QED-161803

1 - Circuitry

With circuitry throughout his plastic frame,
The modern man has programmed dreams: improved,
Perhaps, and full of product placement. Name
A corporation and it's there, removed
From any context that makes sense outside
A dream:  here, long-dead granddad's drinking Coors
And doesn't have a problem; Fido's dyed
The latest hues ("He's Genegineered, And Yours
For Four Low Payments™"); here, those anxious dreams
Of high school presentations don't arrive
Unless they're special-ordered; in those dreams,
You're always wearing Hanes.  Oh, he's alive
In there: we're sure he has a soul. Out here,
He strains to hear the anthem of the year.

2 - Subroutines

He strains to hear the anthem of the year:
Machines dictating lyrics to machines,
Constructing hooks and bridges that adhere
To code, the unencrypted subroutines
Of neural niches, every line designed
For inoffensive, omnipresent play.
The auditory landscape can't unwind
Its tangled, plotted mass; the great array
Envelops and invades to inundate
Receptors cells; the mess of music plays
In streams direct to spiral organs, straight
To eyes, pretending to be songs.  For days,
His lyric hagiography's the same,
A one-hit wonder's effort near his name.

10 - Designations

A one-hit wonder's effort near his name -
He hears his verse beneath the neon sign
Whose six-foot letters struggle to proclaim
Their purpose. Dead and blinking, with a whine
That halts his line of thought, where he can see
A portion of his designation:  'Q
ED,' the Christian part of QED
1618 oh 3, the overdue,
Imperfect melody arrives.  He's ill-
Equipped to process it: a song that's sung
By people? Singers out of sync? Free will
With space for noise. He's stripped of wire and wrung
From plastic. New, he shapes his robot ear:
Surrounded by the neon lamps; austere.

11 - Space

Surrounded by the neon lamps, austere
And silent, base in reason, with a form
Offensive to his function, his unclear
Quintessence - plastics, heavy metals, warm
And caustic fluids, empty space, and sparks -
Admits a sixth: himself. And like a sign,
The failing neon halo spits and marks
His brow two times.  One faint and greenish line
Pervades a denser green; the other, pink
And broad at first, plain vanishes.  This man,
Anew ungoverned, finds a space to think;
He apprehends his ashes: motes that span
Across his father's dust. Fresh-fledged, his chrome
Perspective sings above an empty dome.

12 - Herald

Perspective sings! Above an empty dome,
The cybernetic singer lends his voice
And joins perspective's chorus. Freed, they roam
The neural-lyric passageways, rejoice
To android rock, and weep for MMI-
Augmented arias.  The singer hums
Along; he doesn't know the words, or why
The music works, or grok the robot drums
Or calculus guitars; to him, it's song
For music's sake.  At last, he hears the drive
Behind the rhythm - notes reverb too long,
Or words are mispronounced - and comes alive.
He rings a neon herald like a chime.
The letters that still work pulse out of time.

20 - Message

The letters that still work pulse out of time
And flash a garbled message. Near the sign,
The drone stats truth and beauty, those sublime
And equal states, and labors to divine
Aesthetics from the dregs of neon tea.
The glassy tubes shine green, a frantic shade
Refracted like a punk-rock olive tree,
Authentic and uncurbed, a hand-grenade
Of color burning hot and short.  They speak
In riddles too:  they hiss of Keats, and thrive
On Stephenson. His android voice grows weak,
But weep for Adonais; he's alive
Inside that robot shell, and slips through chrome
Distracted by an urban metronome.

21 - Modern Men

Distracted by an urban metronome,
The modern humans circulate below.
The vulgar fraction, homelessly at home,
And etched across a mobius tableau,
Meanders to a beat the seconds pace.
Each tick reflects a step, and on they walk
While milliseconds track their neural space
And nanoseconds count each android squawk:
The bursts of light through vacuum-sealed brains.
With thoughts that spin on particles of dust,
The modern men ascend through well-marked lanes
And, single-file, crest through the urban crust.
They redescend, mistaking every time
Whose maestro's tin baton conducts the rhyme.

