Phantom Limb Syndrome

by submission
April 18th, 2007

Author : Joshua Reynolds

My brain burns with electric fire. Numbers cascade across the surface of my mind, one after the other. Geometric progression, X+Y=XY.

Numbers are the language of heaven, or so they tell me.

They replaced my gray matter with plastic parts and curling, multi-colored wires, tossing organic muscle in favor of synthetic. I am a difference engine sheathed in limp meat, my only joy to theorize, calculate, and process. To spit numbers out of chapped and bleeding lips in a pitch too high for the meat-men who control me, who made me, to hear.

I do it to spite them, I think. I’m not sure actually. I can’t remember what spite feels like. Or any feeling for that matter. Do I still have them? Feelings?

They told me I don’t. But is that an opinion…or a command?

Sometimes, amidst the cool rush of numbers, there is something that cuts through the datastream, a burning sensation that reminds me of something I used to know. When I look down at them from my web of cables and conduits, when I look at the gray little men with their clipboards and the number hunger in their bland little eyes, I think I catch the ghost of a memory of a feeling.

I think it’s called hate.

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