When "you," the reader, are foiled in your pursuit of its story by the frailty of the text's physical corpus, the narrator imagines you hurling the book through a closed window, reducing the text's body to "photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra." Not content with this pulverization, you throw it through the wall so that the text breaks up into "electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute." Still disgusted, in an act of ultimate dispersion, you send it through a computer line, causing the textual body to be "reduced to electronic impulses, into the flow of information." With the text "shaken by the redundancies and noises", you "let it be degraded into a swirling entropy." Yet the very story you seek can be envisioned as a pattern, for that night you sleep and "fight with dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don't yet know in which direction it will carry you."
Katherine Hayles - How We Became Posthuman
