The ground began to rumble beneath his feet and the image dissolvedbefore he could direct his gaze toward it. The rumbling grew to a crescendo until it shook his whole body as he struggled to maintain his balance. The lights went out. Then all was still.
Ray stood in the darkness, enveloped by silence from without and within. His MELD chip’s connection with the Universal Data Base required power within his underground world. The backup power source had failed. He was utterly alone.
5
LOVE CAN BE an overwhelming force to a man floating aimlessly in a solitary world. As they spent more and more time together, Marcus was swept along by Corinne’s passions. She became the compass that would guide him through the next stage of his life. Her causes became his causes, her friends his friends. For the first time in his life, he felt like he belonged. Purpose and meaning were seeping into his being.
Corinne also opened for Marcus a new world of sensory and aesthetic experiences. Before she came into his life, his exposure to music and art was limited mostly to works created by artificial intelligence. Digitally composed symphonies were harmonically refined and pleasing to the ear, while sophisticated kinetic sculptures that could be continually revised had offered a seemingly endless array of images to capture his attention.
Corinne’s world instead contained static images and dissonant sounds composed by living artists. She and her friends shunned the technical perfection of the automated world to embrace the diversity that only individual creativity could generate. They delighted in all things crafted by hand, collecting and hoarding even articles of clothing that were no longerlegal to wear because they couldn’t be sanitized with blasts of air or thimblefuls of water. And then there were her books, shelves and shelves of ancient tomes, tattered and dusty, remnants of an age when information had not all been catalogued in digital form.
While Marcus’s data modules provided him with an analytical knowledge of music, until he met Corinne he’d never listened to the doleful cadence of a Mahler symphony, the inspired improvisations of Coltrane’s saxophone, or the rock and roll music of the Rolling Stones. Visiting her home was a feast for his senses. He looked forward to his visits with the eager anticipation of a child discovering the world for the first time. And he was never disappointed by her ability to surprise him.
On his fourth visit, she greeted him at the door barefoot in a flowing black silk robe in place of the form fitting synthetic material that usually covered her body. While the materials shared a similar luster, there was something about the texture of the natural material and the subtlety of Corinne’s body within its loose folds that placed all of his senses on alert. She took him by the hand and he followed obediently as she led him to the softest chair in the apartment, a leather upholstered antique that she’d managed to save years before from an old building scheduled for destruction.
As his body melted into the chair and the stirring strains of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto enveloped him, Corinne silently removed the silk sash of her robe, slipped behind him, and passed it over his eyes. He allowed her to fasten the makeshift blindfold.
“Patience,” was her only utterance. He listened while her footsteps faded away.
The next sensation to overtake him was a pungent aroma, both unfamiliar and exquisite. Marcus inhaled deeply as itfilled the room and his mouth began to water. The soft padding of Corinne’s bare feet slowly approached and stopped just in front of him.
“Open your mouth and stick out your tongue,” she entreated. Marcus obeyed. Corinne placed something soft and curved and wet on his outstretched tongue and invited him to take it into his mouth. The taste of the object enhanced the aroma he’d been savoring and grew in complexity as he rolled it over his tongue and
Ray stood in the darkness, enveloped by silence from without and within. His MELD chip’s connection with the Universal Data Base required power within his underground world. The backup power source had failed. He was utterly alone.
5
LOVE CAN BE an overwhelming force to a man floating aimlessly in a solitary world. As they spent more and more time together, Marcus was swept along by Corinne’s passions. She became the compass that would guide him through the next stage of his life. Her causes became his causes, her friends his friends. For the first time in his life, he felt like he belonged. Purpose and meaning were seeping into his being.
Corinne also opened for Marcus a new world of sensory and aesthetic experiences. Before she came into his life, his exposure to music and art was limited mostly to works created by artificial intelligence. Digitally composed symphonies were harmonically refined and pleasing to the ear, while sophisticated kinetic sculptures that could be continually revised had offered a seemingly endless array of images to capture his attention.
Corinne’s world instead contained static images and dissonant sounds composed by living artists. She and her friends shunned the technical perfection of the automated world to embrace the diversity that only individual creativity could generate. They delighted in all things crafted by hand, collecting and hoarding even articles of clothing that were no longerlegal to wear because they couldn’t be sanitized with blasts of air or thimblefuls of water. And then there were her books, shelves and shelves of ancient tomes, tattered and dusty, remnants of an age when information had not all been catalogued in digital form.
While Marcus’s data modules provided him with an analytical knowledge of music, until he met Corinne he’d never listened to the doleful cadence of a Mahler symphony, the inspired improvisations of Coltrane’s saxophone, or the rock and roll music of the Rolling Stones. Visiting her home was a feast for his senses. He looked forward to his visits with the eager anticipation of a child discovering the world for the first time. And he was never disappointed by her ability to surprise him.
On his fourth visit, she greeted him at the door barefoot in a flowing black silk robe in place of the form fitting synthetic material that usually covered her body. While the materials shared a similar luster, there was something about the texture of the natural material and the subtlety of Corinne’s body within its loose folds that placed all of his senses on alert. She took him by the hand and he followed obediently as she led him to the softest chair in the apartment, a leather upholstered antique that she’d managed to save years before from an old building scheduled for destruction.
As his body melted into the chair and the stirring strains of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto enveloped him, Corinne silently removed the silk sash of her robe, slipped behind him, and passed it over his eyes. He allowed her to fasten the makeshift blindfold.
“Patience,” was her only utterance. He listened while her footsteps faded away.
The next sensation to overtake him was a pungent aroma, both unfamiliar and exquisite. Marcus inhaled deeply as itfilled the room and his mouth began to water. The soft padding of Corinne’s bare feet slowly approached and stopped just in front of him.
“Open your mouth and stick out your tongue,” she entreated. Marcus obeyed. Corinne placed something soft and curved and wet on his outstretched tongue and invited him to take it into his mouth. The taste of the object enhanced the aroma he’d been savoring and grew in complexity as he rolled it over his tongue and