Jacob – for that is the name given to him although he does not know it any longer – stands at the doorway, at once the surveyor and the surveilled. He is fully awake now – extricated from the gossamer threads of subconscious alertness that edge the algorithm of sleep. He instantly recognizes what woke him – a blue whale calling out to her pod. The thought bubbles briefly and then floats offstage.

This is a dark place. The deepest part of what will be, given time, the South Pacific. Given time everything has a name including time. Jacob, who does not recall his name, remembers time.

Lost she is, he thinks of the whale, and makes a mental note to forget these facts. The most difficult of propositions: to remember everything so that one can completely forget. And yet, this is the task, as far as Jacob can remember.

The whale moves closer now. Jacob is still some muscle but mostly memory. His hands are already turning digital. His heart and his brain resemble those from the old days and the ones that will come thousands of years from now. The whale knows this and focuses on the flutter of Jacob’s gridwork of gills. Imagine, she thinks to herself.

Offstage, the seaweeds work on the thick plastic bricks of the dome that Jacob inhabits. An out-of-place, Lego refuge. A submarine igloo. Each ridged brick embeds neural networks that have to be carefully disassembled. The task of forgetting has to be in tandem with Jacob’s own shape-shifting. A micron is the coagulation of two decades. That is something!

Already, the amniotic fluid of the sea is darker. Jacob is beginning to shed zeroes and ones, setting the dark seabed ablaze. That is what the whale has come to see. She is not afraid. Whales find each other by their songs.

There is music in the water, Jacob thinks.

***