hen he woke, he did not remember.
He yawned, stretching in the Sunday dawn, going over to pick out clothes from his dresser, looking down at the book that was weighed open by the old flashlight.
“Dan sermon. In the beginning was the Word,” he read in his own writing. He stopped, picking up the book and studying intently. He had written those words, but he had no memory of writing.
But there it was, indisputable, in paper and ink. It could not be bent and twisted by emotions or persuaded by charismatic metemotions. It would not disappear without electricity and it could not be altered invisibly. It was durable and objective.
He stared at the alien part of him, an external piece of his memory, “In the beginning was the Word.”
Memory rushed like blood to the head, and he staggered back.
And it fit like a missing cog into who he was—into the mysterious, almost mystical drive for reading he’d carried, like a spellbound music-box geared to his heart.
Dan. One human, complicit in the system, that set his own life on fire. And the fire had spread to Isaac and set his destiny alight.
He felt courage pumping warm blood through wide veins, and he thought of her.
She was wrong. Even the deep-buried machine part can revolt. In fact, the deeper the dislocation, the more disruptive the chaos.
He needed his next book.