Machines Wake

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1939 was the year my mother was born. It has been three and a half years since my mother died, after which I dreamt she sat decomposing on the end of my bed, beseeching me to let her stay, I scolded her and told her to go find her [[mother|pennys]]. [img[baby.jpg][dog]] [[about this|about]]

"I feel like that dog," she said, sitting up straight. "I feel like that [[stick|palmosser]]." "Like" is how she means. Let me tell you, lads, this, dear, is a treat. Let me show you. Sidhi. Sasi. Milind Sadi. [[A child of kalash|twilight]]

[[Twilight|dusk]] summer evenings on the terrace, listening to [[swallows|sparrowspeak]] swoop and loop above, skin prickling after a day’s sun and thighs and fingers touching, inadvertently in intimacy on a plane’s journey to our refuge. [img[moulay.jpg][eleven]]

Crazy how 'a few short words in [[sparrowspeak|twilight]] can turn a phrase into a full page spread! The magic of the threaded rod, the mystery of the threading couple, the séance of poispes itself. From the vegetable kingdom down to the [[microbranch|realtime]] there's a fine line between plantish and pimentel. It all but vanished as mysteriously as the green youth who first saw the yellow bloke in the eye.

Which time is the real one, the one when I was 8? [[12|eleven]]? This one certainly isn’t as I am fossilised further into [[isolation|lonesome]] away from my raw form.

[[There was|dusk]] a period of about eleven or so and a half months, from the [[seventeenth of Januar|pennys]] next to the twentieth of May next, when the sea was calm and the sun was shining, and the sombrer waves rose and the gull

1939 was the year my mother was born, clothes, she told me, were all good quality then as I produce my Penny’s mastery. Penny’s in Cork was also where her mother went for tea and cakes and chat – a refuge from the [[isolation|sacrel]] of my rural home, that surely was not her real time although it may have been mine. [img[nana.jpg][Start]]

"Machines Wake" by Jeneen Naji is an interactive narrative written during the first Covid lockdown in Ireland in 2020 and completed during the second in 2021. This Twine story interleaves memories and photos of the lives of my mother, her my mother, and my daughter along with quotes generated by a GPT-2 machine learning algorithm that was trained on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. "Machines Wake" is situated in the start of the Second Machine Age that we inhabit and attempts to deal with the temporal distortion experienced by the individual during Covid lockdowns as their worlds' shrunk and past memories rose to the surface. The integration of quotes generated by a GPT2 algorithm trained on the already fluid and multilinear text of "Finnegan's Wake" means that it becomes impossible to discern where the the human begins and the machine ends highlighting the cyborg reality that we all now becomes terminals at the end of a global digital text of pandemic emergency remote working and learning practices. http://www.jeneeninteractive.com [[Start|Start]]

For in these days of night are alledged in the world by the creation of everything out of a silt (sell) [[out of the dark|youth]] from [[sacrel |21]]through

I had thought at least that my daughter and I would have a similar enough [[youth|realtime]], more so than my [[mother|rubberband]] and I, but since the lockdown I realize she is being prepared for an altogether very different future of [[intelligent machines|palmosser]]. Here’s hoping humanity stays smart too. [img[meandcat.jpg][dog]]

A few nights ago I was tossing and hopping about like a topashe on eggshells, feasting my young minds on the terrine, when out of the fudden bright sunaucer I seen a figure in the mist. It was a he. Tall tall loesense he wore, loesense a he. He rose up in the [[smoky darkness|jester]] like a topashe, peering sheepwards through the cowshool weft on his heenyscene, called

and still after his last breath, his last thought, his bubble gum, our last hope, his breath, dear life, and still after his last breath,

[[Dusk|twilight]] neath he snoring, [[Nods worming home|lastbreath]] from his hole in the wall, And th'amore th'amore that he s'posed to kiss the dust off him To go to mackle, you understand, [[Till|eleven]]

[[The invisible hand|dog]], a palmmosser

The [[next night|21]] a black and white jester leered at me from the corner of my ceiling in my room like some sort of sleep demon.

The [[next night|jester]] another waxen decomposing body stood by bed, this time it was a little girl who I imagined to be from the pregnancy I had aborted [[21|eleven]] years before although I think it was also a little bit my niece who had died of [[cystic fibrosis|lastbreath]] aged [[21|eleven]].

I think of them often, my grandmother flows fully, around me in the [[long leaf-filled evenings|twilight]] of an Irish countryside and I am immediately once again small and helpful. She used to save rubber bands by wrapping them around her finger until one of them swelled up dangerously and we had to saw through the suspected culprit of her wedding ring, only to realise it was a sneakily looped rubber band hiding beneath that was the cause. [img[nanafancy.jpg][Start]]