Johanna Drucker

The harpies came back and seized upon these artifacts, bright magpies in the marketplace, they had incredible bad taste and raised it as a new religion in cultish ecstacy, raving at each other, tearing away the faces that fed them, and pouncing with predatory delight on any morsel of tinsel bright non-thought that littered their path.

Future boy, an organizing nodal point, manufactured anything but consent. A sense of humor wove through his discourse with the efficacy of peat bog smoking a whiskey mash. A dark sense of humor, subterranean and occulted.

The electron charged, taking a fun-house ride in a new-age entertainment landscape. Mind-eraser, mild name for an act of physical violence. Soul hungering after soul in a crazed synaptic search, she rotated out of control in a frenzied attempt to find the neural pathways that connect matter to spirit. Stars appeared before her eyes and returned her intent look before they went off, laughing, in their sibling groupings, so many constellationary figures orbiting the earthbound imagination of the crowd. The good Mute watched and waited.

It was a flirt battle, she sought, looking for attention through every cheap trick in her little book. An errant Tinkerbell of the electronic universe, she charged first one and then the other. In front of the Victorian she bid for affection like a tramped-out school girl inept at concealing her innocence behind unnecessary rouge. The thick crayons on her visual orbs betrayed her freshness with a pose of experience, thin veneer too skimpy to conceal her essential sweetness. Love was unpolluted, direct, and honest, but the crush energy wobbled way out of control with a barelegged awkwardness on platform pumps. Future boy governed his response with a late adolescent's certain superiority. His convictions rocked his soul and never hesitated, machine-gun rapid in their synaptic firing of one brutal insight after another. Patience wore him thin, but the magnetic spin of the electron held his small heart spellbound til it swelled in his chest with an immodest response into a billy club hot-link in spite of his better judgment.

The percipient electron peeled back sensation into sense. One config after another danced before her eyes while the devoted dancing harpies in their snakeskin tight affection struck up a melancholy melodrama of great expectations. A group response to their febrile gropings might at least anoint the air with laughter.

Baiting first one trap after another, the electron crooned to herself once more in that slowed-down sleeze tone:

'Oooo ooo oooo ooo --' she gushed -- 'you're all I've ever wanted, my arms are open wide --' The last Victorian signed a queasy sigh at these puerile antics. Future boy took a quick hike on another line. The electron dodged into the crowd around the twin harpies and let her troubles wander off like grazing offspring into the fields of sentiment.

The chorus of fans had become pronounced as the two harpie delegates of pop culture, new age sophisticates, courted each other in a style war of gifts meant for immediate gratification and long-term consumption. A teeny tiny tv, smaller than the palm of her hand, delighted one as if it were the twelfth day's gift, and so she massaged her lover with a tongue to the hair, cheek to jowl, and puss to puss in a paroxysm of joy. Outmoded cultish practices survive -- and thrive -- in the hothouse of such feminine affections. Joy to that world, and all through the house, they stirred, little creatures, each with their hands on the other's mouse --

The electron trod delicately through the resilient psyche of the future-boy, picking her path through the dark swamps and hollow reeds, peering towards him through the mists and fogs of a difficult landscape and an impossible language. His crypto-centric edge, nuanced and sharp, cut through the cotton candy fluff of her attitude with the unflinching steel of a climate with a tiny margin of error in the onging game of survival. She cried out in pleasure to be so perceived! But then the dynamic particle felt drawn to the beautiful Victorian, that brocade sage, in whom resonance pulsed its animal throb, erotic and profound, with a link to the very rhythm of being.

But who could make matter matter more? The dark future boy, thin chest bursting with the dark hunger of longing to grow into multivalence. Or the cultivated historical sentience? The latter done and undone, the former not yet formed. Potency and latency, knowledge or its possibility. She hesitated. Quivering. Her differentiating self consumed with fear and trembling which she rode into a pause in the continuum and held her energy breath before deciding.

The harpies caressed each other's willing screen to draw out the most unimaginable purrings from the program nodes. Whose face was flushed with new life, parting lips with joyful abandon, in a blatant act of childish glee? One kissed her girlfriend on the mouth, holding the tightest, smallest, most elaborately perfect transforming and receiving unit ever imagined against her chest. No pleasure yet had succeeded like this one, bringing the electronic pet into their relationship.

And our electron ? Wait and see --

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