DATA FROM THE VOID
I suppose the best place to do some deep thinking is while spiraling halfway through the 'net.
I never was one to shy away from confrontation, but when it's with myself... That's a different story.
We wanderers aren't much for inward thinking, so to speak. So, naturally, when met with my own self loathing, and what is, essentially, the end of my life, what's my first instinct? Run, obviously.
Well, can't do much running when you no longer have a body. No legs to stand on when you're just zeroes and ones floating in the bumfuck-nowhere of cyberspace.
It felt like I'd been there for years, dissolving and rearranging at the whim of some program. At times, there were no thoughts at all. In fact, there was nothing. Just the blissful void. No sound, no panic, no trace of sentience. And then it would all come rushing back, as the matter of my soul reassembled within the depths of some machine somewhere.
At one point, the pinpoints of light and data faded, momentarily, and I saw my mother's face. Clear as a picture. As clear as if she were there with me. But this was not a pretty picture, the type that you'd put in an album. Her beautiful face - the face I'd often admired for it's deeply etched lines, full of stories I'd never hear - was twisted in agony, and I knew what I was seeing.
What a twisted joke it was that at the hour of my death, I'd remember hers! Even years of therapy couldn't help me do that.
And for the first time since being chopped, if I'd had a voice, I would have screamed.
