The house is empty. I remember coming here as a boy and I can still taste the popcorn we ate on the nights over, the nights I spent with John and Judy here.
But mostly I remember Galatea. I asked her, “Why me?”
I’ll leave out the erotic parts, some of the physical details. Judy would bring us popcorn, we would pop balloons, and when we became touchable, the argument about atomic cores, about whether the new poetry should be eaten or stored for future use. Judy would heat up the images and we’d (mostly I) watch till dawn. The others drifted off around midnight or later, earlier, what have you, given their natures, and I would wait.
She said, “Because you never ask and no one will wonder.”
Her voice was like a Christmas light. Her eyes contained the image of single snow flakes, sometimes the contours of sculpted fingers.
She would enter the kitchen. I remember her warm hands on my shoulders. She told Judy and John to avoid improper restlessness. “Look forward gladly to the long winters of school,” she said, and then she would wink at me, and her lips would shape out the repeated expression: “No one will wonder.”
But I wonder now. I wonder about the children we made in those days, me, Galatea, and the soft summer air under the trees.
In the older days of intelligent systems, everyone knew what was what, what was for search, what was for display, what was for organizing, what was for propelling. When I was five, the law changed, and when it changed, it became difficult to tell who had the synthetic heart that had become autonomous, cell self-generating, linguistically free.
“This is Galatea,” John said. “She’s the house, the container, she keeps everything going.”
I’d imagine all that in the dark when she came and in the morning when Judy and John had traveled off into their futures. But the now the house is empty and I wonder where she’s gone, what happened, leaving the physical dwelling empty.
And where were the children, our offspring? Galatea their mother, I their father, we together what, some of the details expressed elsewhere in motion image, and narrated in her own words?
