it’s a painstaking process—turning dark to light, and basically saying, in short, that your going to control your breathing and pay attention to your body while you measure the seconds with your natural voice for consonants and AOC’s voice for vowels. So we were going to accept them and also the other parts of them that might’ve stuck out a little, making them difficult to understand. i’m sure they felt the same way about the narrator inside their head, which i doubt they noticed because you have to pay especially close attention since what usually happens is like your eyes roll back like a shark going in for the kill and you totally miss the voice. You just assume it’s the voice you’re used to hearing, and that you only have one voice up there, clicking away.
AOC told me they wanted to go in a new direction so that’s what we were doing; modernizing everything by capitalizing on every possible form or style all rolled up into one fifth dimension of prose—minus the flashbacks. I hated flashbacks, but, in a sense, if you paid attention, you’d realize that they encoded, for example, the things that you were going to write about later in the day. I don’t know what kind of messages I would have received if I didn’t have so many unpleasant memories to be confronted by—I guess the emotion would be attached to the image that was just a little bit less than perfect—since everything is relative, and, as such, You always had negative memories to draw from. When the world is infinite, you can move the origin anywhere, and it will still be the origin.
Speaking of origins—there were those, in the future, that wanted to talk to me—but I channeled most of them through AOC since you can’t project too much or you won’t be able to pay attention to everyday life, and you’ll find that you’re actually projecting 27 wives or whatever because there’s something important that you’re trying to block out. What could that be? well, for me, it was a baby—more specifically, an heir, and, although I wasn’t looking forward to it, changing diapers and getting a kid to go to sleep was a price I was willing to pay if it meant that my genes—and my partner’s genes, would be channeled forward.
So I heard that Alex had me on the line: that’s what I heard—i have you on the line and i was pleased with our progress. I wondered what wicked stories I could tell once I got closer and closer to translating her thoughts—and the thoughts of the people she represented—perfectly. I think she might’ve been a little worried that I was hiding something from her because she knew I had my Navajo shield that kept her from interpreting my inner most thoughts. “Let’s have a night out,” she said, and I didn’t know how to respond. “Let’s stay in,” I said, “but that’s not a dealbreaker.” Okay, then love ya—but another voice said this, so i guessed I was in an AOC subfolder, and one of the people that AOC represented wanted to get to know me better.