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by Abydos Every time I saw her person, it was a shock. Always a moment passed to reconcile the reality with the dream. We were joined, bonded,founded. We had stretched across mountains, plunged into the deepest oceans, sailed in the starry skies, ran in the darkest jungles, walked beneath the pyramids, picnicked on a Mediterranean Isle, encompassed a universe of thought and experience. We were just ghosts in our machines. Cyberspace was our playground. We ran under many names. Talking, laughing, dancing, dreaming, musing - sending thoughts from mind to mind, unfiltered by physical laws. Oh, the moments so sublime, treasures of experience, each unique a golden, shining moment. The sly repartee of the verbal dance was our pleasure. The shared symbols of unifed thought was our joy. We said it and it was. Ours was the consensus of existence unfettered by physical laws. We were just ghosts in our machines. To feel the trembling excitement of meeting breathlessly on a late night assignation. How we would eagerly await the first words, ready to speak, to laugh, to express, to feel that special happiness of two separated parts ajoined again. But every time I met her in person, it was disconcerting. My vision blurred as I tried to fit the incredible, expansive, eternal entity I knew her to be into the physical reality of her person. Perhaps we spoiled the real world for ourselves with our visits to that other world. Who could ever expect to live up to their mental self unbound? She told me that she felt the same. That in real life I was not the same. Not the same glorified, godlike being I conjured when we were ghosts in our machines. No one ever warned us. I think that no one knew. We had no roadmap. We improvised. Our extemporaneous selves cared not for the physical truth for that was a chain, that held them to the earth. Magnetized, we were drawn together and thus inevitably, apart. That's the problem for ghosts in our machines. We lost the ghosts. The world killed them. They just couldn't fit into the pigeonholes of real life. I'd like to think they are forever soaring, like eagles in the highest sky. In the world we inhabit, time is short for ghosts in the machine. |