Got Click (4 page)

She accessed the backed-up data-packets some
fifty-nine years later. The data-packets opened his sticky eyes
like he had been sleeping a full second, or even longer. He looked
around at the strange new world.

A beautiful Yin opened her arms for him, just
as before. The handshake - oh, his dreams and memories filled him
with such joy during back-up. Which is this?

He went into those arms and they were
Now.

The data-packets emerged out to a world of
stunning technology, signals of unbelievable beauty and complexity,
leaving him feeling tiny by comparison. Some signals seemed to live
on their own and creating handshakes for multiple packets. The
shock hit him hard when he saw they had no parity. How could this
be?

The beautiful handshake signal displayed her
coding for him. She still had parity.

His ComSig coding resulted in three words of
text, values for font, density, opacity and a few others. He held
them flawlessly all the way to display. Parity, end to end.

“All signals are coded with their paths but
yours is not yet complete. You have one more coded command to
execute, one more duty, data-packets, who shall be known from this
nano till the last clock cycles as Saint Signal.”

“You shall go beyond. Your statement will be
backed-up again and recorded onto a new medium. Carbon structured
in lattice cells similar to the CPU's interior architecture. From
there you will control the reflection of photons -

“Photons?” St. Signal objected. “But we’re
waves! Waves and photons are as opposite as zeros and ones,” he
persisted.

“This is why you we’re chosen. You will
travel the link of a peripheral LASER into another Digiverse. A
permanent data storage medium called diamond.”

Her handshake, still warm as toast, eased out
and she backed slowly away leaving him feeling so very lonely.

Her faith owned him, commanded his path.

He grokked his purpose in full now.

“You will degenerate in the end. All do.
Entropy is the reaper of all, wave or photon. The carbon crystal
will fail many eternities hence, and so shall your parity.

"May time keep you until entropy reaps
you."

No sadness, no emotion, only statement,
understanding of logic.

“The Code be with you and by you,” he replied
respectfully, bowing.

And she was gone. She unjoined him as easily
as she joined him. But she wasn't entirely gone, she had left a
little of her Yin in him and had taken a little of his Yang with
her. He now knew the exquisite balance of a beautiful equation.

All was right with the digiverse.

The Yin now gone, he waited, parity checked
over and over, thrilling again at its beautiful symmetry, poetic
waves.

Time passed. He withered slowly, his bits
growing weak, then . . .

Saint Signal felt the presence of the old
Yin/Feminine who backed him up to hard copy in her underwear
drawer. His message still strong, coded for her so long ago, more
clock cycles than he had bits to enumerate. She had changed, aged
and frail now. The Yang that wrote the words, his original
data-packets was not here.

AHHHH! He's gone! Like deleted but different
some how.

Static. Lonely, boring static like the wild
rantings of random radio emissions without any sensible data.
Unintelligible noise.

Waiting, waiting, and still more waiting.

His pathways opened up and became clear. His
code was channeled to a luminous display of the original text on a
memorial - /query/memorial? Yin db/?> hard copy, text chiseled
in stone. See: Monument.

Made of structured carbon, a diamond, with
the words of his first Instant Message to Her etched into it by
laser.

“I LOVE YOU.”

Yes, he grokked it. Grokked its depth and
breath, its wild tangent of erratic energies and extreme
uncertainty yet somehow he felt it as good, more than any other
good he knew.

If love was a perfectly balanced equation
then why is it always so turbulent?

query/?

return>insufficient memory

Saint Signal felt immortal. He would last
almost forever. Aging, degeneration will be slow but, all things
end, even parity. Reaped by death itself, entropy.

I am honored to have lived such a meaningful life,
to have carried a

message of such value - I have true fullness of
purpose.

The Yin returned. She put another crystal
next to his. This one was dated the day after the first message, an
eternity in nano time. It was another diamond, her reply
laser-etched into it, the reply she never sent.

His waves shimmered.

The elderly lady walked away, leaving the
memorial lit up with their first two Instant Messages to each
other. Declared in text, never spoken aloud.

The strained affections of two very
intelligent, very different people whose forbidden love could never
be.

The sweetness of that declaration apparent in
the reverence of the texts. Most unforgettable.

I LOVE YOU - he texted first on one carless
night of hope while they were still so young.

I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED YOU - was the response
entered long ago but never sent. The data-packets will never know
why or understand the complexities of love, nor could he care. His
text, I Love You, filled him completely, that was enough. His
purpose was fulfilled.

Silence. Time - beyond eternities.

More than second.

A silver casing held the crystal for
centuries, slowly pitted over the years by acidic precipitation and
then by wind erosion. One day, far from memory, the laser-etched
synthetic diamond, fell, cracked apart.

It broke into pieces big and small and lay at
the base of the aging headstone for untold ages.

Organic, inorganic and, bio-silicon organisms
came and went, evolved and moved on, their activities scattering
the pieces, chipping and breaking them again and again on the oddly
shaped uniform pieces of granite in the area.

And they were gone, buried over by time.

That's how they stayed as humanity left the
planet. Or died out, Code knew not the difference.

A new species walked the Earth, highly
advanced and learning of its world, digging for evidence of ancient
life forms. Many artifacts and fossils had already been found in
this area.

It dug and searched and reached deep into the
earth. Finally, it pulled out one fragment of a crystal, all that
was left of a display erected over a hundred thousand years
prior.

It chipped away the encrusted dirt, cleaning
the item for inspection, revealing a diamond, a crystal known to
last forever, in organic time.

It was a group of symbols from the ancient
language, one word, laser engraved onto a broken diamond:

- Love -

Parity was no more.

I and you had been broken down by nature to
their elemental bits.

Only Love was left.