Snow is falling, gentle fat flakes from a white haze of sky onto the gentle ebb and swell of hills rising from the intercontinental tundra. The sky is northwards forever. I look up into it in reflection, sipping black coffee before the great window-wall of the building. Jutting from the ground, the facility emerges from permafrost jagged and glass-like. All black, except for the square end of the shard that opens up to a great glass wall, where light pours in from the north over the snow and sun, into the brut office constructed for me.
Preservation is a watchword of the day. I’m all alone on a highway, six months previous, listening to the radio. I was where the hosts are rounding about to months ago, not that I would be allowed to speak of it. I pull into a gas station where soggy paper blows across the winter slush to my feet, crunching under the salt and sand, my own lips touching cold metal with a instant guilty bite as my tongue touches refrigerated cold. I finish it halfway back into the city. Research trips are always unpleasant, hoping to get a good nap in under the city lights to wash the taste of the nation’s white-primitives out of my mouth.
There’s an email to attend to once I get back to the office. Helvetica, 12 point, as is standard. Some place use arial, not that anyone except I can tell the difference, cultured deeply as I am into those little advantages not afforded lightly. I get another sip of coffee, looking over the carefully typed paragraph, somewhat between a memo and an order. Preservation, preservation. Information as well, keeping it safe though is talked about far more than gathering it these days. In my apartment I have an image of a dozen or so men in outdoor gear standing in some distant location, smiling, holding their equipment. It’s all obsolete now, the few suckers who get shanghai’d down to the south pole, the last frontiers where it hasn’t all been mapped out like the rest, at such a pace to busy entire buildings in cataloguing it.
I was once taken on a trip to see my friend, northeast of the city, where the money lives. He was old, not even American despite being here for generations to monolinguality, buttoned down in a banker’s suit. The structure was underground, inside a sort of Versace golden recreation of a hellenic villa, windowless, marbled stone, polished reflective on all side of me. Here there was only ink black and every shade of gold between yellow and brown. Security was immense, men were standing guard equipped in the way of soldiers outfitted fresh every six months, on the cutting edge of laser-rimmed eyes piercing me as I was led past a flank of submachine guns into vaults, vaults within vaults that he could only show me on a computer screen on a mahogany desk that itself was buried deep as though it were as precious as the interior’s contents.
We produce ninety-eight degrees of heat every second we live. In abstract, we produce exponentially more. I browse the halls of a server dungeon, glassy sheer surfaces in a winning battle of their heat against the super-frozen water pumping through their veins. I sit in a plane and look down upon the world where smog coats the city palpably, a fog thicker than fog, heat islands and car exhausts pumping out radiating waves of our heat into space. If there is life on the moon, we’re like a lover to them, burning to the touch, nestle up against us in the cold night, lord knows we’re putting off enough heat to forget the big empty beyond.
Heat destroys energy, practically speaking. Not truthfully of course, energy cannot be destroyed, but it’s obvious what’s meant. After heating, it spirals off, careening through the void to nothingness, until we eventually hit the terminal cold, where all is still particles floating isolate in nothing. I think about it often. My body radiates heat beneath my quarterzip into the arctic air and I think about it, the permafrost melting and all I see... that Windows XP screensaver, the one that simulates flying through space with white dots on a black background? I can’t stop watching the center. We use a proprietary linux build here, but I can’t stop looking into the face of terminus.
When I’m home, in a minimally appointed home, snow is falling outside, in gentle crystalline flakes. Every one is a unique sparkle of art that shows brilliant under a microscope. Every one hits my upper-floor downtown window and melts from the radiance of heat inside my apartment. The pattern is destroyed and the energy is lost to the void. I sit in an Ikea couch and watch the city blurred as my vision focuses on the window, only a scant reflection of the dim lights I have burning at this time of night. My computer is vibrating along the floor across the carpet. The heat can be heard in the walls. I look to my Rothko and back to the window. I am alone.
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