3. Plastic diagnostic

Your laolao is sick today. Pain and fever, a bad flu quickly building-up. Seems I’m under a full-scale invasion. Shock-waves creating craters in my brain. And I’m bleeding a bit: The hysterical side-effect of a flaw in my shields.

I’ve often battled solar storms in my youth, they’ve left me tired and unprotected. My lungs, from smoking too much, are like a deep lethal plasma sea. Powerful mass ejections endangering the fusion core. Hellish conflagrations breaking all data streams.

The air recycling system is off line. Turbulence is giving rise to flares, tons of blinking warnings have set up base on my global positioning system. The menu window no longer offers an off-world refuge option.

On the very edges of my awareness, exactly where my spacesuit soon intends to call its bluff, I feel like I’ve become an endangered specie, dispatched to an unsecured location, beyond the reach of reasonable senses.

I feel I’m almost ready for one of those out-of-body experiences. I better take an aspirin.

And keep radio silence.

Muffled voices in the distance have left heat signatures on my mainframe. It’s an ambush. I can’t reach the decontamination area. Let’s hope there’s a fail-safe feature, some sort of covert operation unit, antifreeze in the engine, anything to help me bypass this plague.

It’s just the flu, little baby, hurting my morale, which happens today to have forgotten to pack its biohazard gear.

While I look for rescue equipment, and count the impact points given by positive thinking, I’ll keep a self-adhesive target in mind: I want gigantic auroras to lay in your future.

And I’ll take exquisite care of myself. No human waste is impregnable. These hostile parasitic colonies, which have landed in force in my inner sanctum, at my command will storm out and I’ll obliterate them with the oblique, but enduring patterns of my optimism.

Your resilient Laolao

2. Our Doppler effect

Still on the language issue - adding to it quite a perceptible concern for chronology - I want to tell you that at my birth, eons ago, nothing was said.

That made me, right from the start, a fictitious character in need of a magnetic message. A bit like one needs a compass or, better, a great number of space observatories to move around.

You see, there should have been somewhere something said loudly enough so to guarantee that I heard the entire cont(in)ent. A sequence of dense plasma particles engraved in a cosmic cultural context I could have identified with. Words with such luminosity properties that any physical displacement would have, with astonishing accuracy, predicted all those close encounters one needs to be wary of during a lifetime.

I came into this world full of hope for a language, one that would have been available exactly at the beginning of it all, filled with pulsing wavelengths, a celestial map which would have indicated what needed to be known – the movements and the exact positions of all large objects - in order for me to function properly in the years to come.

As I opened my ears for the first time, I expected a long, exhaustive sound carrying a solid, reliable meaning; a fundamental, essential explanatory sentence (it didn’t have to be long, just complete), spoken with clarity (I was a baby after all). Syllables well detached from one another forming eventually an introductory paragraph, with a thesis statement followed by supporting details keen to elucidate whatever questions might pop into the mind of a new being gifted with a spheroid head.

Yes, an algorithm.

I wanted a method for data collection.

And I was deprived of that. So I turned my back and left, in undefined wails of protest: If you must know, that’s the origin of the ‘malaise,’ my dear.

I was terribly stunned, you can well imagine, as the umbilical cord was cut, leaving me dependent upon my own much underdeveloped devices, unable to figure out the procedure to grow into a step-by-step person.

So, it didn’t happen, the growth, and that’s why I had to contend myself with an embryonic structure to build entire future universes.

This is who your Laolao is, my dear: Someone who has believed there was a glitch in the machine; who has thought all her life that it must still be out there, the message meant for her, its sound waves intertwined with all the useless speeches listened to, decades after decades of cataloguing astronomical amounts of systems; A diluted message, lost, weakening by the minute, but still carried through time, covered by voices that have psychiatric haloes like sensitive information one keeps for the sake of self-preservation.

In this cacophony, I spied. And spied. And spied. Stretching my auditory abilities as deep as they could go into the ancient memories of the world, in an intense search – I like to call it a stellar evolution - for a trace, a bleak whisper, whatever would be left of what I wish I had been told. Well in advance.

