(1094 words.

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(Short-story by Arvind Passey.)

I HAVE LONGED TO MOVE AWAY.

I don't like being where I am. I don't like aak2 priming me for the MMT (Maximal
Mnemonic Trials) by drumming some regimented piece on 'Linguistics and the Native
Speaker'. I call MMT a 'Maximal Mahem Twaddle', because for me they are all
forcibly acquired traits. All turning points of technology are turn-offs for me. In place
of robots that move, I would rather be creating rhymes that move. That is why I like
you Dylan Thomas, whom I meet so often on my virtual-reality network, and like you
I too wish to hum :
'I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the cold lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.'
I know that Dylan lived in rather abnormal times. He took walks in parks and heard
passionate squeals of laughter. He went in cars, jostled in buses, queued for tickets,
swayed on steamers, and even watched tree-tops from the window of some airplane.
Those were slow times indeed. We travel, making easy conversation with thoughts, at
times even leaving them behind. But I'd rather be with Dylan, dissecting meandering
thoughts, moulding inflexible ones, and making them valuable assets by fixing words
at the right spots. Why can't I go back in time, just a hundred years back, to be with
'Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,...'
But it is really a dream -- even for us who have advanced to wherever forever is. Let
me tell you Dylan, if you can hear me through the retrogrades of time, that we live in
lighted times. O, how I wish these were enlightened times instead. But let me not
digress -- we live here, where no skies are felt; no seas, no birds, no winds ever sing;
no floods, no earthquakes, nor tidal-waves come and frighten; no horizon, no sunset,
no dawn to make love to. We live below all these transitory happenings....we have
discarded their permanent perils. But a few like me say that time and technology never
could win the battle with nature and we sunk ourselves lower and lower into the
bowels of the earth where we advanced higher and higher to create the very things we
had run away from. You called them illusions. For us they are icons.
So now we simply watch life. If that means anything at all.
There is this reality all around, Dylan, this dark reality that changes to whatever we
wish, by a mere touch......and yet a reality we cannot touch, nor feel. There is no one
around me to talk to -- not the way you did with your friends. All those hearty back-
slaps, secret snoggings, deliberate hugs,......even tickilish glances. We have forgotten
to torture ourselves like you did, simply to write such wonderful verses. How I wish I
were
'Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup...'
Whenever I stroll with aak2, my robot valet (he is actually my master, I sometimes
feel -- O misery ! misery ! ), into any of our Past-Mist-Freeze-Vaults, I look at the
painful expressions of people walking sloppily through the slush of melting snow, the
baleful looks directed at the heap of fallen autumn leaves, the irritation-wrinkles on
sweat-lined brows during hot summer noons -- and I want to reach out and tell them
they are hitting the wrong targets. It is their future generations that are going to be

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the real victims......they will suffer subliminal damages because they will not be doing
these very things. I would love to trade my present with their present. With your
present, Dylan.
'I would not fear the muscling-in of love
If I were tickled by the urchin hungers
Reharsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.'
We who skate on MCTs (Mnemonic Control Tracks) and watch the very cauldron
where knowledge is parboiled, we are actually, poor. We are 'deaf to spring and
summer' and we know 'not sun nor moon by name', we are the new race of super
humans. Our themes are not as simple as the fusion of sex, birth and death. We never
smell flowers, nor are we stung by bees ; we never kiss a lover's lips, nor are there
tearful partings ; we never smile in rhymes, nor are we able to drown in prosaic
depths.
I must be strange one even for aak2. You know Dylan, I had once quoted these lines
of yours :
'Out of your sighs a little comes,
But not of grief, for I have knocked down that
Before the agony; the spirit grows,
Forgets, and cries;
A little comes, is tasted and found good.....'
Before I could even finish, aak2 quizzed me instead with these statements :
"Searching for 'little' in recipe section."
"Wait."
"Command not found."
"Check from following options : ....."
....and then there was a list of recipe options and I had a truly tough time transposing
sanity to his circuits gone haywire.
I envy your evasive way of life, the seductive pleasures of friends, the parasites called
loafing and goofing that you all so readily adopt...believe me, when I say, that our
destroyers are the same. Its the same 'force that through the green fuse drives the
flower' that drives the chariots of destruction.
Though its equally true that your destruction leads to a fresh beginning, maybe a
crossroad. You get started again and spend your years destroying and rebuilding
anew. But me, I have entered an indestructible mental life and so I only have a start
and an end. Is this the truth that you had dreamt of, Dylan ?
Just one life with no life in between.
No options.
My life is one big crystal that reflects smiles that have no tangible existence. Even my
name is a reflected convenience of aak2 : Gubaar. He says that in a dialect once
spoken in what used to be Central Asia, it meant 'trapped feelings and emotions within
a life-form'. Thats probably the reason why I am what I have become. That must be
the cause for so many images being born and dying in another, that must be the
foundation for this sequence of creations, re-creations, destructions, and
contradictions ......all yet unable to destroy my indestructible mental armour. That
must be the start of my search for the end of dreams. Your futuristic fantasies, my
dungeon inherited.
That must be why I have always longed to move away.
(NOTE : All quotes in italics are written by Dylan Thomas. )
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