THE LIQUID MAN AND HIS WIRELESS MODEM

1
One night, a year ago or so, Jack downloaded an application in the midst of a dream, while connected to a very odd site, while he thought he was sleeping.
It came as a surprise, like a slap in the face from an irate woman, having been devoted to her man for many years and finding out suddenly that he has without doubt been unfaithful with a next door neighbor - from behind while shaving – it came complete with some sort of info file in connection with the thing that told him he would need it; told him the application allowed him to download things directly to his mind.
Jack never forgot being connected in his sleep that night and sitting in front of some kind of fire-spitting, spewing, blazing monitor - flashing bits at him, and passing on zillions of lessons instantaneously - and in so doing – creating the world’s first auto-educated human being; except, at the time he remembered it as a dream, though had since plenty of concrete evidence to ensure that it was not, nothing is real now – it seems; if something is real then Jack thought he had an amazing unsolvable problem – a dilemma on his hands that would not simply be forgotten over time, washed off, as gravy from an early supper, or taken out with the morning garbage.
If something were real, then he would have to accept that in his reality, he could download things from outer space, possibly access the fabled Akashtic Record; or at the very least was having communications and relations with an alien beast or a divine creation or with a divine lord or – even possibly with Satin, waiting where he hides, like a Russian agent of the past, waiting to pop up and perform his miracles aimed towards creating just in an unjust world, through means that some deem only evil, but that certainly have played a role in the history of the world. If the devil is evil then it must be said that he knows best how to fight evil and whether it his goal or not, making bad elements into God like things. And in the world of today it would not seem strange if at this moment, as we speak, God is getting ready to hand the devil a new mission, to take his long ago disgraced assistant and put him back into service again. Would it be so strange? – like the C.I.A, once again authorized to kill after 911, while having been kicked out of and disgraced in Washington for thirty years and under an infatah-like order calling for its death and destruction, while simultaneously calling for the death in America of anything with balls.
And then thirty years later, as if it had been an accident – as if there were no changes in society leading up to and possibly even causing the events, calling forth its tribal warrior to make the world safe once again for its inhabitants, after abandoning common sense and dignity for three decades straight – as if to say that it were time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and all the kings men were going to give it a try. As if all was not real in the course of human history – as if humans had not played a conscious role in a myriad of events or those in Washington were really not culpable of anything more than having run the most powerful nation on the planet and ... shit happens.
Where ever blame lay there was no one touchable, existing human being – that could be blamed without causing a chain reaction that would cause a system to self-destruct; therefore:

Nothing is real. This is what they are telling him every day. Every day now, he has to make an online appointment with Dr. Salmon, who one day six months after the initial appointment would let Jack in on a little secret: Dr. Salmon would tell him that his motivation for studying psychology was an ‘incident’, as he referred to it, in high school; for a year he had become convinced he was a fish; he swam from class to class with lips pursed and puckering; and, while his teachers were talking, his lips continuously pushed out and sucked in as if to breathe; no dialog was ever enunciated from them, only a quiet sound resembling someone opening a pull top – a p- tin twang sound of air being sucked into a newly opened aluminum can.
During the first month of each semester he was sent to see Mother Fear, a battle axe of a woman out of the militant feminism of the sixties, who now had reached and carried her maximum weight of two and a half hundred pounds, and who hated anything and everything it seemed that had two balls and was capable in the future of displaying even the remotest resemblance to a scruffy unshaved face, many times. The boys of the school feared her as much as they might have feared the disciplinarian of the past and a thin cane that whipped and whined as it went through the air, and in their hatred of her, put thumbtacks on her chair and unmentionable lumps of things in her desk, which seemed only to serve the purpose of making her meaner - more ambitious in her endeavor to castrate every male on the planet earth – men were the universe’s one mistake in the creation of life in the realm of Mother Fear’s universe.

