Suspended Sentence

and while children, to whom the future’s still a playground, are complicit in computers’ fantasies, not so this adult; scared witless, that one wrong button pressed will spell oblivion; a lifetime’s guilt stirred by the one word ERROR! in its deadly box; and then that solemn judgment that ‘this computer has committed an illegal act’ – so that I go to the window, switch out the light, and around the curtain look for that dark unmarked car across the way with its two immobile figures frozen in a mindless anonymity which could not be more suspicious – and now it tells me in unrolling words that ‘an uninterrupted playback will commence in more than one day’ – and life’s put on hold, the present time is stopped, and all our yesterdays are to be fast-backwarded, as it’s said may happen at the moment of our death; no longer are those sci-fi films the mind’s brief game; today I am to live in no placed place nor now-timed time; and as tomorrow’s dawn breaks grey and fearful, outside time itself, the playback of my puny life will roll… time (so to speak) for final cyber-irony: press Start to stop this virtual memory’s oblivion, and wonder if Prince Hamlet felt like this.