“The laptop,” I said.

He fired up the laptop and launched two processes while I got the classifier going. “Maybe you should only run one of these,” he said. “That Asher’s still working on you.”

I agreed. “We have to go out to the club before dark,” I said. “But we have time to catch up on Google news. Let’s carve up this dataset and make a fine corpus, maybe toss in some Baudelaire . . . where’s the car?”

“We gave it to somebody cdr,” he said. “I have the iPod in my briefcase.”

“What’s the number? I’ll call down and have them load the bastard with dub and grime.”

“Good idea,” he said. But he couldn’t find the abstract among the tunes.

“Well, we’re fucked,” I said. “We’ll never convince the academy to give us a rental ever again.”

He thought for a moment, then pulled out his cellphone and asked for the garage. “This is Dr. Bridge in 312,” he said. “I seem to have lost my paper abstract for that red compact I left with you, but I want the car washed and ready to go in thirty minutes. Can you send up a duplicate abstract? What . . . Oh? . . . Well, that’s fine.” He hung up and reached for the named pipe. “No problem,” he said. “That man remembers my thesis.”

“That’s good,” I said. “They’ll probably have a big net connection ready for us when we show up.”

He shook his head. “As your advisor, I advise you not to worry about me. Also, stop spending your time helping the other students and get your own work done. That’s what graduate schol is all about.”

The top trending topic on Google news was about the rise of terrorism — a series of horrifying disasters: explosions and twisted wreckage, men falling for terror, Pentagon generals babbling insane lies. My mind briefly turned to how I could better the world using computational linguistics. “Turn that shit off and close the window!” screamed my advisor, “Let’s get out of here!”

A wise move. Moments after we picked up the car my advisor went into a food coma and ran a red light on Congress before I could bring us under control. I propped him up in the passenger seat and took the wheel myself . . . feeling fine, extremely sharp, a second-year student on the road. All around me in traffic I could see students talking and I wanted to hear what they were saying. All of them.  But the keylogging kernel mod was in the trunk and I decided to leave it there. Austin is not the kind of town where you want to drive down 6th street aiming a keylogger at the stars.

Turn up the radio. Turn up the iPod, fire up the Voice Memo app. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the few cool Texas nights that you can. Ah, yes. This is what it’s all about. Total control now. Tooling around the drag on a Saturday night in Austin, two academics in a fireapple-red Ford Focus . . . streaming data, ripping up papers, hacking the Python Twisted framework . . . Good People.

These stitches left him scarred, but ripe for the transplant.  He had been chosen out of a lineup of fifty boys his age to accompany the craft into the vastness of inverspace.

He stumbled upon a few recordings of other space cadets from back on earth.  His training records: physical fitness, organic chemistry, astrogation, descriptive linguistics so he would be able to decode the tongues of alien beings, should he encounter them.

But they soon bored him out of his helmet.

He was running dangerously low on new records, new sounds.  The same revolving discs over and over, the drumbeats and synthesizer riffs only go so far to bide one’s time, to guide oneself through the memories that are one’s only friends.

The sound of impending – something or other…  something he couldn’t fathom.

Piano keys into the mix.  He had an instrument somewhere on board.  Where was it stored, among the metric tonnes of dehydrated food and tanks of water?  He endeavored to find it.

Harmonics and lies scratching passed the time between the light displays from the rays of the stars … passin’ by.

Little lights in the sky were flashin’ by and by and side to side they were bein’ fried by the sonic waves of inverspace.

Slipstream, hip stride, what’s that outside, the stars are busy bein’ our guides while we’re takin’ a ride.  It’s gettin’ time to flip the side.

He had reached an intermission.  “End of Side 1.  Flip the record and press Play to Continue.”

Listen: Lazarus – 13 – Space Cadet 2

And just like that, he felt as if he had seen an angel… a holy vision that would guide his mind, keeping it from the transmoidial abyss.  Allowing him to focus his conscious thought and work toward guiding his own destiny, improving his own lot.  Even if he couldn’t control the ship, he could take control of his own mind.  His own … personal… odyssey.

There was one time he had done this before, at age twelve, when he ran the people off of his father’s convenience store after they had pinned him down and threatened his life.  He remembered pulling the shotgun off the back wall of the store and waving it in the faces of the villains…

He never had to pull the trigger.  The police had arrived just in time.   Thinking back, his bravery is likely what saved his father’s life.  But he recoiled, sinking back into a spat of depression.  His father never recognized his bravery, nor that he had saved his life and life’s work.  But this was such an abstract notion, and …

His mother… her knitting, patching up young Benny’s clothes after the boys had done their worst.  And his wounds.  In those days, a doctor wasn’t available for consultation, especially in the rural Idaho hills.  These stitches left him scarred.