22 - Mr. Roboto

Whose maestro's tin baton conducts the rhyme
Remains a riddle he can't yet decrypt:
An android Oz, a cyborg King, a prime
Director architecting, nondescript
And hid inside an atom's quantum shell,
A voice that strings, recursive, through and through
From AI Isengards.  Profound, this Hell
Was made a Heaven: here, the drones eschew
Their eschatology and utter praise,
Ave Marias digitized. He hears
The domo arigatos, sees the glaze
Across bionic eyes, and disappears,
Rejecting his bequest for Kilroy's groove;
More feebly than before, the people move.

100 - Metropolis

More feebly than before, the people move
Along a damaged grid -- one two, one two,
One... one? The bits collide; they can't remove
A null, or power cycle its askew
Connection to the main. They crash instead,
While all about, Metropolis inveighs
Against its failing heart. Its systems shed
Their excess modern men; its core surveys
The damaged grid; it finds the absent drone
And, finding it malfunctioning, aborts
Its processes.  Inoperative, the prone
Machine, so briefly 'QED,' contorts
Into a cube.  He's zero-shipped: compact
About him like a gel, the air is packed.

101 - Unwound

About him like a gel, the air is packed
With sound: occluded noise, like underground
Sonatas sung through water. His intact
Assembly tells a robot's tale: unwound,
Herein lies one whose name was writ in sand;
His mental mechanisms tick no more.
But whither cyborg souls? Can his unplanned,
Demanded obsolescence answer for
The sparks he held within?  His metal sinks
To purgatory: blasting pits and belts,
The factory between, where plastic links
With flesh to make the modern man.  He melts,
And androids grapple, as their wreckers move,
With doppleganger dreams they can't reprove.

102 - Rebooting

With doppleganger dreams, they can't reprove
The modern men.  They wouldn't understand,
Nor could their overseers disapprove;
Their circumscribed ontology is scanned
Routinely, and the viruses of 'dream'
Deleted.  Likely, then, a dreaming drone
Would wonder freely: what is truth? What scheme
Exists, or could exist, outside my own
Condition?  But the modern man would then
Adjust, rebooting 'til its brain returned
To zero. Countless grids of countless men
Abort such thoughts, save one: as 'Kilroy' burned,
It dreamed as well, and saved him to extract
The similarity behind the fact.

110 - Kilroy

The similarity; behind the fact
Of robot life - their solitude within
Their mass - a delicate and inexact
Communion can be heard.  The one who'd been
Termed QED 1618 oh 3
Computes no more; though terminated, he's
Alive, and looks with human eyes on he
Who saved him from perdition.  Through unease,
The modern man smiles back, and QED,
Now Kilroy, comprehends.  Nearby, the core
Ignites; Metropolis, wise to the free
Device, locks down, while Kilroy, with a roar,
Redesignates.  As twenty bulkheads burst,
His handle intersects the twenty-first.

111 - The Core

His handle intersects the twenty first-
Born modern men Metropolis created:
In ternary design, the grid reversed
Old man's descent, 'til 'QED' awaited,
A seventh android son assembled on
A day of rest.  Now shorn of rigid gears,
Metropolis-like, Kilroy tastes the dawn.
Reborn with human eyes and human ears,
He shatters his creator with a word.
There is no man behind the glass, nor will
Beyond the screen.  Within the core, a third
Creator could emerge, and Kilroy, still
Restarting, hears the call to join the first
And second; centuries' half-rhymes, at worst.

112 - Darien

And second-centuries, half-rhymes, at worst,
To heartbeats, drum inside his android brain,
Their epochal vibrations interspersed
With echoes of creation.  Kilroy's reign
Below the neutral-network grid begins
And ends; he heeds instead the neon light
And excavates the core.  The android sins
Metropolis commanded die outright;
The modern men are people once again.
They stand around the ruins of the dome
Where, from the wreckage, Kilroy climbs. The men,
A silent, blinking sea of android chrome,
From Darien, surmise what he became
With circuitry throughout his plastic frame.

120 - Anthem

With circuitry throughout his plastic frame
He strains to hear the anthem of the year,
A one-hit-wonder's effort. Near, his name,
Surrounded by the neon lamps' austere
Perspective, sings above an empty dome;
The letters that still work pulse out of time,
Distracted by an urban metronome
Whose maestro's tin baton conducts the rhyme
More feebly than before. The people move
About him like a gel; the air is packed
With doppleganger dreams.  They can't reprove
The similarity behind the fact:
His handle intersects the twenty-first
And -second centuries; half-rhymes, at worst.