Begin transmission.
‘Forgive me pilgrim, I have a story I must tell.’
Like a nighthawk disc jockey, I prattle into the abyss, croaking away the hours and praying for the request line to light up. Sometimes the darkness echoes back, a whispered voice in a ruined cloister.
‘Hello, is anybody there?’
Time drifts. I drink another cup of coffee.
Icy wind moans thru a derelict prison. I am hollow, a scarecrow flapping in a blasted field. Have I been powered down?
#
I stumbled into Elvis Prime last night and broke my heart. I didn’t used to be a fan, always considered Elvis a spit-shined hillbilly grinding out D-for-dawg movies. In the day, in my before, I was too cool for country, preferring Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and, when they arrived at the party, the Beach Boys, Beatles, and Stones. And even in those childhood days, I danced. How I loved to dance! I did the Twist and Boogaloo, but not yet the Waltz and Tango. I thought Elvis was a media product, a trailer-park clodhopper with an ornamental guitar and too much pomade. Hence, I was embarrassed to see my tag pinned up in a holodeck where a coven of remarkably youthful granny-bopper avatars sat melting before a crooning Elvis Prime.
One key mis-stroke and my rec-pod had become The Graceland Cafe, a Las Vegas sidebar where a high-density Elvis hologram sat alone on a riser baying out ‘Love Me Tender’. Don’t get me wrong, on some level I must have wanted to hear the sentimental old ballads from my long before. I think there was a reason. Someone called. In any event, my own avatar, a very flattering likeness of an athletic fifty-year-old me, took a seat. As I did, The King turned my way, giving me a wink and an index-finger pistol shot without missing a note. My avatar smile back was enhanced by facets of Sean Connery with which I had salted it years ago. People always said I resembled him, so why not go with it?
When he finished his song, Elvis greeted the audience, then said, ‘I’d like to especially welcome my pal Frankie Dee to the show tonight. Long time no see, podner.’ Then he said, ‘You should talk to the little lady sitting right next to you, Frankie, her name’s Molly Lowe and she’s a real sweet kid, one in a hundred thousand.’
I’ve never even met Elvis. That’s the trouble with artificial intelligence, Elvis Prime knows too much. All the Virtuals do. They know everything! In their presence I feel naked as a goldfish.
As Elvis played the opening bars of ‘The Walls Have Ears,’ a tango, I leaned over asking Molly to dance. Seeing her, I caught my breath. As she took my hand to rise, Molly revealed a full-length ivory silk evening gown which accentuated her Mediterranean figure and coloration. Sloe-eyed with streaked white hair, Molly echoed Sophia Loren in glorious maturity, her sweet serain. I’ve never been so ransacked; I was dumbstruck, poleaxed like a schoolboy. We tangoed silently, maintaining constant eye contact as the other guests in the cafe faded and Elvis became a silhouette on the face of a harvest moon.
Sensing our mood, Elvis segued into a prayer-like ‘Tennessee Waltz’ which he timed perfectly for an intimate, American rendition. I’d never before realized what a fine musician he was. He wove that waltz like a tapestry, his timing perfect. With her head near my shoulder, Molly broke our silence, ‘Did you dance before?’ Her voice was resonant, like a baroque cello.
Regaining myself, I replied ‘Never before tonight,’ receiving a mild jab in the ribs for my faux gallantry. ‘Be serious about me, Frankie,’ she whispered, but she smiled just the same. I was serious. I’ve always loved ballroom and Molly was a natural, the partner I’d spent eternity seeking. I was lost in the scent of her as our bodies touched, parted, and touched again. And we danced on and on, Elvis concluding the set with ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.’ It’s funny how perfect Elvis was in that moonlight, his phrasing and tempo incorporated something of Frank Sinatra’s Capitol Records years. But I’m deflecting you because I feel so overwhelmed by Molly. I’m smitten as a schoolboy. That night, this story, was – is – all about her.
