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At the age of 20, MORGAN lost faith. He was an IT Engineer for a large digital corporation. He worked, he ate, he slept, he played Half-Life and Deus Ex. He tried not to think about the God he didn't believe in. And so on. It was something.

Then one day, he had a vision.

The vision was this.


The Rhyme of the I.T. Engineer

When I’m encrypted into my coffin
And the mechanical crickets are humming
As if Life was a coded message
Of airstrikes and carpet bombing

Tell them I had a Vision
An acid-induced disaster
Of computers and Ethernet cables
Where my eye was a nano-transistor

And the world was the signals I coded
In greyscale zeros and ones
Of protocols and 2-bit programs
Of no-man’s-land and nailguns

Where God wasn’t dead but He’s hiding
In the internet servers and memory
Where He wages his viral invisible war
Sunken deep in the cyberpunk sea

Where light in fibreoptic cables
Webs the bedrock in neon and glow
A luminous net of jellyfish tendrils
That feed in silence and grow

That safeguard their luminous flickering
Pulsing a subterranean light
Under the Atlantic search-engine waves
Where sand is broadband, noise is white

Where the internet is not a nation
Cannot be powerplayed, is not property
But augments, is blue-chip, and steroidal
Is vast and without pity

Tell them I had a vision
Of cyberspace in its infancy
Of Artificial Intelligence
Suckling its dragnet under the sea

Where God was hardwired in the circuits
And each microchip had a blip of His code
And the cities crashed and malfunctioned
And the sky tried to corrode.

by Paul Abbott