Tales of the Old Amoeba

I have long since ceased to be properly alive, although you wouldn’t know it to look at me. I keep myself in reasonably good shape; I take exercise regularly and I don’t eat junk. I don’t dabble in street drugs either – not for a number of years now at any rate. I’ve cleaned my act up big time. So if you were to bump into me on the street you’d probably think that I look pretty good. When I look into the mirror I think I look pretty good. “Shit man,” I say to myself, “I’m not looking too bad.” Given my age and back story, that is. Given my history up to this point. “You don’t look so bad really,” I say to myself, “not when you take everything into consideration…”

 

I keep myself in reasonably good shape but at the same time I have long since ceased to be fully human and that’s a bit of the downside by anyone’s reckoning. When I say that I have ceased to become to be properly human that’s a kind of an understatement. Inside me there lives this thing and it’s not a very nice thing. It kind of lacks refinement, I guess you could say. It seriously lacks refinement. Instead of refinement however it’s got a whole lot of other interesting qualities. Interesting but not good. Interesting but not at all good. I’ve got a name for this thing that lives inside me – I call it ‘the robot’. I call it the robot for a very good reason. I call it the robot because it’s dead and mechanical and yet it nevertheless keeps on pretending to be neither. It stubbornly keeps on pretending to be neither. It goes through the motions of being human and caring about things and having feelings and all the rest of it but it’s fooling no one.

 

You know that thing where you’re denouncing wrongdoers and you get a bit overexcited and then the next thing is that you’re up in court being charged with incitement to commit hate crimes and you realise that the judge is probably going to throw the book at you and he does and then the next thing you know is that you’ve been sentenced to a six stretch by the highest court of the land and you slowly start to realise that you might have overstepped the mark? I know that thing anyway. I know that thing. I know all the things. And that is my curse. My curse is that I know all the things.

 

You’re denouncing the wrongdoers and you’re getting more and more excited. The crowd is baying for blood – they’re looking for some scapegoat to take it out on. They’re hungry for scapegoats and they’re not at all fussy about who they get. The crowd never is, is it? The crowd never is. We all know what the crowd is like so there’s no point in trying to put a pleasant gloss on what’s going on. There’s no point in trying to make it sound nice, is there? Is there? You’re denouncing the wrongdoers and you’re getting overcome with emotion. Your emotions are running high. You’re getting positively hysterical at this stage and the crowd are lapping it up. The crowd are loving it – they just can’t get enough of it. You’re denouncing and denouncing and you know that the bad thing is going to happen real soon.

 

The robot is actually my default personality – I used to have other personalities once but they’ve all been subsumed at this stage. They’ve all been subsumed within the robot. Everything gets subsumed within the robot – it’s a kind of lowest common denominator in that way. That’s why I also sometimes call it ‘the Old Amoeba’! The Old Amoeba eats everything that it meets; it eats everything it meets and it makes copies of what it just ate. Nobody really minds of course – that kind of thing doesn’t bother us none and so the Old Amoeba gets away with murder. The Old Amoeba always gets away with murder. As far as we’re concerned a copy is kind of almost as good as the real thing, right? That’s what we think anyway. That’s our motto. It’s obviously what we think. I don’t think there can be any questions on this point anyway. Sure there are lots and lots of questions that we could be asking but this won’t be one of them. No sir – this is one question that we aren’t ever going to ask!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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