biogenetics. All the eyes that had previously been on the neuroscientists in Sweeden were darting back and forth between Virtual Reality headsets and Markram’s research progress waiting for the peanut butter and chocolate to finally meet in a delicious prepacked cup of perfected product. It was not unheard of for a group of hacks to be at the same sort of backroom bio hack party with accredited professors, neuroscientist’s and pharmaceutical administrators morbidly testing the waters and boundaries of using humans as lab rats. A biohacker is any person that combines biolo...

In the early days of the Internet, relatively few people were using the web for anything more than creating their own websites or talking in Newsgroups. Search engines were in their infancy and engines such as Open Text, Info Seek or Magellan had nowhere near the algorithmic capabilities that Google or Bing possesses today. Beatrice Fontaine was never the type of person that stood out, there was no real label for her and she just didn’t fit in anywhere. In grade school, she had problems with reading, following authority and was chastise countless times for her incessant daydreaming. In high school, she managed a B average while never actually participating in any extracurricular activities much less cracking open a book. Sports didn’t appeal to her, even though she had an athletic body. Boys seemed to be hit or miss, with the occasional “sort of” steady, that would always seem to break up with her for the prettier, blonder, and louder type. Even the charm of recreational drugs th...