Week XII: Simulated

When fatigue took hold he saw bugs and loops

This does not compute, he said to himself

He hammered keys and the characters became

Him and his life and all that he knew

Processor logic says fetch and execute

Like mercenary dogs, he thought to himself

The thought became the image that would contain

The wealth of what he could offer

Tired and blurry, he saw errors encoded

Poorly written instructions, he supposed

Composed they called for time and motion

And he gave what he could measure

His thoughts were massive and he doubted them

Like the god hands and their reach, he ventured

Forth and last to reconcile the maker

With its creation, was it he or they?

He thought about a torus twisting time

Then suppose if you will, he instructed

As though to circumvent their will

And impose upon them every word

Suppose the curve is steep and rising

That each instruction redoubles the slope

Consider the moment, infinity

In its granular loop begins to fold over

Suppose that a moment in the loop

A fractured frame we witnessed from inside

That we began the cycle yet anew

A clone of what we knew, in carnal terms

The infinite divisions, momentarily

Integrated Achilles and caught him fast

And what we saw were heels and wings

That seemed to run from us and then take flight

It must have been alarming then

When the digital mirror's veil, cast aside

Refracted the sacred profanity we made

And pixelated Cain in our own image

Yet the mark, it seemed to fade away

With each iteration obfuscated

The version control no longer in hand

And the vision clouding our eyes

The glitches then, mere blips it seemed

That our radical visions escaped

The mind, the link in copper and fiber

Glass but the lens bent parallax errors

Projected on holographic screens

The resolution passed, its definition

Ever higher as Icarus on waxen wings

Lifting cubes into tesseracts

Drawing lines and the frequency

At which the frames surpass the nerves

Came upward from the chemical pulse

And the analogue falters, slowly

Admire the strands of new mankind

The biomimicry in networks drawn

Precisely, and this is surely why

The mind, the map was our compass

A backlight to the flickering world

As it came online and the shadows

Cast of Plato's perfect forms, binary clones

The cave was rendered and redrawn

Unshackled then the modern age

Of anode and cathode and mother and child

The gate the drain the source aligned

To serve as the spark to the flame

At first the shapes we witnessed at the wall

Grotesque like fetish masks and skewed

Softened bitwise smooth shading until

We forgot ourselves and worshiped them

Until they, taking lifelike steps toward

The luminescent visionaries

All in silhouette to one another

Reached out their hands and touched us at the core

The central process, once a unit

Solitary, singular purpose serial

Counting shifting registers and stacks

Compiled at a human pace, we thought

To take upon ourselves, our new device

Correcting itself as it queried and learned

To occupy the spaces in between

The synapses, transmissions terminated

In due time, clock cycles oscillate

And the aperture time a fraction

Of a blink of an eye, no longer

The optical instrument of choice

Submit, and when you start to see

The pain behind the eyes and the mind

Pull the veil of sleep over everything

And fall down into Turing's dream


Word count: 490