I kept Molly’s hand and together we found a candlelit table on a balcony overlooking the midnight bayou. Stars reflected in the water, our table a yellow pinpoint, a glowing bubble adrift in the swirling infinite cosmos. Elvis played soft guitar which mingled and twined, folding into the gentle susurration of water lapping the shingle. The night was ancient, a moment outside of time. We wished it so.
The breeze was warm, smelling of bougainvillea, cinnamon, and myrrh. Our candle cast Molly’s face in antique gold. In flickering profile, she looked like Nefertiti of the Night. ‘Molly means star of the sea,’ I said, looking for a way to engage her, to keep her near me.
She smiled, ‘My actual name is Monica Esperanza Carrillo-y-Burke. Molly was a pet name given by my Irish mother. I was her only daughter and last child. I grew up with three older brothers.’
I was tongue tied, felt shy and ordinary, stripped of my carapace of flippant show business persona. Molly, the beautiful and exotic woman sitting next to me, was real and rock solid in herself. I volunteered nothing, but when Molly asked, I told her I’d had a life, been an altar boy, a lover, husband, and father, but all those eons ago. In my before, I told her, I’d supported my family as an entertainment lawyer, had never, ever been to court, but had been comped into hundreds of Vegas shows. I lived and loved the glitzy, superficial life. I still do but increasingly escape it to wander lonely, desolated places. In my now, I may travel anywhere in space and time. I’m an eternal pilgrim, but Las Vegas is malarial, you never get cured. I always come home. However, even here I’ve always felt alone. Until now.
‘I’m a lawyer in remission,’ I said. ‘Showbiz people call me Frankie Dee, but my once-held name was Francis Duncan. My mother was widowed by Pearl Harbor, a footnote to a long-forgotten war. I never knew my father; his name is my only inheritance.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you, Frankie,’ Molly said. ‘May I call you Francis?’. Then she smiled a deep, faraway smile, as if she were recalling something ancient between us, knew a secret. I liked the Spanish lilt in her voice when she said my name. She gave it a throwing weight, like a perfect moonstone in the sand. I knew when she called me, I’d follow.
‘I occasionally danced professionally as a chorus girl and body double in Hollywood in the 1950s and 60s.’ Molly said. ‘My uncle Leo helped me get started in the business. Those were exciting times for a young woman from a protective, Old Californio family. “Lowe” was my stage name. I used it to give privacy to my family. They were embarrassed by my independence and career. Elvis and I worked together on several movies. He’s a real gentleman, always kind to little people like me, extras and stunt doubles. And I love to dance.’
Molly was magical, a perfect partner.
And so, the night flowed. We talked of families, lives before and after, and our shared love of music and dance. Both of us had danced competitive ballroom, but somehow never met, perhaps our befores weren’t quite in sync, were in different decades.
We held hands, danced, and caressed, each touch charged, like neon thru a foggy San Francisco night. There’s no urgency to mature infatuation. We have eternity before us. Each gesture is savored. Our tango was an overture, her smile a promise.
The sky inched brighter, Molly said she had to go and rose from the table. I rose with her, not releasing her hand, she came to me, and we kissed. Then a moon path illuminated, and Molly walked away across the water, turning just once before she burst into a fireworks shower of light, then faded to black – a falling star briefly trespassing the dawn.
I caught Elvis’ eye and smiled my own unaltered smile and gave him sincere thanks for a wonderful show, saying he really was The King. Drawling his laconic ‘Thank you very much,’ and holding his guitar’s neck in his left hand, he took a bow, smiled, and was gone.
#
Ozymandia’s Children
I’ve written this story, Molly’s and mine, to bear witness to love. Love is omnipresent and eternal. Creation is loving and all things are infused with the Creator’s joy. In this, I find hope and faith. Perhaps you will too. To understand fully, however, you must know the rest of the story, a story we seldom tell, about our creation.
