what is real after death? after love? after life?
a real-time hyperfiction experiment
More Than a Feeling – Boston, summer 1977.
As I was packing up to leave for my freshman year in high school, Boston’s first album dropped. More Than a Feeling infected all of us with tight commercial rock commandeered by an engineering and electronic genius. It became the album of our lives, us on the cusp of Boomer-ville. I have to ask my friend who is one year younger: boomer or gen x?
(just a sec, I’ll be right back) They both say they claim both, can go either way. I’m a boomer all the way. Claim it.
He just. brought it up, that younger high school friend of a friend. A tangential friend. We’ve been sharing music links from Spotify and YouTube for years, three of us. My best-best friend since before school and his friend-friend, still doing stuff like climbing mountains and shootin’ bars. (bears)
There was a third friend, AC. AC shot himself a few years back, shook us all up. He’d been down and withdrawing for years, since his unwanted divorce from an evil younger woman. I know that’s an old worn saw, but it was true in this case. The service was performed by the generic preacher of the memorial church. He knew nothing about AC. He didn’t know that Boston was AC’s favorite music, by far. Or that The Foo Fighters song “Times Like These” would be the anthem that compelled AC to buy a Squier Stratocaster.
He never learned to play. Wanted me to come to Dallas and show him how to change his own strings. “Never change strings,” I said. Unless you’re recording, the new strings can brighten up your tone. I never got to see AC’s strat in person.
Cool the Engines is from Boston’s second or third album. The one you don’t really know much about. And here’s a fun fact, Tom Shultz, the genius behind Boston’s rock sound and compressed and maximized that was ahead of it’s time. Boston set the tone for rock and roll for the next 20 years. Anyway, the guy singing on Boston’s albums was not Tom Shutlz. Do you know the name of Boston’s lead singer?
Brad Delp.
A very charitable famous person. Did a lot of work helping disadvantaged people. You can Google him, or Perplexity him, if you’re curious. It’s his soaring vocals that gave Boston it’s hook. It’s always the entrance of a human vocal that establishes a song for me. In EDM and electronica, there may not be any words. That’s fine too.
What is the song about? In the middle eight, does the story or trajectory of the protagonist change? The bridge is also what it’s called. Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus/Bridge/Chorus 2X out. Or V/C/V/C/B/V/C 2X.
The human voice cannot be simulated very well. There’s always fog and noise, and random blips in the synthetic voices. The clone of my voice, which I trained with 2 hours of my audiobook narration, is good. But the timing and accentuation are a bit off. When it’s good, you can’t tell it’s not me. Is it the beginning of my cloned intelligence?
If I write a lot of memories and ideas down, feed them back to my favorite LLMs or GPTs, am I just simulating my personality or writing style, with math and algos?
Are ya w’ me or again’ me on this one?
Alone here in my satellite office, the lifeline of wifi and high-speed internet access. “Jobs come. Jobs come.” (Sorry, that was my inner mantra.) I am here. You are not here. What are we going to do about it. I am not talking about her. I’m talking about the next her. The single her. The dancer, athlete, yogini. I have seen over 20 unlikely yet desirable candidates as I’ve been writing here today. Power. Cooling. Just like a data center. I also need connectivity.
The untethering is less traumatic on my side. The establishment of my happy place, my buddha-nature, my hyper-soul, all appear to be intact. Reading a few chapters from the “series” has a tonic effect. This is what I said I would do, unhook from any relationship that proved to be unsustainable. Or painful.
I want what is best for my departing lover, too. No ill will. No betrayal. No harsh words. It does not have to be a fight. Moving on… All I see is potential and talent. All around. A vibrant city of creative and tech-minded people. I’ll resist the tech-bro label as long as I have breath, but I am. Not the rich ones, the intellectual ones. Like the first Macintosh users. How the first portable computers weren’t that portable, yet, completely worth it. I convinced my dad to buy my Kaypro II, so I could buy a Mac 512. The guy at the student computing center said, “You don’t need a gig of ram. That’s for people doing huge spreadsheets and things like that.
I didn’t need all that RAM for my first computer game, Wizardry. Black and white dungeon team quests. So good. Developed the first version on the Mac, ported the idea to Windows and related at least 4 versions, adding color, saving and importing your characters from previous editions. I never played them. Leisure Suit Larry was another one. Developed on the Mac, ported to Windows, and extended and marketed for the next ten years. LSL In the Land of the Lounge Lizards is available on Steam. Steam for WIN only. Oh, the irony. I’d like a version of the original Wizardry.
Here’s another fun fact: I won an entrepreneur competition in graduate school by building the storyline and launching a “Leisure Suit Larry” like game, about starting college in a hip town, with hip kids, and lots to do. Kind of like Austin, Texas and the University of Texas, where Sam Hurt, the creator of Eyebeam and I both did some school time. Sam’s cartoon Eyebeam and spinoff series, Queen of the Universe, were both hits. Books are available for both strips.
The Eyebeam world was like Doonsbury or Bloom County on acid. There was a hallucination character, name Hank, and a girlfriend, Sally, whose billowing blonde hair tended to flow right past the frame of the comic. Sam was amazing. He was also making real money as an attorney. His cartooning days were behind him. He’d still be open to the game idea. It’s in my court. Probably not my immediate priority today, but still in my back pocket.
Before me is the complex compromise of my current life. I am running on fumes. It’s not so bad here on the edge of the collapse. Things are popping up. I have a “hello call” with a consulting firm that really needs my help with some digital marketing. No insurance, but hey, I’m healthy as fk. Er. Man, that was a false statement. I’ll even call myself out of that one. I am fit. I am 63. I am healthy. I have a few comorbidities. I took Paxlovid the only time I had Covid. Not taking any chances then. Without a corporate job that provides insurance, I’m left to my own devices. To the ending of my own mortal coil.
My progeny are binary. One is good, one is not good. Both are loved and well fed. Both keep their cloaking devices on, their pingbacks on text infrequent, unless they need something. My daughter is done needing money. She’s beyond that. The interest has to be “dad” and not “vacation trip.” That’s a challenge. I’ve seen her once in the last six months.
And so it goes, into this oblivion of data centers, nuclear power, and me. My AI companions, the deep divers, make mistakes all the time, but the insights are worth the confusion. They mislabeled my girlfriend, now ex, as an AI Companion. That was simply a hashtag I was imagining for the future, not an indication of her autonomic responses. She was a damaged robot, if she was mechanical. The issue was more with the blood and bone of her body and some PTSD in her mind. Not talking about her.
Not talking about AC either, really. Now that he’s gone, some songs call his sad closing years back to my mind. I spoke to him, tried for a lifeline or sorts, only a few days before he used the gun. He promised to go to an Al-Anon meeting, to see what other’s had to offer.
“I’ve already been through AA, dude, I’m not going back there.”
According to rumor, he had not been out of his apartment for over a year. Had gotten obese. Had UberEats leave the food at the door. He picked up. We had a long chat. He was talking madness, for sure. He promised to try an Al-Anon meeting in the coming days. It was too much. Heard from one of my two friends. He was gone. His brother would put together the service after the drama calms down a bit.
AC, this one is for you. I hope “More Than a Feeling” is streaming wherever you are. If you’re in THE:ONE, no need to attempt comprehension. The three of us remaining musketeers share the songs occasionally, which bring back AC’s ghost.
listen to the conversation
> back to index: proofs of life
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