"Computer labs are always running in Universities," he said, turning his head back to me as he turned the key in the lock and opened the gate of the large rectangular cinderblock enclosure. "They feed academia. Power must be generated to feed us information, and this information must be stored. A digital database is a considerable academic resource. But she is a muse that demands to be there continuously. Records throughout the University are always being accessed, and from these sprawling piles of data, mounds of information are zapped through human eyes so it can be contemplated over. To do this, large sweating power generators and cooling units such as these throughout the campus feed mainframes. These powerful machines are rightfully taken for granted, as unless one is directly involved with them, people have other things to worry about -- namely, the information generated by the machines. But though it takes relatively calculable amounts of electrical power to feed our information networks, the physical weight of virtual objects as they travel through cyberspace is poorly defined. All the email sent in an entire year only weighs .0006 of an ounce. Not exactly something you can readily put on the morning scale. Yet, Henry, each one of those tiny emails weighs something, and infinity has the resources to magnify even the most innocuous number, no matter how far to the left the decimal place has gone.

"With weight comes gravitational pull. Some scholars wonder if there is gravity in cyberspace. People even smarter than me are struggling with it. It involves things like quantum mechanics, and an almost instinctual appreciation of concepts that would take me years and you centuries to understand with even the smallest amount of intellectual authority. The world's most gifted scientists study the physical properties of cyberspace, and they assure us it is no easy task. To a limited extent I have been forced to wonder about these things too -- at least as well as I can -- particularly considering human language as it morphs into strange fragmented entities within the binary model -- how phonemes, bilabial stops, fricatives, rounded vowels and yelps of pain, the winds that huff and puff up our larynx to be subjected to the whims of our tongues and lips, find themselves jostling through the massive free-floating apparatuses of computer networks, which know only lifeless digits. Once digitized, the disconnect between language and feelings becomes a matter of endless deformation, but through that deformation, I think that there are new possibilities. You, Henry, have contributed to this. All your gibberish is in the air around us, entered and stored. To get this data -- your sounds, your 'life rhythms,' as you call it -- I needed to bug your apartment. I had no choice; the template was irrelevant to me; the actual uncensored babbling was of course what I was interested in. You shouldn't be surprised. We have, you and I, skirted a few moral dilemmas already, and it would be hypocritical for you to object."

I didn't say anything. And he was right -- I wasn't surprised. Or, at least, not entirely. Nonetheless, I was enraged, and felt myself turning red with embarrassment. All those racist slurs, all those deranged, aggressive sexual fantasies I let myself indulge inside of what I thought was the privacy of my own apartment, all that talk about excrement -- who knows, other people may be listening to it and putting my words into weird graphs and diagrams. Oh, sometimes I had really let loose during my gibberish sessions!

"Can't you feel the generator pulling on us?" Beardsley asked, stepping closer to one of the large power units to demonstrate how it was pulling at him, and how it was causing him to lose his balance. "Can't you feel it?"

Beardsley's beard had become fuller since we had entered the enclosure. His face had shrunken, his ears had become enlarged, his nose more of a snout, and from either side of his mouth two long whiskers had grown. Alarmed, I saw a third whisker spring up from the right side of his face; it wavered up and down slightly, trying to orient itself after such a sudden birth. Beardsley's nose continued narrowing, projecting downward and outward in front of him; his forehead had become gray and hairy; his eyes smaller and farther apart.

I wasn't as curious as I was frightened, yet Beardsley did not seem to be a physical threat. What could I do? Resigned to addressing his question, I walked closer to one of the power generators, just so I could feel its pull for a moment -- and indeed, I felt it. Suddenly something seemed to crawl out of my lower back, and I found my hands clutching behind me at what appeared to be a newly sprouted tail.

