She
drove on downtown, being extra careful because she felt like doing harm
to somebody, found a liquor store with a big Checks Cashed sign, got
the same turndown inside. Running on nerves and anger, she kept on till
she reached the next supermarket, and this time she was told to wait
while somebody went in back and made a phone call.
It
was there, gazing down a long aisle of frozen food, out past the
checkout stands, and into the terminal black glow of the front windows,
that she found herself entering a moment of undeniable clairvoyance,
rare in her life
but recognized. She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were
swinging everywhere, that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might
easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished Business
in it that might now resume ... as if they'd been kept safe in some
time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of
something in power, must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect.
Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful,
Jasonic, blade-to-meat final — but at the distance she, Flash, and
Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on
alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of
electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeros were
"like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an
individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of
ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a
long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at
least — an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight
human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name —
its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history
of the world. We are digits in God's computer,
she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard
gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be
living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in
our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the
hacker we call God.The night manager came back, holding the check as he might a used disposable diaper. "They stopped payment on this."
"The banks are closed, how'd they do that?"
He spent his work life here explaining reality to the herds of computer-illiterate who crowded in and out of the store. "The computer," he began gently, once again, "never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It's like it's open 24 hours a day. . . ."
–Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
No comments:
Post a Comment