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Resurgam

Waking to consciousness is thankfully something we do not remember. Or perhaps it dawns slowly, before the mind has any need to store such kinetoscopic moments.

The rebirth was Jonathon Spires was quite different. Lightening flashed around the greenhouse atop the Battersea building, on a particularly stormy day. Only Tom the Gardener attended the foul smelling room twice a week, and he drank heavily afterwords. On one perfectly normal penut plant, perfectly normal peanuts grew, albeit at an accelerated rate.

On the other, the shells had a five point access, and indeed seemed like little legumes trying desperately to be voodoo dolls.

Hailstones rained down, and soon began to break the dirty glass panes. In the morning the greenehouse and its contents lie ruined. Birds picked at little shells holding legumes and little horrors of science, within. One remained untouched, hidden below some glass shards. The shell had been cracked by the storm. Out of it, a little man shape appeared, not completely formed, more like a pudding attempting to be useful. It sensed danger from the birds. The birds sensed danger. Running in a kind of floppy gate, it came to the southern edge of the building, teetering over the edge of the roof, and fell just as a gull swooped in upon it. a northerly sea breeze pushed it along until the little thing landed in the canal. If it obtained consciousness by now, it wouldn’t remember.

Night again, this time without storms, a week later, a human emerged from the filth of the canal, fully grown, draped in a tunic of seaweed and garbage. Some spoke of magic, but there was vertible alchemis’ts dream of chemicals in a varitable pousse-cafe of chemicals and industrial byproducts that would have left any renaissance hermeticist drooling.

The being that stood in the midnight gloom smelled the soot, the sea air, the huddled life of the city and remembered who he had been. He was in a very literal way made from Babbage, now. He could sense it, not in any supernatural way, but in a kind of awareness that takes over in quiet moments of intense concentration. The lense of the senses narrowed wherever he fixed it. Bats flapped about the Shipworks looking for mosquitos. A reef marker klanked softly to itself out in the sea. A wiggyfish flapped in the canal. A hobo slept under the tram tracks snoring. The clock of the Church struck 2 highly rational and impersonal bells.

“Well goodday ole grayface,” he said to the church. “It’s good to be alive, and that’s the Truth.”

 

 

 

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