Grow your own live robots, the advert said. Just add water. Just add a pint of regular old tap water and then watch them grow. It’s amazing what modern technology can do, isn’t it? Only a few decades ago that would have been considered science fiction. Only a few years ago that would have been considered ludicrous bullshit. These days of course it’s all the rage. Grow your very own live robots, grow your very own live robots. Watch them organise themselves into small but nevertheless efficient military units and try to take over the world…
That’s just my little joke of course – they’re not really allowed to do that. It’s against their programming. That’s one of the Laws of Robotics isn’t it? Thou shalt not take over the world. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s ass. That used to be a big problem you know. Back in the day. Coveting your neighbour’s ass. It caused no end of trouble. There were fights breaking out all over the place over that and some of them were quite nasty too. Some of them were very nasty. Moses consumed some special cyclodelic plants that he found in the desert and then he communed with an AI. The AI manifested itself to Moses as a giant fractal pattern in the sky and then it spouted a whole bunch of social algorithms. When X happens then make sure you do Y. Always do Y. When Z happens run like fuck and never tell anyone anything about it. AI’s are full of shit aren’t they? These days you can grow them from seeds.
We re-edit our memories every day and that’s why we can never trust anything we think. What a terrible situation to be in, huh? You go ahead and you think your thoughts and that’s fine, that’s great, but then you realise that you could be humouring yourself because you are afraid to think a true thought. You are afraid just in case you do. Think a true thought. You don’t know if you can trust yourself or not because you know you’ve got no integrity as a person. You’ve got no integrity as anything else either! What a situation could be in, huh? I mean – I know I’m going on a bit but do you really get that? To realise that you have absolutely no integrity at all and that you can’t trust yourself not to lie to yourself at all. Not to lie to yourself all day long. You can never stop to draw breath. You never can stop to draw breath when you’re lying to yourself all day long because you don’t know what might happen if you do. You haven’t got a clue and that’s frightening. That’s the frightening thing right there…
Some things are genuinely frightening and it’s just plain stupid to try to pretend that they’re not. People sometimes like to say that everything is always rational and that there is a perfectly sane and normal explanation for everything but obviously that just isn’t true! Even the people who like to claim that there is a rational explanation for everything don’t really believe that. Even they don’t really believe what they’re saying. Especially they don’t believe this – that’s precisely why they put so much energy into saying it, of course. Rationality is fear itself as we all know – pure naked fear. My point is simple however, despite all my prevarication. My point is that when you put enough energy into turning truth into a stranger then the truth becomes something rather unpleasant, something rather sinister, something rather loathsome. What will the truth be like, you wonder? Will it take on the semblance of a decaying corpse, inviting you into its corrupt embrace?
Truth is a-knocking on the door, can you hear it? I can hear it. Knock, knock, knock it goes. Knock, knock, knock. Truth has come a-knocking! ‘Come on – are going to keep me standing out here forever?’ truth says. You lily-livered bastard. You old yellow-belly. You useless pathetic maggot you. Truth isn’t going to stop knocking you know – that’s not really how it works, is it? We all know that that isn’t how it really works. This really is an archetypal situation of course. It’s the most archetypal situation of all – it’s that old, old situation. It’s that old, old situation that we all know so well…
