2025 Chapter Prologue

Blackness. No moon, no stars. From orbit, no glowing electric webs across the night side, dense where technocracy thrummed or stretched thin towards the wilds. On the ground, no glow of distant cities on the horizon, no orange fuzz of sodium street lamps lit. A black without texture, a yawning abyss of black, empty, but not forever. This is the primordial black of the bubbling nothing from which all creation eventually blooms.

Sound. A high pitch whir of thin tires on crumbling pavement, squeaky pedals turning a chain, gears shifting and the rhythmic huffing of human exertion. A few notes of a whistled tune, futures and romance.

Shattering the black, a flash of electronic phosphorescence, blurry as if burning. Up and to the left, a tiny green horizontal line, an underscore, blinks. On, off. On, off. On...

The sounds of exertion and clacking continue. Meanwhile, in the seclusion of encrypted thought, a monologue spools out, exposition, a man is talking to himself. Perfectly articulated speech sans breathing or stutter, words made of electricity and neurotransmitters only.

"I'm amused, still. I feel my face making that slight smirk, every time. In the evolution of late 20th century cinema, a ghostly green blinking underscore on a black background was synonymous with computation. The cursor, as it was then known, comprised the entire interface for the very first cathode ray tube equipped computers. A precise flickering trifle, expectant and enigmatic. What do you want? How can I help you? Long after computer interfaces added menus and icons, and before they colonized refrigerators, brains and finally every cloud and rock, the cursor was at first a cliche, then later an homage."

The clank and sputter of changing gears, and the sound of breathing gets heavier.

"Replies to a cursor's query had to be phrased in an esoteric language known only to an elite few, the nerd class, geeks. The geeks shall inherit the earth, the bible almost said. They and their issue morphed into a legion of legendary billionaires who tinkered with culture and the life support system of the Earth, striving to improve. What do I want? How can you help me? As if the entire planet was a blinking cursor, an insistent, myopic introspection."

For Uncle Joe, the cursor was certainly redolent of this history, how could it not be? He had respawned in the late 20 century, post the exhilarating ubiquity of integrated circuits.  That was all lived experience he had both reveled in and been somewhat chafed by.

This cursor, his cursor was a deliberate retelling of that story, an upgraded personal mythology. For Joe, this cursor revivified a callow but potent enthusiasm from back in the day, when the world was new and computer appliances too.  In this era of rogue cognition, the cursor was also a stark reminder to keep the initiative on the side of the interface that huffs, puffs and pushes pedals.

Joe, rider of bikes, reprisor of computational antiquity, now transmutes mere respiration into vocalization, in a thick and slightly affected eastern euro version of English. His words are displayed to the right of the cursor and in the same phosphor green, with an almost imperceptible delay.