Getting old, getting old. I wake up in the morning and things are hurting. I tell myself it's simply that my sorry excuse for a bed should have been replaced years ago, but sometimes I wonder. My hands and forearms hurt at work and I tell myself I simply need to remember to go get some more bromelain, but sometimes I wonder. I have trouble focussing my eyes on the monitors at work or my own monitor here and I tell myself I'm just tired and I need new glasses, but sometimes I wonder.

I have a gray hair in my Padawan braid. If that's not a contradiction in terms I don't know what is.

I have even more gray hairs in the bits around my ears. Undoubtedly I have more in this mass of human wool I laughingly refer to as my hair, just that in the Sagan-scale numbers of hairs on my head it's pretty much unnoticeable. I guess there's some advantage to looking like Cousin It.

Just tired and stressed-out.

Angry at myself for being stupid and clueless and a coward. My grand plan to die with no regrets isn't going to happen. Sure, I'm not hurting anybody but what have I done? I've done what I believed in. There's so little to believe in anymore.

I suppose it makes me a weak kind of person, that I need to believe in things and have some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. That I need something to remain a constant. One tries with abstracts but it seems pure constructs of the mind just don't cut it. The bright future of humankind in space died with the landing of Apollo 17, although this week's triumph of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne may revive that hope. The visions of a shining future here on Earth via the technologies just around the corner, always just that next generation into time. We were supposed to be on Mars by now, living in mile-high towers and commuting to work via maglev train or space elevator. HAL was supposed to have murdered Frank Poole and the scientists in coldsleep three years ago, somewhere in the vicinity of Io. I should be sending this via videophone from a wheel-shaped space station with Pan Am shuttle flights on approach visible through the window beside me.

Why are we still fighting over tribal god images and liquified dead dinosaurs? We're supposed to be better than this.

Somewhere between HAL and Neuromancer, something went wrong.

When did the Monolith turn into the Ono-Sendai? When did that pristine white space station turn into Night City?

When did the future turn from a place where humankind might transcend itself into simply a place to kill people and make money?

HAL went squirrelly because he was forced to lie. Wintermute and Neuromancer played with human lives like Silly Putty and didn't bat an electronic eye when their plans killed and injured hundreds of people. What am I supposed to think about this box on the floor at my feet that holds my life? It holds my words, my worlds, the myriad pieces of myself. At any moment a virus could come along and wipe the hard drive like a virtual drive-by shooting. At any moment the drive could crash. Any moment. Our electronic lives are at the whims of these unsentient, unfeeling machines, poised on a nanosecond knife edge of the flow of electrons through microscopic circuitry.

They keep us here, I think. Staring into the electron fog.