Then, at some point as the semester wore along, and settled into its natural railway-like groove with only occasional bumps and upheavals, the teachers would slowly begin to ignore him, or make him sit in the back row where he sat and sucked air alone, mildly annoying the students who sat in the row in front of him.
The only teacher he ever had a real problem with was in his auto mechanics class where his teacher had the unique, yet unfortunate, and certainly coincidental, in this case, - name: Mr. Fish. Mr. Fish being somewhat rotund was a bit more of a whale than a fish, and perhaps after walking into class several times and finding his glass whale paperweight placed in odd positions, alone on the empty surface of his desk, sometimes in the chalk well with a few choice words written above it always referring to a fish of some kind - the paper weight always glaring up at him, reminding him of his name and student-given moniker, Mr. Fish could be forgiven in his judgment and conviction that little Salmon made these clicking sounds only to infuriate him. The other students made bets on how many minutes of class would pass before Mr. Fish became irate and requested Salmon to wait outside the room, where he would sit with puckered lips on imagined pectoral fins until finally the bell rang, at which point he would swim back to his locker, flapping his hands and waving his fingers at his sides, for his necessary texts and notebooks, of which he often wondered the necessity of, since he already knew how to swim and the rest of his required world knowledge presumably resided within his genes.
Nothing is real, Dr. Salmon said to Jack on the day of their first online appointment: the words appearing to originate within the mind of the fish avatar that Dr. Salmon used as his online representation of himself, as if to say that if they see I don’t have fins they may insist, and unreasonably so, that I am not a fish.

Leave it alone... over and over, for years and still going strong – it is all in your mind, you don’t eat vegetables Jack, or not enough, or you don’t get out of the house – that’s all it is. And Jack. The most important thing to remember is that you are a human being... you are a human being...
... this one line, Jack repeated to himself, over and over, again and again, because you see - Jack no longer believed in the existence of the human race. Jack didn’t believe he was a fish... or a bird... or a cockroach – Jack believed and was absolutely certain – he was a clone. They told him so... it was in the info file. That file told him more than that. It told him about the existence of an antenna, and how it communicated with the clones - and how and when; however, it didn’t tell him exactly where in three-dimensional space the transmissions were emitted from, a fact that bothered him; nor did the file tell him anything as to the nature of what it was that was transmitting.

He hadn’t believed in it since the day he went to plug his Kindle into the USB port in preparation for downloading a book and saw a tiny spark fly from his fingertips, and had suddenly and instantaneously known the story – could, in fact, see the letters printed behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes, and could even read the story line by line - bit by bit. The fact is that Jack did not have to look at those sentences and words on the back screen of his eyelids – oh, if he were inclined, he could read the story, but books he never read, something in his mind read for him – bit by bit – came to logical conclusions, synthesized emotional epiphanies and incorporated in a pure crystallized form into his soul... almost without error... his mind’s reactions to the story... almost... not quite.

One day while searching Amazon for digital books, as his finger sat near an open USB port like a ship at birth waiting to be fuelled with diesel oil, he downloaded the entire inventory of the Amazon Kindle store through one stroke of the keyboard and a gigantic strike of lightening that having appeared to come out of the USB connector at first, then shot straight up through the roof – flash, leaving a burned out hole in the ceiling that rain never did fall through, though he could see the sky and flocks of white egrets flying above, and circling back, appearing to pause in midflight and peering down into his humble abode, before changing the angle of their wings and flying out from shore, eventually disappearing somewhere along the horizon.
He had a headache for a week and a half after and then one day while brushing his teeth and looking in the mirror, he thought his head looked just a tad as if something were inside, pushing out on the walls of his skull, stretching bone to snapping point (as he had, indeed, felt for the previous week and a half), in some futile but earnest effort at trying to get out as if a bird had flown in one ear and had been trapped bouncing its flapping wings inside his skull). His head looked, well, a little rounder than before – as if it had been a basketball, having lost some of its air and sitting limply in a forgotten corner of an unused room - a little flat - and then someone with a desire to make it jump through hoops had pumped it up until its face appeared from amongst its inscribed grooves and once again smiled happily out at the world while dreaming of hoops and large black hands. He felt like a balloon that given one last tiny breath would burst. He had in an instant - gone to school and gathered knowledge.

