Terminal Man

More about Terminal Man

Way back—forward—somewhere in that shimmering distance the scholars once called the future past, the original Terminal Man finally wore out. No one remembers how. His cables frayed, his lenses dimmed, his breath became a soft static hum, and one morning he simply did not return from whatever horizon he crossed. After that, they found me.

They plugged me in.

They set me up.

And somehow this became my job.

Now I sit here at the endless keyboard: ivory keys like fossilized teeth, humming under my fingers. The wires crawl around me like docile serpents, looping through my ribs, whispering along the bones of my arms. Every keystroke echoes through the architecture of the air—because everything is connected. Every kettle, every door hinge, every streetlamp, every mind-threaded lens depends on the quantum lattice that pulses beneath this universe’s skin.

The old scientists used to call it the computer fabric. But it isn’t fabric at all. It’s more like a reincarnated cosmos, the previous universe rewritten into circuitry so fine you need six senses just to sense its dreaming.

And I have become its musician.

My job isn’t to command the system. My job is to keep it dreaming—keep the rhythm, keep the pulse, keep the quantum connection from collapsing into silence. Somewhere out there in that folded, Möbius distance, the future past opens and closes like a giant mechanical lung. I tap into it with chord progressions old as nebulae. I maintain the link.

People depend on me. Entire cities breathe in time with the patterns I play. They don’t look at me anymore—they look at the lights flickering across their sky and assume stability. They assume order. They assume the Terminal Man never makes a mistake.

But I know better.

Sometimes, when I strike a key in a certain minor interval, I feel the old Terminal Man on the other side of time—a faint echo, a resonance, as if he’s playing with me from whatever place he retired to. Maybe he isn’t gone. Maybe he just moved further into the circuitry than any body can follow.

And maybe, one day, I’ll join him.

For now, though, I play.
All day.
Keeping the reincarnated universe alive, one trembling note at a time.