goodbye, john
From the novel Monopole [formerly Theodorus in Excelsis]
“Goodbye, John,” says the voice of an electric lady, which seems to come from everywhere. Teddy looks about his accommodation for the source of the sound. His visual search reveals a small space, walled on three sides by bare metallic panels; walled on the fourth by a floor-to-ceiling window that looks out dimly onto a gray city, a skyline of both tall and squat buildings, complicated networks of crowded roadways and busy tracks running through the city like a circulatory system. His gaze across the small room continues. A small kitchen nook shares the wall adjacent the window with the door leading to the bathroom, kiddy-corner from where Teddy stands in the doorway leading out of the accommodation, which has just somehow spoken to him with the voice of an electric lady. His bed levitates in the corner to his right, opposite the window-wall, as do a few table surfaces around the room. The cracked ALLpod hovers against its induction dock mounted to the wall beside the bed. Teddy completes his scan of the room and, while he knows that he has occupied this space for many years, he feels he is only now discovering it for the first time.