I never gave up trying to pinpoint this feeling powered by the ‘already-heard.’ I even came to accept that I had been the one, the fool, to misunderstand silence, mistaking it for absence.

A cloaked message, that’s what it must have been, did I sometimes convince myself, my remote sensors in untested overload mode.

It lasted a long time, this sad mindset, the same way radioactive materials tend to last. Isolated.

It made me carry around my personality a dangerous asteroid belt of well-studied, but destabilized words and phrases.

You can still, I’m sure, intersect with their remnants.

Fortunately, I’ve recently spiraled out of dark matter issues. Tidal patterns emitting mutually attractive atmospheres have put a final date, or fate, a deadline to my quest.

Happily, you came, lovely one, confusing all the tongues spoken around you in a clever effort of creative imitation. This has resulted in a new, mysterious language that can’t yet communicate anything as you are so young. And we get along just fine.

Antimatter purely coincidental to matter.

You have, my children and grandchildren, great philosophical implications, which will help examine the turbulent belief system my descendants have no wish to inherit from me.

You’ve changed my exposure to the heavy elements of this life and extracted from the event a unified theoretical model, a large-scale single open question capable of absorbing, digesting all in-falling clusters of molecules, tantrums and dizziness experience can exult.

A passage out, regardless of the viewing angles, in the advent of an expansion of our universe.

Light years of immense elastic tension becoming just that, a nice bandage for undiagnosed disorientation.

Therefore, as my spaceship crashes towards Earth, I might consider recognizing the right altitude where it’s sane to eject. Where it’s ok to trigger whatever’s still operational in the mental technologies deeply wired into each of our own personal zenith.

Or perhaps a sharp spark in my antenna will finally suggest a proper re-entry curve.

Be patient. I’m not crazy at all, simply an old lady who has revolved along her own axis a bit too much, always loyal to the vertiginous laws of mechanics. But they’ve just snapped these laws, at the approach of tiny errant atoms rearranging letters. Stowaways glowing among other fugitive space crews.

I hear you flashing your electron streams at my control panel. You want to rectify my trajectory. And galaxies twinkle by analogy. A reason today for wonderment. Plus for an awe-inspiring shift in pitch to confirm our Doppler effect.

Your Laolao

1. Language choice

Right now, I don’t quite know which language to use.

It was said, ages ago, that I had the gift of tongues, and I add: a built-in retrieval system to sort them all out. Now, they haunt me, shreds of words stretched out of shape, muddled up, spiraling helplessly toward the outer fringes of my ageing memory; a maze of vaporous translation layers, half-erased, imprecise. More like galactic debris.

The first language I ever heard must have been French, then probably English. As I matured, learning to vibrate at the sound of Italian- or Spanish-speaking boyfriends, I hurried down the path of romantic eloquence - a linguistic apprenticeship very much like a gravitational pull, primeval and triumphant, my entire metabolism then transformed into instinctual vocal energy bound in orbit around earthly pleasures.

Today (for reasons to be explained at some other time) I try to speak Chinese.

To be honest, this zigzagging across languages has meant frequent and prolonged exposures to many agitated worlds, sufficiently to deeply compromise my structural integrity.

Yes, I’ve ended up off balance and do realize, without being entirely surprised, that my situation is totally unpronounceable.

From all the outer spaces that I have known at one point, I have begun my descent, soon to be a burning, incandescent one, at an explosive velocity that will, I have no doubt, rip me apart.

I have therefore very little time, my lovely ones. I am broadcasting on all channels to reach you: I am your grandmother and there are a few things that I must share with you. I will do so in (often bad) English, mainly because the keyboard wants to. And also because I do not know which codes you will be using when you reach school-age.

Laolao

Introduction

Back then, undisputed authority placed me - who is without a name, although living in the absolute - at the very beginning of a long list of mechanistic justifications, but it’s recently been discovered that this authority is nothing more than the noise made by the endless echoes of a bad joke.