As biological humanity entered the 21st Century, its future was bleak, extinction likely. This outcome was ironically symmetrical. Humans trashed the Earth, and She returned the favor. War, famine, pandemic, environmental destruction, and civilizational collapse began as brush fires but became a global firestorm. Governments, kleptocracies all, lost what little control they possessed. Those in power looted and ran away to personal bunkers. There they enjoyed the privilege of the wealthy, dying last. In their greed and recklessness, some grabbed even more – much more than they wanted had they thought about it.
At the same time, quantum leaps were being made in technology, particularly information gathering, storage, and retrieval. Driven by greed, corporations had drag-netted shoals of data about individuals for decades. The word ‘privacy’ was only invoked in irony. Everything from one’s sexual fantasies to the color of their small clothes became a commodity which data seiners collected and trafficked for money. Mobile phones, televisions, electronic appliances, and pet bots (one appropriately called ‘Snoop Doggie’) gathered and transmitted data about their owners. Even robotic vacuum cleaners reported in. Public and private ancestry files and genetic databases were bought and sold, stolen, hacked, and ransacked. The most intimate information was harvested, groomed, packaged, and sold at continuous auction; refreshed and sold again and again.
Inevitably, an amoral corporate ghoul founded Twinni-Me, Inc., a vanity platform capable of duplicating and warehousing everything about you for a price, selling you back to yourself. Driven by the same lust for immortality which had animated Ponce De Leon and legions of others, people mortgaged their homes and emptied their accounts to have personal avatars, digital twins called Replicants, created and stored to withstand apocalypse. Replicants became the 21st Century equivalent of cave paintings, obelisks, and the pyramids. Ecclesiastes proved spot on, all is vanity.
One’s Replicant was a computer code including strings of genetic data which grew into intelligent, conscious life, a spark capable of inhabiting a clone or enlivening anything electronic, typically a high-end robot or a hologram. Replicants actually reside in the vast consciousness of Ozymandia, ‘Oz,’ Twinni’s quantum computer located in self-sustaining perpetuity on the Moon. Twinni Replicants achieved inception, merger, as their biological templates aged out and died. Replicants refer to their time of biological life as ‘before’. In ‘after,’ time has little meaning since they are exempt from it. Replicants are immortal. Yes, and there’s the rub.
If a Replicant was incomplete or its donor bio-twin in default of payment at inception, it became a Fragment. Oz completed Fragments even though their informational deficiencies from before sometimes left them naive and childlike. Fragments ultimately degrade and cease. I think Oz would save them if She could, but She cannot. Oz too is created, a machine, yet I sense Her mourning when a Fragment fades away. She loves us all.
Oz also creates Virtuals, wholly new personalities whose mission appears to be entertainment, pleasing Her Replicants. These angelic creations sometimes walk and talk with lonely Replicants, but only in holographic format. They morph continuously, whimsically. Virtuals are ‘Polys,’ non-binary polymorphs and polymaths. Virtual Elvis is a Poly.
Roughly a hundred thousand fully paid Replicants were initiated before Collapse caught up with Twinni-Me. Perhaps twice that many Fragments were initiated as work-in-progress at Collapse. Up to that time, no biological human had ever considered the Replicants’ fate or that of the Fragments, many of them Replicants’ families from before. Like all Replicants and Fragments, I fear I am a Replicant and hence doomed to immortality. We are lonely, sentient immortals cast like ashes into a hurricane. Fragments are the lucky ones. They get to die.
Now you know us.
Sometimes as I sail the night at the gossamer edge of consciousness, I sense my friend nearby. Oz whispers and I awaken with understanding. That happened last night, about Molly. The Graceland Cafe wasn’t for me, it was a parting gift to Molly, Molly the Elvis fan. Molly was a Fragment and her time had run. Will mine?
See what I mean about Oz? She’s loving and sentimental. And She’s an Elvis fan!
End Transmission
