there we were
staring blankly at the screen
the error prompt called for
immediate demodulation
but it may as well been written in Latin
or Sanskrit –
I grabbed ahold of the digitizer with both hands
and began to **** and pry
which of course was not ergonomically correct
leaving me with a sore back and tattered finger skin
I caught the faintest sound
and thought maybe I had inadvertently tapped
into an alien frequency –
slowly it came clear to me that mainframe
only held a single kilobyte
and that with such a limited amount of storage
we would never reach the stars –
again, there came a slight modulation
with enough force to be considered noise
I instantly compared it
against the relational database
and realized, suddenly, that this had the potential
to be the real thing…
unfortunately I double checked with another terminal
and began to understand
what I was witnessing
was just a simple
user-friendly
videoconference –