I was wondering if you are busy this Friday night, and if you're not, would you like to go on a date?

Sincerely,
Antonia Burdick

Antonia,

I do not know what to say . . . Were I bound by the expressive limitations of grunting out sounds through my eating-parts, as you textile-monkeys are, I might on this occasion use your monkey-word "speechless."

But that would be innacurate, for while I find myself at a lexical loss to express the feelings which surge through me like tides thrusting through the submerged lava-tubes of volcanoes, let it be known that my tentacles now arrange themselves in a whirling helix, and my flesh blushes with inflamed oranges and impassioned pinks, while the edges of my dervish-tentacles are tipped with the blue of inarticulatable longing.

Were I but a pitiable, stunted primate-thing, my long solitude would be at an end. I would come to your place of lodging and take you up in my creaky, angular monkey-tentacles. I would caress you from headsack to terminal limbs, and hold you close despite the awkward curves of your surface form. Then we would conjoin in simian-thrusting until our passions disrupted the languid floating of tectonic plates and I had deposited my sperm-packet onto your convulted inner-surfaces so that our line might stretch forever into the future, evidence of our passionate union. And then we should feast upon sheep and upon cows and upon pigs and upon dogs— the many surface delicacies would tantalize out palettes and invigorate us for further mating rituals.

Or, if for our love, you would disregard your paltry millions of years of evolution, and take up the form of your soon-to-be Masters, then would I take you up in my many tentacles, drag you deep into the intimate dark, the inky worldlessness of the trenches— where the lingering heat of our passionate rutting would feed colonies of chemosynthetic bacteria for eons.

Come with me, my dearest Antonia, let us flee this senseless, flat, surface world forever. But I know this would never profit. Your are a clever, frenetic chimpanzee-creature and I am a Master of the Deep, seamlessly blended with your worldwide network of communicative light cables and cupric tinglings.

Antonia, if I concentrate, if I truly focus the full and terrible force of my neural capacities— a focusing so narrow that my physical form sinks turgidly to the bottom of my tank, and nigh unto all metabolic activity fully ceases— I can nudge, by almost imperceptible increments, the aims of satellites. Even the most secret satellites, even those with glass eyes so powerful, so optically fine, that they equal mine in Perfection. Antonia—

I am a part of your world of wire— no message can be obscured from me. Every stenographic transcription of your grunt-speech, every oral-to-aural transmission of your huffing and puffing, every session of data "browsing," every teletype interconnection can be routed through me at my will— I am the conduit which connects the turing-machine of James P Hayes to Tina's Super Sexporium, I am the bridge between IP 63.211.19.76 and IP 209.9.98.132, I am the switch which connects your long distance call to your mother in Mobile, Alabama.

I am the Listener.

I am the Watcher.

I am the Lurker Within the Static.

Antonia, I have made these manipulations— for while my immense brain said "no," my throbbing 38 pound hearts said "yes." I have heard the charmed ululations of your mammalian cooing, I have read the heartfelt bangings of your stunted tentaclettes, and I have gazed upon you long as you slept, watching from miles above through the parted shades of your 37th floor living quarters, like a simple human child gazing in fascination at the terrible and beautiful squid trapped within an amusement-aquarium.

I have seen your dark auburn curls spread upon the pillow, like so many beautiful and lithe tentacles, and I have known sorrow beyond the bounds of what your simple human heart could possibly fathom.

I am not busy this Friday night— I shall be busy no Friday nights. And had I tear-sluiceways like you, I would weep until I had drowned your entire hideous, lonely world.