ann was home from work. i was at the computer. she came over and looked over my shoulder. we were using the sherlock program to try to find something. air brakes hissed right outside the window, startling us. It was still mid-dawn dark. suddenly, the program crashed, quit itself. Then all other open programs crashed, quit themselves. I thought it was frozen. I started to tell Ann it was frozen; she had gone somewhere. But then it started launching programs, and then crashing them! The first one seemed to be something like QuarkXPress. There were a couple more. I continued saying aloud to Ann what was happening. I said it looked like was going to open and close all my programs. Then, the screen changed. It became coloured like tapestry-cloth. Tan, burgundy, greys, reds. Everything disappeared but this beautiful pattern. Two icons popped up near the bottom: first, a cartoon bunny or mouse, I wasnt sure which. Very cute with floppy ears. Next, a cartoon elephant head, right behind and slightly above and to the right of the bunny. Then the icons disappeared, and the pattern began to mutate, kaleidoscopically. I became excited. I called to Ann that she should see this. The patterns continual self-redraws became more fluid. It began to look like zoomings into a fractal. Then words appeared, black, normal text size, and while they seemed for the most part to retain their baseline orientations, they swirled around, along with the swirlings of the pattern! They formed briefly into a poem-like construction (the sense of which, alas, I could not discern), and swirled away into the fractal soup again. Finally Ann heeded my exhortations, and came back to look over my shoulder. I said, look isnt it beautiful! and its even better when the words come! o please come, words! And they came again, and so she got to see.