16 Aidan San Francisco — 1981 Pac-Man and Galaxia

At the back of The Vamp two metal sentinels, Pac-Man and Galaxia, flank the bar. They are getting old, but still bring in a fair amount of change most nights. Both are on the fritz. They still willingly gobble up coins, but instead of hungry yellow mouths, or alien-insect invaders, only black and white static appears on the screen. The static actually has a much more violent history than that of the constantly ravening Pac-Man or the Galaxia alien space wars. The static is left over from the biggest explosion ever, the Big Bang. The static comes from particles of light, photons so hot they are still cooling fifteen billion years after the Big Bang. These photons are so hot they can never connect with the atoms that cooled and joined together to form matter. Like Aidan, they are perpetually alone.