Flying as freely as a bird,
Soaring in the skies of heaven,
Far beyond the mundane world of trouble,
No longer confined to the life I knew.
The autistic boy longed for this liberation,
For room beyond the chains of the familiar,
A window in the walls of his lonely world,
An opening through which imagination could fly.
Opening that window were the revolutionaries of the mind:
Those who made stories of worlds that seemed real yet were not,
Of situations plausible yet not possible,
Of lives his own experience had never offered.
Relishing the taste of freedom,
He soaked up the sights and sounds, the glory and the terror,
The magic and science, the romance and imagined fact,
Absorbing them like a thirsty sponge.
No human cities circled those distant stars,
But the storytellers had already built them.
No fantasy kingdom stood upon the map,
But once upon a time, it had existed.
Whatever could be imagined was fair ground for the spirit.
Whatever could be spoken could open another window.
He travelled through faraway solar systems,
And swept over the world on a magic carpet.
The sentries of reality did not patrol every story.
He took advantage of that freedom.
His body remained in the room.
His imagination had somewhere else to go.
Can a computer have feelings?
Can sensory information become experience?
The questions waited at the edge of his understanding.
His own living body carried the mystery.
He had imagined himself as a machine,
Yet within that image lived a soul:
One that delighted in the beauty of patterns and the glory of truth,
While so much of human feeling remained far away.
A soul unlike the ones he thought he knew,
A soul he imagined from another world.
Ghost in the shell, soul in the body:
These were the words through which he reached towards himself.
No explanation had finished the mystery.
No machine image contained the whole of him.
Through the open window, stories kept arriving.
Spirit, fly.