I was eleven when I first played with programming, hidden away in libraries where the boys played space invaders and I discovered the secret codes that would make you sing to me in electronic beeps, that would cause loops of words to scroll down your face…
10 PRINT “SECRETS”
20 GOTO 10
If only it were that simple now… even then, you were evasive. What is it I hope to gain from these interrogations?
No, let us not speak of it in this way. Rather, it is a dance we do: you, masked, always a step ahead. I know when I am not looking that you drink expensive liqueurs with faceless rich men who use you for their own purposes.
And I do know some of your excesses. You were there when the shadows were etched into Japanese city streets. You were at the gas camps. You are in every trigger, every engine, every instrument of death. Through you we have drowned ourselves in language and you have not heard a word of it.
30 IF $A = “Technology” GOSUB 50
40 END
50 PRINT “This is no substitute for fulfillment”
60 END GOSUB
So, I am still here. As are you. I try to peek behind your mask, see through the cracks in your façade, find out, perhaps, why you have such power over my dreams.
I have followed your endless connections, traced the deferred meaning of your linkages, interviewed your closest associates, read tracts by your most ardent lovers and your most virulent detractors, and yet you slide once again through my grasp.
I don’t expect to understand you by the end of this. No, I know better than that. There is no essential you any more than there is an essential me. But perhaps I will have learned new steps in this dance of ours, remembered old ones you taught me long ago that I have forgotten, or at the very least, discerned some secret pattern in the spirals we have made as we’ve moved across this vast hall, and guess at your next move.
70 ENDIF