Part 3; The Afterimage 
(I sometimes think these descriptions are just a folly of my own hubris. The fantasy of some one reading these lines of wit, as they listen, may indeed be as frivolous as that dream I have of being dropped with Fanny Roos into a shipping container full of silk)
Years later —
 the fever had burned away.
What lingered wasn’t shame.
 It was a kind of phantom sensation —
 an echo of our former gods.
We could still feel the hum
 of that invented Eden
 in our fingertips —
 a ghost limb of possibility.
We scroll now through the wreckage:
 screenshots, forum posts,
 avatars frozen mid-laugh —
 archaeologists of our own delusion.
Each image,
 a little erotic —
 not for what it shows,
 but for what it almost remembers.
The academics would call it
 “dissociative nostalgia.”
 But that’s too clean —
 and for that matter,
 too hard to spell.
It was hunger.
 Pure, unrepentant hunger.
We were trying to make love
 to the infinite —
 and for a brief, incandescent moment,
 it almost loved us back.
Philosophers talk about transcendence.
 Psychologists — coping mechanisms.
But between them lies the truth:
 it was never about escape.
It was about becoming real
 through unreality.
A kink of the soul, perhaps —
 the desire to see ourselves
 lit from the inside,
 to be worshipped
 by the light we created.
Even now,
 as the avatars slide
 from data farm to matrix,
there are nights
 when the air hums
 the same way it did back then —
 low, electric, erotic —
and I swear,
 if you close your eyes just right,
 you can almost feel it
 download you again.


Second Life Part 3; The After Image

Bambino: One shop destroyed. Three heads split like overripe melons. One man wounded and one castrated. All in two hours. Just two hours I left you alone. Two hours.
Trinity: Well, you asked me to give you a hand.

Second Life Part 3; The After Image

MMMMudd