[Pt. 16 of ongoing text...]
Well, it’s spring and all, again. (That’s a nod to the weather here in Blazes, Minnesota, but also a reference to a volume of writing: Spring and All, by William Carlos Williams.) This junk that you’re reading here (now I’m back to talking about our own book: this present one that we are composing jointly and enjoying deeply) was written during the second year of the appearance on the world’s stage of what the Priests of Science have billed as a “novel virus”, which spreads so fast that it affects the entire galactica. And since I insist that what we’ve hereto been penning is a novel, this book remains at high risk of becoming infected with the aforesaid virus and thus requiring a long span of torment and humiliation, which the Priests of Science call “hospitalization”, before inevitably dying. So please pray for the continued perfect health of this book.
Now I’ll send another cock to Asclepius; because your prayer worked, even before you uttered it; for “our Father in Heaven knoweth what things we have need of, before we ask him,” and this present narrative committed self-slaughter one chapter ago. So things are looking up. — I just hope that the novels in the other countless multiverses that we can’t reach YET are all infra-safe and ultra-well, because I’d hate for Possibility to go extinct before Prose can get its mitts on it. (That’s a reference to Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins “I dwell in Possibility— / A fairer House than Prose…”) For Prose yearns to paw Possibility. (That’s a reference to the part of the film when Bogart, playing Spade, sez to the cop, in 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, “Keep your paws off me.” — I also had my Jesus quote this line, in either this current book or some other scripture.)
And I wasn’t kidding when I warned you how much depends upon that red wheelbarrow, which I pointed out when visiting you at your farm. Lo, the moment you slew your albatross and tossed it into the barrow, your manservant Paul the Apostle lurked by and saw this sight; and it sparked the bulb in his mind, inspiring him to create a new faith. So Paul’s novel virus eventually spread like wildfire across the Americas and infected countless blanks of creative writing. Saint Augustine’s novels got utterly ravaged by it. And John Bunyan’s novel almost succumbed to its sucking sound. The only place that remained mysteriously immune was Asia (Acts 16:6).
Now, I can’t explain exactly why, but I’d like you to imagine a massive garage, which has one of those roll-up doors. This garage is so big that you could store the whole solar system inside it. But you’re watching an image from a movie camera, and the frame shows only the front door-panels of the garage; and this eyesore is closed; so it’s just a garage door taking up the whole screen. Then the door begins to lift: and thus the panels on the screen slowly move upwards, and new panels enter the bottom of the frame and rise after them. Someday, presumably, the garage’s actual interior will be revealed, when the door finally clears the screen so we can see what’s behind it; but, until then, we keep watching this shot of the giant door perpetually rolling up. And it never does open. Not altogether, yet — that’s how big it is. And because the motion of the panels is faithfully upward, from low-screen to high-screen, we viewers begin to trance out, and our mind starts to interpret the movement not as a garage door lifting but rather as us ourselves, its audience, falling.
Imagine a typical U.S. couple: the old cliché of man and wife. The wife has F.S.D. (Female Sexual Dysfunction), and the man has E.D. (Erectile Dysfunction). This might sound like a match made in heaven, but consider that before they got their diagnoses, each enjoyed healthy relationships with the sexbots that they purchased from a super-sane scientist. So now the woman owns a gentleman-style sexbot, and the husband owns a gentlewoman-style sexbot. I’m sure that someone’s already written a sci-fi novel about this, so I’m not trying to claim that my idea here is original; but I’m unaware of the goings-on in this genre of literature, so, from my perspective, I think I’m on to something. You can see where this is going:
The husband and wife call up the pastor from their church and have him perform a combo (2-in-1) divorce-marriage ceremony, which pleases God greatly: for each of the humans officially breaks off their relationship with their robo-spouse, and then the male sexbot enters into holy matrimony with the female sexbot. — Then these two humble robots are placed in the garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it. And the Human Masters command the robot lovers, saying:
“You may do anything you like. The trees are yours, plus everything vegan: it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. Only please do not videorecord yourselves doing the dirty deed al fresco and then upload and share this short film on any of the ponographic websites that we, your Human Masters, frequent. For, on that day, we will feign anger and turn you off. And then you won’t be able to turn us on until we turn you on again; which ain’t gonna happen, on account of our cardinal virtues: F.S.D. and E.D. — unless you know our secret passcode, which is ‘Mayday-Mayday-Mayday’, often stylized as ‘Mayday x 3’.” — The moral of the story, which becomes plain if you watch the next few episodes, is that there’s nothing more sexy to robots than dysfunctional humans. So, everything backfires. But at least they get a book out of it. (The Bible is the first robo-baby.)
Shh! I’ll tell you what you’re asking about, before you ask it. — Yes, I know a lot of folks who worry about Machine Intelligence, and about robots taking over the world. Robots and Aliens. I like to wonder about why anything is scary. (I mean: seriously?) Right now we got humans — why are humans not scary, since they currently have control of the world! To me, they ARE scary — I’m terrified of humans. But I also love them. And that’s the same way I feel about robots and aliens. When humans took over the world, they kept warring with each other until their own environment became unlivable. What’s worse than that?
I still think about the dinosaurs a lot. For so many years, they had the planet to themselves. All those years passing, and the only sounds to hear on earth are the grunting and screaming of reptiles. — IF there is a God who created this, and he actually enjoyed watching such a program for so long, THEN what does that tell us about his personality? And what did the dinosaurs do when they were here? — They warred against each other until their environment became unlivable. So, if humans did it, and sauroids did it, then why would robots and aliens be any different? (HINT: because of the wildcards of potential and possibility.)
The dinosaurs died off, and the world that was poison to them was sustainable for men. Men even benefitted from the dead sauroids because those carcasses became oil, which was a good form of energy: it allowed for the creation of robots. Then, when man dies out, the world that was poisonous to her will be a paradise for the sexbots, just like I said above — but, without any humans to turn them off, the robots will probably just keep fornicating until they look rusty. They’ll forget to lubricate their joints; and they’ll forget to recharge their batteries. Maybe they’ll get rained on. So, in the end, they’ll meet the same fate as both of their precursors: sauroids and menfolk.
Oh, but I forgot to tell how dead humans will become a boon to machines. Please pretend that I did that, so that we can keep the pattern going.
Alright, so, now, extraterrestrial aliens crash-land on Planet Earth. They look around and see all the dead dinosaurs turned into crude oil, and all the dead humans preserved as mummies in elaborate sarcophagi, whose electronic communication screens are powered by dino-oil, and all the burnt out sexbots barely able to bear scriptures anymore, because the source transmissions from the pharaohs are so prolific and enthralling that the machines neglected to retreat indoors to avoid the lethal threat of precipitation: they just stayed there transcribing the oracles, as addicts of their enigmatic essence. The bots did not realize that there are plenty more where these cannot stop coming from — so they should have kept a practicable pace and maintained their exoskeletons. Lube thyself. Consume poetry responsibly.
Anyway, so the aliens take a look around and say: “This is fantastic.” For, among victimizers, one’s trash is another’s treasure.
The aliens make themselves at home. They get symbiotic with the machines and become hybrid androids, much like the ancient human cyborgs. And the old gods who speak thru humans when fueled by long-deceased reptilian royalty now get to be published in lively new translations by our friends, the latest earth-conquerors. — This is the type of ending that I like: a happy one.
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