Of course, it had been a while anyway since Jack really closed his eyes for long periods of time... you see, he was terrified of sleep. He knew this was how and when they took his mind; how he became what he now considered an avatar-like clone; and how he knew things about mankind that he didn’t want to know; that were not meant to be known in the societies lived in in various locations across the globe. Data that would not ensure the continuously expanding markets, the boom of babies that would later grow up and go on marching in the streets and stores, nor support the formalities of war and the justifications of them, in the minds of peoples of democratic nations and communistic societies; thus, huge sums of money would no longer be able to be garnered through the building of advanced weaponry and in setting men to marching in unison with the aim of protecting what they were told was a precious gift - while killing other men, women and children - that some must continuously and without end perish, as the Mayans had once sleign a thousand a day out of fear of the end of a Sun in ritualistic sacrifice, for; without even holding a conversation with an enemy nation; negotiation with an enemy was much too dangerous under current conditions past and present and could lead to war; negotiation with an enemy state might lead to much as in the situation above – leaving politicians without a means of bringing in huge sums of cash above and beyond their civil salaries, and giving huge corporations no justification for producing weapons of mass destruction; not unlike a little boy or girl who having not been designated first up to bat – decides to take their ball home and refuse to play with the rest of the world outdoors, not only not playing with them, but preventing them from playing with anybody else with the possibility of the possession of bigger balls and bats more ready to take a swing at the world, or take their wives to bed, it appeared at times.

Jack figured something was downloaded that night so long ago, as a year and a half was now, as he watched lines of code glide by his eyes and flashes and brilliant pulses of light emanating from the surface of a magical, mystical screen, so brilliantly bright that he could not make out a thing; he had been like a deer staring into an idled spotlight that had somehow been left in horizontal position, transfixed in its glaring glowing beam and now glaring out across the road while its operator stood in the trees taking a leak with his back turned to the street.

Advanced mathematics, Latin, Molecular Biology, Unified Theory, Advanced Genetics: these once time consuming to be learned with toiling, sometimes gruesome effort kinds of subjects were now mastered in an instant, transferred across what must have been a connection of unlimited, if just for an instant, bandwidth. It was something akin to having a surgically implanted USB port in your brain and plugging yourself into a computer and filling up and out the neuronal network, making connections that had been preprogrammed by what some might naturally assume was a higher - more advanced race (Jack hoped and prayed for the best in this regard, he had visions of other things of which aliens played a key role in, and he felt at times, as if a worm had in some way gotten into his head and was now possibly growing and eating, knawing immense meticulous tunnels through his mind on its way to some unknown goal or purely natural one, refusing to stop until there was not any flesh left, perhaps finding the brain sweet and tender as some cannibalistic societies have described it, delectable.

It had been the education of the future, perhaps, Jack mused: granted to him a little earlier than in this world: When the baby of the future is born, he thought, after its first cry, it will be waved with an almost magic wand, and connections made in its mind, in the intricate neuronal network, within a web of many splendid neurons – a jelly like mass whose flavor is now decided at birth – scientists and artists can be preordered and come complete with their elective courses downloaded and installed, extra limbs are not unheard of, - perhaps a future baseball player would be born with four arms and four legs and able to leap seven meters and catch balls hit high over the fence with a harry mitted paw. Kids don’t like school and now they no longer have to go. Teachers have become computer programmer’s creations - merely lab assistants, have even donned white robes, and are injecting kids with thoughts and knowledge once run away from through the ditching of classes or the smoking of marijuana after school (and probably a fair share of pure unadulterated good old-fashioned mind control).
These kids knew what they needed to know. This was fine on the surface. The thing they didn’t know was what they didn’t know that they needed to know. What they needed to know had been decided by committees across the globe. Committees not crazy about telling a secret to the humans – secrets in the desert, strange shapes seen in the dark of night, things buried in the sand, IPODS that had been switched off.

