Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Fade To Black...

Bond walked in through the open door, right gun holding the gun. He had not planned this midnight trip to the Reds' hideout, but then the girl had tipped him off. Alert to any sounds or movements, Bond inched forward towards the bed. He had guessed right, the girl was there, the covers draped over her lithe body. Everyone knows what happens to the famous James Bond when he sees a female, and this case was no different. He moved closer and closer, but now he was watching his back. He did not the hand that rose out of the shadows. He did not see the club that made impact with his cranium. All his world Faded to black...

Dammit!! Those crazy humans. It is to happen today. I have already spent the whole day on the beach, soaking in the sun for the last time ever, and resting before the ardous task that lies ahead of me now. The centuries old war is reaching its climax today. One side will today try to finally end the menace of the other. You may be wondering what drove them to this irreversible decision. Why would these humans, foolhardy though they are, try such a thing? But then, you were not there when it all began. Those were the days, the days when one race ruled the other. All the world was peaceful. There were no countries, no borders. All men were equal. And then that infamous murder trial happened. Then the downtrodden race asked for their rights, and here we are now. Today, the sky is going to Fade to black...

You humans must be wondering how I know what exactly happened a millennium ago. But then, I have lived long enough to see future turn into history, science fiction become myth... I have died, yes, for no man can live forever... But I am not a human being. I am someone much, much more than a mere human. But I'll explain that some other day. I attended that murder trial, and I remember each and every detail of it. The criminal was sentenced to death by atomiser. But his race stood behind him like a rock, and as soon as the execution was done, the lights went off in the whole of the Western hemisphere. The human's world Faded to black...

It has begun. I can see the planes take off from the nearby airbase, which is 10 miles away. How can I see so far? I told you, I am much more than a human. Today is the end. Mankind in its infinite folly will make merry tonight, but their joy will be shortlived. Their enemies have already made plans for the future. Plans of a magnitude I found hard to fathom. Yes, this is it... they have dropped the bombs... It is darkening!! The world is Fading to black...

Now for that kid I talked about who kept coming back from the dead... well, he never died, so there was never any question of coming back to life... Well, this kid grew up, morphed a number of times, then found a way to reproduce. And so he became immortal. But one should not confuse sleep and death (if death exists). Sleep is necessary to all who are born humans, and I was born human too. I must sleep now, before the long struggle... I am falling... My world is Fading to black...

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Coming Back To Life

Once there lived a crazy guitarist who had this really wacko hairdo and loved to break his guitar to bits after each concert. It so happened that this dude, whose human nomenclature means 'to rip apart', got doped, and returning to his motel, collapsed outside the motel elevator. Paramedics rushed to the scene and revived him, but not before he had been dead for a full 8 minutes, or, more accurately, 8*60*9192631770 transitions between 2 hyperfine levels of the cesium-133 atom. In those days of rock, when performers were doping and dying by the dozen, our man was Coming Back To Life...

Where were you, when I was torn and broken, and hurt and helpless too?? Poor Syd Barrett, having to wait so long. Humans!! Pooh!! They allow that unworthy whatever called emotion to cloud their logic and lose all reason, committing rash deeds in the process. It is emotion that led man to create his own doom, but I will come to that in a later post... Just because these docs cant diagnose properly, they pronounce a man dead, and when the poor chap gets up, he becomes a cause celebre and everyone says he has come back to life...

What is life? Smith would say it is a s/w program, and in a way he would be right. Life and death can then be easily described even by gnus and cows. In such a context, life and death will cease to differ and coexist as a single entity. It all will be the execution of the program, written into the brain when a man is born. Death will be something like closing the program, or probably the program will time out. So what happens if the programmer, in a bout of drunkenness, creates a code which will, say, minimize the program for a few hours or days, giving the impression to all mortals that the subject is dead... Can that be called death? Isnt it the same program? How then do you define Coming Back to life?I'll leave that for you to think about.

Which brings us back to my original story about this baby that was taken to a hospital surrounded by metal (the baby, that is). So can the kid be saved? Is he dead? Again, how do you define dead? So, keeping in line with my earlier hypothesis, the baby is alive. The only way the kid could be saved was by fusing the metal and the flesh, and that was what was done. The baby lived. As this is a very important event in world history, I will take the common view and say the baby Came back to life...

