Amir and the Singularity

by Sonya Thompson

joystick, jump, fracture, correlation, discipline, live

The disciplined life that Amir was used to was about to be torn apart. At exactly 3 minutes past noon on Wednesday August 14, 1978 Amir set eyes on his first real life Atari. It was marvelous fear at first sight. Why you may ask would this produce such a strong and violent emotion in a healthy, intelligent and fun loving boy of 8? was it the size? was it the Joystick with it’s all too erect posture? was it a memory long repressed? no, it was something far more sinewy in texture in his sticky, quick small brain. He stood still and silent.

“Don’t you like it?” his Uncle Anthony asks, a bit uncertain at his strange reaction.

Amir starts, there is someone else in the room but him and IT.

“No, sorry, Yes! Yes! It’s awesome! Thanks!”

“Do you want to try it out?”

Amir stares for a moment more “...of course!”

It was something he had seen in a dream, or let’s call it what it was, a premonition. Exactly two mornings ago Amir had found the future was written in code on his cereal box, he has extraordinary vision, a mind for patterns. That monday between the grapefruit for him and his mom and the milk something about the pattern of pinpricks of yellow on the back of his Cheerios box stopped him dead. The offer of free Star Wars coloring posters within the box had last week been meticulously colored and were gracing ThePrivilegedPlace on his bedroom wall. He had read and re-read the discount offer on the back from Kenner Toys, and had started to make a game of the patterns in the drawings. Perhaps it was fact that he had already read and looked at this box for days that changed it into a day of ThePatternGame for him. Time seemed to stop, and sounds too, the color pinpricks of the box were all he was as a being for that moment. There IT was presented to him in morse code of yellow, a message from the future set out just for him.

It was a moment from the movie, the one we all hope for as children, but fails to materialize, except for Amir it did. This was a message to tell him of his special gifts, and to give him a vision of the future that only he could bring about. A warning? A vision of a better world? It was indeed an encrypted, inscrutable message, but He understood and had a vision of what must be begun. It was a vision of the future, the last moments before the earth became new again, before the human race finally emerged from their grub like state into the newly evolved singular creatures. This vision was in the making long before Amir’s birth, before Alan Turing’s work at Bletchley Park, before Ray Kurzweil’s first breath, long before binary code was dreamed of, or James Thomson’s first inklings of inspiration, this began with the first single celled creature and in the mind of God.

Amir plops himself onto orange shag carpet, and smells it’s familiar musk, and absentmindedly pulls on it’s long fibers.

Taking a cartridge from on top of the television, his uncle inserts it. “It’s got 128 colors, and is fast!”

Brewing for years in the perfection of chaos and reason that was the childhood of Amir Zarkesh, his orderly life had come into sharper focus recently with his creation of ThePatternGame, Morse Code, of his obsessive thoughts of the patterns in the veins of the leaves of plants. This was his orderly world.

But the siren song of that Joystick terrified him, and was part of his destiny. He knew it all could come together, or crashing down around his ears with the choices he made entering into a relationship to this machine. ThePatterns on the Cheerios box, and his vision of the birth of a new future told him as much. His conduct would be judged by the wild chaos of his future life. Would he become engulfed in the world of Pac Man? Becoming nothing in the future but a basement dwelling-sweatpant-wearing cheetos-dust encrusted slave to/ lover of his machine, or using his discipline to tame the beast inside him would he become a Golden God, using his powers to help bring forth the dawn of a new humanity, a part human, and part binary creature that would be the solution to so many of earth’s problems?

Daylight streams in past the plants suspended in by macrame, creating a glare on the screen.

His breath comes quicker.

Amir is handed the joystick.