It was all supposed to have been neutralized during the 20th century: We, without a name, but living in the absolute, had been told (many times and in many ways) that we had been freed from all sorcerers, soothsayers and buffoons; and from then on, that we could absentmindedly walk in perfect, clear, safe circles for the rest of inexistence.

But as memory left, we sensed from afar the signs of creatures at bay. We recognized the special effects imposed on our dying shadows. We were still without an inked name and in the absolute, but were nevertheless running wildly along a path that was reputed normal and perfectly integrated to the obscure, but impeccably edited image of the world.

We became suspicious.

We had no choice but to imagine a caesura - then, almost awake, we groped around for the light switch and exposed all the negatives of ourselves we couldn’t google. Only this way were we able to find some of our eyes buried in pixelized grains of dirt dropped, dragged by our own not so imaginative hands caught in redundant moves.

At that very moment, the captions laying low at the bottom of our mind felt a tiny, scarlet pulsation, and our own awkward translations finally resumed their shining, definitely guiding us out of the reel, and indefinitely into the real.

We had perhaps found, on the borders of ourselves, a key word undeniably affirmative, dissimilar and epic, never typed in a chatroom. It had all the inverted colors of our iris and the shape of a fast moving eyelid crashing down on numerous lies of omission never posted anonymously.

In shock, we carefully read the subtitles that had been hidden from time immemorial; in fact so well hidden were these subtitles that we had to unlearn everything, particularly unlearn how to download our own virtual rhythms while playing games that had no one in sight. And of course no insight.

Our eyes, in energetic terms, were finally able to articulate the libidinal at large, thus providing the three dimensions needed to reach the sky with a lucid and eloquent fist – a blow that could be watched without getting blinded by the brightness of liquid crystal displays plugged in as personal and strictly intimate great walls.

We saw indented limits all the way into the heart of things; and through the marginal and parallel holes of an outdated roll of film we did play, but only our own undetermined role.

That was for the best.

Visions were no longer austere, of an anguished nature, and our brain no longer cared to ask how much time had passed by since the last frame shown on (or out of) line or since the framing of the last victims.

No more simulated happiness. No more insipid ideals. We turned away from the mediocrity and the ridicule of sophisticated orders simultaneously shouted from multiple megaphones aimed at creating the very constraints that come with an exacerbated sense of stoic beauty and/or beautiful branding.

We agreed to renounce all credits. And to delete the FBI warning usually posted before scripts turn for the worse.

We still, to this day, consider our deformities, our angles, chaotic gait, hatched lines and our broken awareness splattered all over our bodies and texts to be quite luminous, indeed, in their primitive essence. And we still, to this day, seek a savage form of ambiguity.

Our refusal to focus on visionary words, as much as our disruptive mental panoramic shots, have all contributed to transform the view into transparencies.

We have also eliminated ourselves as potential stand-ins for future stars listed in the elegantly forged credits shown at the end of the featured truth. We’ll stick instead to veracity and its infinite kinematics.

We are eyes without a name and in the absolute. But we can now see the sorcerers, soothsayers and buffoons wrapped up in their giant screens featuring long and miserable careers in various political formats.

They are standing over there, their lenses all fogged up from the heat made by perpetual mouse motions and the frantic flight of our plots.

We have opted for open-air cinemas, no films shown, nothing reviewed, just the repeated sequence of kissing in the back-seat of ocular dimensions oblivious to the night.

Still without a linked name and in the absolute, we know the difference between what should be seen and a made-up scene.

I am like many others.

But I am also - it's no longer a secret - the laolao who loves you, little ones.

I am so old, a thousand years old maybe, so old that I can’t be sure I’m still around. I must therefore depart and seek your presence in a world I know nothing about.

That will virtually make me an alien when I reach you.

So I will write throughout the trip to make sure that it remains so, that I’m never quite recognized as such.

With all my love I do give you, as sole inheritance, the entire future I will not have.

Of course, it’s not possible for me to understand what I write from so far away, woven within the fabric of the space-time that has held me, but you will, sweet ones.

Laolao