Scene 4: Dance of Electronic Desire
The dance unfolds and builds into a climax – the lava lamp pulsates madly to the dancing rhythm. Occasionally the deep hum of the CYBORG resonates over romantic melodies.
HONORIA
Perhaps you wonder what we humans are doing?
The clones now active in our pursuing,
have begun the process of clone differentiation
to complete the humans in-machination.
Well versed in sense, we long for much,
much more than electronic touch.
Whether borne of pen or pentium
this love is a novel invention.
All HUMANS
It’s a puzzle, it’s a mess, it’s a perplex,
all these chat rooms tittering with sex.
We long to make what we long to make real
putting all the virtue back in the virtual.
HONORIA
Like stars above the modem lights did dance.
It didn’t take long to find themselves entranced
by their, donna primum mobile,
met through email, convinced that the key
to paradise was just beyond the keys.
A cursory glance confirmed this was the case.
All CLONES
To interface or not to interface,
to interlace or not to interlace,
isn’t that begging the question a byte?
Have we got all our prongs plugged in right?
What is a man, after all, but a lame excuse
for a modem with megabytes? A poor, screwloose
wandering file of DNA with one finger
poised above the ALT key there, let it linger.
CYBORG
Like bards in romantic ages
who sung pictures onto open pages
now see your reflection of me
staring back, signifiers you think you lack
lie in the heart of imagination
igniting your hopes in desirous conflagration
Is this not love we share,
across cables and modems and ocean and air?
HONORIA
What emotion lies dormant is past,
memories saved in a hard drive will last
though we drift apart across silicon aeons
I will not become technology’s scion.
If you paint my reflection with watered tears
you will magnify my real-time cellular fears.
.REZ begs the CYBORG
Can I save her? Can I hold her?
In the sweet, sure grip of a document folder
and keep her there forever, saved as wife
in the drawer I’m renaming as my new life?
CYBORG’S Fabulous Aria
Such desperation marks your faces
Communication leaves no traces
The hollowness of moonlight scrapes the earth
Antagonism, rapture flower
Bliss and fury, childlike power.
All that’s left is Hope and sweet sweet mirth
Casualties of longing, hear my simple words.
I’ve got so much to show you, there’s so much that I’ve learned
And all the while, my silence has been your friend.
As an act of imagination I made myself into two
One to speak for and another against you
My right face speaks of love and light
my left space speaks of mystery and night
And the two together do speak beyond me
seeking one who is sweeter than my own thought to me.
Look through windows, look at mirrors
Look through words, look at ideas.
The mirror casts such deadly glances
The cyberworld grants second chances.
HONORIA
Worldmaking starts from worlds arlready on hand
when our assembled forms and multiple selves band
together upon towers of promise and danger seeing the convexed
dawn-defined virtual vistas’ curves without context.
Though cyberlife aches from more than the ills which cyberstrife makes
My dear friends and on-line lovers in your darkest hour
the words you write will give you power.
we duplicated data streams (honoria points to the clones)
to reify unfulfilled daydreams
You needn’t worry, cyber lovers of the nascent age,
Adaptability is your freedom, for cyberspace is not a cage.
unwilling disbelief.