Afterwards she provided more details about her father. Finally. “He lived on top of a mountain but not that one, the one we talked about before.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking of my own mountain, my own castle here. I don’t live on top — not yet anyway; working my way up there with the positioning of this bed behind the eyes at the top of the spiral staircase; just for more privacy on this special special occasion (!) But instead more in the middle where the great majority of my things are still, like my notebooks, like my piano. Just behind the mouth and that gall darn big tongue sticking out from within. The one Philip likes to take his wee-wee’s off of between games of High Speed, ha. Hmm, wee-wee again. Pee pee, I restated in my mind, to match Daisy’s progression of the phrase in moving from real to virtual back in ’12, she revealed.
“They torn down his *house*, Frank,” she just blurted out. “It was awful. Just because he was a rich white man in a poor black country-state working on stuff they couldn’t understand.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I decided to say.
“So am I. He built a much smaller, much more modest house to live in after that but they just torn that one down too, the ‘stuff’ being the problem and not the money he made off of it. Not really… at the core. He had no choice but to leave. Off this world, actually, to a second one initially thought to be far far away indeed, unobtainable to reach in distance of space. He sank all the remainder of his money into the endeavor.”
“Off – world?” I didn’t know where this was going. Was she insinuating that her father was an astronaut? Actually flew into space on a rocket ship? “What could he have… I mean, what did he do to–”
“–incite the people to such anger, such destruction?” she finished his fumbling question. “He was head of a startup company developing AI.”
“Artificial – intelligence?”
“Yes. And they, the townspeople surrounding him on all sides east west north south, believed it to be an evil spirit, a rare, *dark* orisha they called it. Because it threated the whole world, the survival of the human species itself. Or so they were told.”
She became silent here, like a mute button was automatically activated on her flat top head. And so it was. tbc
Sunklands 