But for now, Jack was the only one to receive this sort of advanced education - and this had happened in his sleep; and, no one would believe him if he told them. Jack didn’t know it then, but his mind had been programmed and then reprogrammed, and he was to become the first and only person in the world (for quite some time) to know he was a clone – the one and only soul to know his home lied in a clone; that we had been cloned in the image of ? - Jack had not been told ‘what’.
Jack woke up one morning – not so long ago at the time - and he found himself hearing the lyrics of a song that he liked and left to his own devices might have listened to is several times - Nothing is Real by the Beetles. He wouldn’t have thought anything of it, most likely not, but when he looked down next to his pillow the IPOD earbuds were dangling beside him and to make matters even more perplexing and uncomfortable - the IPOD wasn’t even switched on.
Jack would be twenty-five tomorrow and a dapper twenty-five at that, so he was pretty sure he hadn’t lost his marbles, blown a gasket, or grown feeble and weak hearted in his sleep – but he did wonder if he had prayed somewhere his soul to take - and if ‘I die before I wake’ - and pretty much figured he had been taken somewhere – somewhere albeit unusual - yet with a beauty of a kind, a newness of spirit, a mind-blowing place that for all he knew might be on the other side of some vast galactic rainbow that played tricks with light, gravity, and the unified forces and theories of physics, which at that time were not fully understood and looking less complete as each day subsided into the past, that was somehow able to take a pinprick of light and turn it into itself as if traversing back through a magnetic tunnel and dumping its riders out into an infinitely empty room.
He saw dancing before his eyes, ions switching off and on and different states of mind, as a vast array of worlds swam before him. It was as if his world was shorting out and in, diminishing at times, than coming in to focus again; interspersed within the lattice were dots of past events and future ones, dots that blinked and twinkled like silver dust in sunshine and as a particle of this dust danced before his eyes, a tiny piece of the universe was shown to him as if he were looking into the eyes of a bee with a microscopic lens or a beehive had been shattered and each cell become a movie screen with tiny moving pictures playing inside. He was looking at a million tiny round mirrors, floating all around him, each with its own bit of world and a cinematic scene, and he could simultaneously listen to each dot and view each story, as if in the night someone had hung and let dangle a hundred thousand smooth silver open-faced pendants interspersed with star moon spinner rings from the ceiling of his room, each at a different height using invisible string. The silver discs twirled and spun before his eyes, turning off and turning on as their tiny pictures swung and rotated towards and away from him. Each coin was spinning rapidly but slowing, then spinning rapidly again, and as a coin faced him rays of light would strike his face, projecting images and repeating revolutions so quickly that he could put some sort of galactic puzzle together from the images into what appeared to be another possible world, a record of the past, the present and the future. They seemed to mock him as if to say we were all part of a previously planned adventure planned from the beginning to the end.
*
Jack had grown up with media of all kinds - and it had bothered his parents - that he never went outside. Both of them worked – he had been a latchkey kid - and when they came home Jack was always on his computer, or plugging electronic cards into motherboards or rearranging cables. Until he was eighteen things had gone on like this - when Jack turned eighteen his parents rented him an apartment. They had raised him to adulthood and now was the time to turn him out into the real world, but as we know the real world did not exist in his cornucopia of knowledge.
For Jack, being turned out into the world meant one thing only really, and the one thing that he was most apprehensive about - that he had to go outside, that at a minimum he had to get from this house to another abode.
*
Jack made it to his new apartment and set up his internet connection, and as he was making plenty of money online at this stage of his life, he never had to go outside again for quite some time. Then one day Jack realized he didn’t need a PC to download things; that he had installed an application in his sleep. And from that point on everything was real and not real, all at the same time. You see Jack was a clone. For some reason (perhaps the antenna in his mind was not compatible with the ship’s antenna - his model had after all been created in a flash, a long time back) Jack needed to have a wireless connection in order to connect. He could not connect to the Net as some might conjecture - just by looking out the window or transmitting his thoughts to another town. For now he had to have his wireless adaptor turned on.

Jack thought he knew everything about everything there was to know everything about – take baseball - he played the game on his Nintendo-in-his-mind. Always in the background he heard the words - nothing is real; – smelled scents of Scaroughborough fair and strawberry fields - and found comfort in the lyrics We all live in a yellow submarine... a yellow submarine...a yellow submarine. He may have innately been aware that outside the hull – sharks were waiting – things that lived in murky places – things with dreams that pulled you in them, but these things Jack learned could find you in your dreams in the quiet of the night, in the warmth of your bed, somewhere on the other side of midnight as dog’s howled at things they saw in the wind, of things they saw we couldn’t see; and dark things flew across the sky in search of something between you and I and them.
Jack didn’t have to go outside to find these things – they found him. Those bits and pieces of his education that had been missing came one day to fill in a few bits and pieces and complete a puzzle that Jack once left set aside. They may been waiting for him on some forgotten playground of the past - on an empty spinning merry-go-round when he was five, but he never arrived. They had been waiting for him in the sand beneath a slippery steel slide at one point. They had been waiting for him. They had things to tell him and knew now the place he occupied. It would have been, oh, so much more pleasant while he was swinging in a swing set, kicking legs up high, but now he was twenty-five. And they found him in his mind. Bob Marley might have told him ‘Your home is in your mind.’
*
His mind had downloaded all things and yet as he read through a screenplay - one that had somehow gotten stuck before his eyes, calling his attention to it through duration - click,click,click - for the Sound of Music, he heard not the music in it; and for now, he chose to stay indoors. And he would, for a bit.