The cosmic internet communicates through noise, we note in our dialogue. It creates confusion, poor connections, pixelated images and digital one-way streets. If it’s discovered, it’ll be banned immediately, but since the government will never be completely sure it exists, within the existing definitions of existence, the legislation will have to be abstract and ineffective, incorporated with grey writing in the documents’ annoying and disruptive grey areas, meaning margins, notes and footnotes. It will remain unexplored bonus material.
The cosmic internet can hardly be used for money transfers, shopping, credit checks or advertising, Venke writes.
But it will be possible to transmit cosmic internet signals through the bank’s fibre optics, making money straight up disappear from their numeric systems, I argue.
Or maybe transform the numbers to a stinking mass of fat, oozing from the USB ports, Terese suggests, inspired by her sourdoughs.
USB-pores, I reply.
The cosmic internet is an ancient witch commune, don’t you think? Venke writes.
Sounds a little esoteric, I type back. Couldn’t it be for everyone?
It’s an open network, Venke replies immediately.
It can be fuelled by human matter, and the electricity from our own bodies, Terese replies, and I add that that’s at least how my hands feel right now.
We agree that in the long run, when it trusts us, the web will evolve into a fleshy peer-to-peer network, where a small part of your flesh is always seeding.
It won’t hurt, but you’ll feel it in the form of connections and sensations occurring in the body.
Collective phantom limbs, Venke fantasises; anatomical phantom eyes, Terese suggests; portals, I hammer on, where THE SPACE BAR ejects us into space. The temperature rises in the witches’ den.
It shouldn’t distinguish between body and data, or living and dead, Venke writes, and presses the point even though she can hear Terese giggling next to her.
We agree that in the most extreme instances, you should be able to log on to the cosmic internet and exchange small pieces of flesh with other bodies out there in the hereafter, and then feel a leg or an arm snatched at, as your body comes into contact with the half-composted dimensions.
A carnal version of how we first perceived the internet? I write.
It could be a carnal version holding the possibility of contact with the hereafter, the spiritual. Like that time when electricity felt so new that it gave us the sensation of extension into new dimensions, proof that there’s something out there. The cosmic net could be a place where you actually get there. Where you type into the search bar Is anybody out there? And then press ENTER and SPACE.
That’s where we can meet. That’s where we can write. That’s how I want to write. Now, I’m writing.
We’re writing. As we write, the click of the keys sounds more and more like the cracking of little bones. As we finish for the night, we joke about how we can see constellations of stars and bits of skeletons glittering in the black screens that sleep in front of us: little dots from the universe, and pieces of ourselves. Later, back at mine, I can feel the jerk of a leg, or is it an arm, the way my body jerks when I dream I’m falling. At the same time I hear a noise, like the short echo of an old modem that is dialling and connecting. It’s the call of the cosmic internet, or the dial-up. Maybe I’m logged on when I sleep, when I let myself scroll down my consciousness, let go of my waking existence. When I’m free to search for you. ENTER, SPACE.
It’s day again. Our witch’s cauldron, a private Google doc we share, is seething and boiling with ingredients found in deep places. It’s a red herring, deployed to distract the ordinary internet from our actual task.
Somewhere else, on other screens, far from the reach of the algorithms, magical image searches are scrolling hurriedly past, with their tidy rows of tiny little preview pictures:
One of us, wearing a mask that obscures her face, holds the sun in her hand.
Another, painted like a Munch figure with eyes like deep dark holes, grips a paint brush in her hand.
Someone, face painted like a panda with deep dark holes for eyes, grips her pubic hair in her hand. Glitter, or glittering dandruff, drizzles to the ground.
Two paint brushes dripping with black and red paint are held one over the other and taped together to make a cross, perhaps an upside-down cross.
One of us holds the other’s hair in their hand.
The one who is painted like a Munch figure chews on her hair.
We cut each other’s hair. Blond and brown hairs, as fine as dog fur, fill a bathtub to the brim.
Imagine. This is our ritual, my ritual, your ritual. Imagine us as layers and layers of fabric and textures, layers and layers inside my film, portals to other places, Venke inside Terese inside me and all deeper inside the deepest web, where the electricity prickles.
The scrolling continues, and now the pictures form an unbroken shooting script.
A hand holds up a little pixelated chick, transferred via Skype on a terrible mobile network, giving it a blurry beak and only half a left wing. The chick shakes a few water droplets off its fur and then it settles in the hand, silent as a cutlet. Then we let it slide from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, from armpit to armpit, between us. The chick is cradled in our bodies.
Imagine that this is a music video but that the only movement in the picture is vertical scrolling. Your own index and middle finger dragging