But none of this mattered now.  He had seen the bright shinies of inverspace.

Memory is a tape that grows ragged over time.  It bends, stretches, warps to fit the present.

Listen: Lazarus – 12 – I Saw The Bright Shinies

The ship passed over a star from which a sonic emanation wafted in concentric waves visible to the naked eye.  The transom hummed with arousal.  He stood naked, his space robe loosely draped over his shoulders, and brushed his teeth.  Wake up pretty.

Then a voice like the sireen from the Greek mythology vids, the ethereal voices passing through the ether between the ship and the waves.  He pictured himself as Odysseus.  But where was Penelope?  Wake up pretty.

The console was lit up like a Christmas tree, and he thought today must be some special day in the heavens, or that this space must be the origin of beauty in the universe.  Wake up pretty.

Listen: Lazarus – 11 – Wake Up Pretty

He arose one day to the first motion on the nav console that he had experienced.  Something, Anything to break the monotony.  It was a gas giant.  He stood at the window admiring its magnificence of repetitive storms swirling across the surface, where each movement was unique, unlike the rest.  It was mesmerizing, and inspiring.

He began to realize that every day, however he defined or tracked it, was his own, and no machine, no matter how sardonic, could take that from him.

He was the black lizard taking refuge beneath a red umbrella.

He wasn’t to be counted among the dead yet!

Listen: Lazarus – 10 – Black Blizzard _ Red Umbrella

Death steals what only thieves understand,
takes that life and all contraband
and in the lonely quiet of a clearing,
judges, first by sight, then by hearing.

Death has shallow migratory patterns
causes migranes with twists and turns
down narrow alleys and busy streets
strikes up a match with everyone.

Death breaks a rhyme, puts time on hold,
grinds the sinews and ends the old,
loosens up a tight poet’s verse,
takes back every moment in the universe.

I agreed.  By this time the lab was barely able to cut the mouse turds and my howllucidations were down to a tolerable level.  The Dell service guy had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, his being a native Texan and all, but I was no longer hearing high-pitched CPU fans echoing down the corridors in pools of fresh connections.  The only problem now was a gigantic neon semanticist outside the department, blocking my attempts to enter his vaulted clique — millions of synapses cried out and were suddenly silenced by his overly-complicated discourse semantics, strange symbols & filigree, with discussions of one’s pedigree, giving off a loud hum. . . .

So much for the RAship!

“Look outside,” I said.

“Why?”

“There’s a big data . . . machine in the sky, . . . some kind of eclectic eel . . . coming straight at us.”

“Code it,” said my advisor.

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to study Old Norse.” He went into his office and began pulling my chain and joked about firing me. “Look,” he said, “you’ve got to stop this talk about eels and the inequality of the department funding those who have parents paying their way. It’s making me sick.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be gone by the end of this adventure.”

“Worry? Jesus, I almost went crazy down there in foobar.  They’ll never let us hack back into that place — not after your scene at the hash table.”

“What scene?”

“You bastard,” he said.  ”I left you alone for three semesters! You scared the shit out of those students! Waving that goddamn Parlin stride around and yelling about reptiles. You’re lucky I came to this campus in time. You were ready to call it quits and leave the program without an advisor. I said you should be my RA and that I was funding you up for your bold power. Hell, the only reason they gave us the lab space was to get you in there!”

He began medicating himself with a single album, which he played once per day, or whatever period of time made sense to call a day.  For all he knew, the span of this narration could’ve been as short as an hour or as long as a week.  Time ran together in a Pollock of confused layers spilling out over an unknown destination.  Slow and fast with periods of waiting in between.  He began to fear the destination of this journey set on autopilot, thinking it could only lead deeper into madness, and wondering if he was even moving at all.  He began to expect another person to appear at any moment, for one of the withered corpses in the cryobeds to suddenly come to life and amuse him, if only for a single moment.  Then he began to pray for this.

This single record, revolving at an odd, repeating 33 and a third.  Aftermath.  Was this the aftermath of some rogue signal from Earth?

Listen: Lazarus – 09 – I Am Waiting.

But those could only last him so long before he descended into the madness that came from being alone day after eternal day.  It was only a matter of time before he was utterly consumed by it.  What if I am the last one alive?  What then?  What year is it?  How much time had passed?  He was dying to know what day it was.  Unfortunately, the on-board computer had been reset for some time, and the battery had malfunctioned so there was no temporal compass to guide his speculation.

Listen: Lazarus – 08 – Equally Damaged.

To console himself, and to expand his mind beyond the limits of this outerspace brig, he began playing age-old educational records he found in the ship’s audio library.

Listen: Lazarus – 07 – You’s A Jaco Pastorious Looking Motherfucker.