Beardsley chuckled as he saw me make my discovery. "That's from the resinous ointment I prepared for you. Where does your nightly resin treatment come from, you ask? Right here! Ha! He grabbed my arm with both his hands and drew me to the other side of a large cooling unit, pointing at the flowering, fluorescently purple blossoms blooming aggressively on a clump of plants near the cinderblock fence. The stamens must have been made of steel, to carry the weight of their frantically large blossoms. "I contaminated the ones near the generator with urine from the lab mice," he said, "which of course contains trace amounts of morphine, along with various alkali I added to react with the strength of the University's fiber-optic connection. The plants, which are nourished -- or poisoned, depending on your perspective -- as much as possible by the mouse urine I feed them, are located in an electrical garden. The urine and the electricity interact as the plants they feed grow, and the resulting resin is a lubricating device that digitizes the gibberish and allows a smoother bodily communication with the internet. Without the resin our project would be like driving a truck into the side of a canyon.

"If I never noticed any naked, post-pubescent girls walking around your apartment with you, that is probably not just due to the lingering smell of urine in the resin, but because a side effect of the resin is impotence! You know very well that you haven't had an erection in months! Ha, ha ha! I added a little perfume to lessen the resin's smell. I douse myself with the concoction daily; you're not the only one. Did you know that some perfumes contain excrement? So do some cosmetics. That should interest you, ha ha! 

"Yes, Henry, I was outside your apartment in the street every night, and scanned your physiological responses as you jabbered, using frequency patterns generated by your contact with the resin. It's all on my laptop! By using a rough and ready phonological algorithm, I transcribed your thoughts. Think of your tail as the price of wisdom! Your stored speech-patterns themselves are more unclear even than when you talk in everyday conversation, but your thoughts are out there, out here, and they can be exposed to new forms of analysis; in short, you yourself have been digitized! You are my own personal server, my host, my internet provider. That pull you feel on you right now knows you better than you know yourself. Welcome to the world of cybernetics!"


Beardsley laughed again and walked closer to the generator, and his body became smaller and hairier. He scampered recklessly, and jumped up in the air, his body twisted in a loose knot, subjected to the magnetic periphery radiating from one of the larger power generators. He continued talking, and as he talked the slight squeakiness that had overtaken his voice intensified.

"I already know, Henry. They told me immediately, as soon as you informed on me. In one malicious stroke you ruined everything, just because I wouldn't coerce Benjamin into raising your grade. My fault was in not seeing this coming, and not buttering him up beforehand…! Carapace, the laundress, and feathers, blue… Ack…!" He struggled, gasping, his hands clutched at his throat, as if that would help him regulate his speech. "Now that everyone knows about the forgeries, it's all over for me. What an embarrassment!… Ducks, ducks, and bear markets too…. I should have known that if something went wrong, you'd turn Turk! So long, you cipher!"

Beardsley jumped toward a power unit. Very quickly his arms disappeared as the sleeves of his shirt flopped down. Two narrow rods tore out of both ends of his sneakers and revealed themselves as the hind legs of a frighteningly oversized mouse. His body, meeting the magnetic field, was suddenly pulled with incredible force against a generator, zapping against it with a great spurt of blood, and Beardsley's last sound as an organism stayed in the air behind him -- an ugly, truncated squeal. He had landed snout first, and the entire front half of his body had disappeared, ground up inside the generator's grille; the machinery behind it was now in the process of jamming and sputtering on the body caught inside its gears. All that was left of Beardsley now were two massively drooping hind paws protruding outward with a surprised-looking tail jutting upward diagonally. Blood, fat, and fur dripped nauseatingly down the side of the machine onto the grass into a gooey puddle, and from these remains I saw gleaming wires shoot up, twitching and proliferating opportunistically. A thin line of light flashed between Beardsley's butchered body and the flowering plants that he had contaminated. Suddenly the line flared from the other direction, and more waves of light shot from the blossoms to the generator, which immediately caught on fire just as everything went dark -- all the buildings around me had lost their power. The generator boomed loudly, violently, like a massive animal clearing its throat, which left me with a violent ringing in my ears.

Beardsley had gone into cyberspace.