autiobiography
mark p neyer

the spring uncoils itself to push the driver gear, and the timing pendulum flies through its flawless arc. the paw clacks upon the ratchet track, and the cylinder ticks another turn. as this mechanism pushes and turns and whirs and purrs, a purposeful pin on the cylinder touches a tiny tine on the comb, impelling it to action with a kinetic slap in the face. as is so often the case in our universe, the tine now tries to find its way back home to its resting place, a journey it will never complete. it strives and seeks to return to an equilibrium position, but the energy the tine was given from the push of the pin must be dissipated, a process which has no begininng and knows no end. the pin will forever vibrate in the air, gradually slowing, but never ceasing in its striving to reach that impossible resting place: peace. as it radiates quanta of energy, the pin pushes the air around it, moving the atmosphere up and down, sending pressure waves rippling through the soft gaseous fabric that surrounds and sustains us. the vibrations from this tine travel along the comb to the other tines, pulsing through the porcelain music box and tickling the mahogany end table, which wobbles, sending tiny tremors through the tiles on the floor, resonating through the entire house. the house shakes, causing the earth itself to pulse ever so slightly with thermal vibrational energy in its orbit around our sun, which is now transformed into the tweeter on a solar system sized speaker, broadcasting mass and charge and strong and weak field fluctuations for any and all nearby (cosmically speaking) listeners, interested and uninterested, to hear.
 
time passes.
 
the sun burns through its limited supply of hydrogen, and explodes. this supernova bears the signature of that tiny tine, now amplified for even more distant ears and other ear-like orifices, and really, any device capable of measuring vibrations of any kind, to hear. light from this supernova spreads to distant galaxies and registers in the sensory systems of lifeforms with twisted hypergeometrical forms, slightly altering their thought patterns; a metacognitive eddy current in an ocean of churning thoughts and feelings. however tiny, these changes in thought texture cause the aliens to behave differently towards each other, sending the tine's tiny vibrational voice over intergalactic social networks. the energy from the supernova pulses through massive gas clouds, galaxy-wide expanses of nothing but inky blackness mixed with glowing blurs of hydrogen now softly sparking with tiny veins of energy coursing through them, microscopic stars that live but for a brief instant. the frequency signature of that music box tine travels through tiny particles, past the event horizon of a black hole, and is swallowed by the maelstrom of mass at the center. that glob of former planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies now scintillates and dances to the dissipated beat of the tine, gently tugging at all other mass-having elements in the universe.
 

time passes.
 
the civilization crumbles, the stars explode, the gas clouds dissipate, and the black hole implodes. the universe continually cools and spreads until it is a lifelessly uniform mist of energy, vibrating ever so gently to the tune of that tiny tine, and the other tines in the music box, and the music box itself, and the table, and the tiles and the house and the earth and the sun and all the aliens and intergalactic gas clouds and the black holes and the dancing of crowds and the delighted chirrups of baby bluebirds and the wailing weeping of a mother as her child starves to death in her arms and the swimming of a school of snappers and the spin flipping of electrons smeared across the cosmos and the lonely orbits of planets around long forgotten stars, and every thought, feeling, sensation, and idea that has ever left its electromagnetic signature in the mind of man or machine.
 
 
turn that shit up.