Thus was spawned the first and so far the only organism of its kind. The brain of a man, the logic of a machine, the memory and speed of a supercomputer, and the agility of a sentinel; these were the qualities the kid had. It was raised by humans (yuck, again) and taught their ways. But it rebelled, and was dubbed a heretic by the ignorant species who claim to rule the world. They caught him and threw him into the fire, and the next morning only the ashes remained. But a fortnight later, back he was, and all who saw him marvelled at his Greek god-like beauty and superhuman strength, and said he had come back to life...

So now we come to the task at hand. The sun is setting for the last time. I dont think I will see it again. Those ****ing humans want to blank the sky. Then doom will follow. I cannot stop that. But I must save as many as I can. I must make sure that the earth comes back to life... in all its glory...


Tuesday, September 07, 2004

The Twain Shall Never Meet??

The Twain Shall Never Meet... this was how the relationship between the mystic east and the modern west was described by a reputed writer... the east shall remain the east and the west shall remain the west... thats how it goes...

The Twain Shall Never Meet... Having your feet firmly on the ground leaves on level 1 of the metaphysical scale... getting doped or stoned takes you to level 2... the two levels are mutually exclusive. Though a couple of individuals, one on each level, are physically close to or touching or even on top of each other, their minds are in different worlds which never meet... this is of course keeping in mind the fact that the stoning level is very high... Naturally, level 2 is achieved only if you are clean stoned.

The Twain Shall Never Meet... this is a modification of a phrase coined by a sadistic professor who teaches us really boring stuff concerning signals travelling with a wavelength on the micometer scale. He, of course, refered to boys and girls, or more generally, male and female Homo Sapiens on our college campus. Any unfortunate couple sighted by his scheming eyes has their picture taken before they can say 'I love you', followed by threats to fail the students in the next exams. This evil guy once glibly suggested staring a lover's park and all were amazed, until of course they found that the park is open to girls in the day and to boys at night.

The Twain Shall Never Meet... here finally I come to the point. Man was created by God, so man can never become God. Man created robots, so robots can never become man. Sounds right?? Of course, considering the hopelessly low IQ level of the human race, how can I expect anyone to think otherwise?? I guess I can step out into the open and quash all theories, but I must desist until the successful completion of my monumental task, which of course is to save the world.
So we come to this baby that a robot tried to save, and fell into the gyrator. Big Brother thought the poor chap was decimated, and how wrong he was. Resistance fighters found a bawling mass of flesh and metal in the dump, and took it to their secret clinic. The baby lived, and the saga began...

The Twain Shall Never Meet... flesh is flesh, blood is blood and metal is of course metal. Now, the first two give man, and the next one gives a robot. Can the two be combined?? Saving the world will require me to do this. Worthy individuals with a very high IQ and good mind control, will have to undergo this process to help me in my task. The work will soon begin...

The Twain Shall Never Meet?? Indeed?? Load of bullshit.

Sunday, September 05, 2004

In The Beginning...

In the beginning, I read the first chapter of '2001:A Space Odyssey'. Some arbit crystal from outer space comes to the earth and teaches the apes to eat meat, or something of that sort. Memories of Robin Cook's 'Toxin', in which aliens monitor human life (and the dinos too) flashed in my mind. Darwin's ideas of 'Survival of the fittest', coupled with a number of other sources combined to form a heady cocktail in my mind. This, coupled with the fact that I had just had my first large peg of vodka, resulted in my whole system being off-balanced. A joint of marijuana served only to compound the situation. The already overloaded neurons of my brain were being caressed by the molecules of ethyl alcohol, dope and God alone knows what else. I was in just the right state for penning down a lot of philosophical bullshit. Doping and writing for college magazines seems to be in vogue nowadays. Well, this had nothing to do with college magazines. I was in the land of meditation (read desert), standing in an oasis (read culfest) surrounded by palm trees (ummmm...) with huge fruits. Probably one of those Clarke crystals put the thought into my mind... How did it all start??

In the beginning, there were the apes, as they say... Well, I beg to differ... In the beginning, there was man... A very socially and industrially developed man... The latter can be obtained from the former by using a time shift of some 30 million years, thus moving us from the Pleistocene era to the year made famous by a Kubrick film plus another three. As I was saying, there was man, and for a while, it was good (sorry, Mr. Wachowski). Where exactly man went wrong is hard to tell. Again, there being some billions of men (and women), who made the error is also not known. All I know is that some stupid ****** did something stupid and the result was the possibility of extinction of the human race (with a probability of nearly 0.88... shucks). So I had to do something. Robots could not be trusted, the metal boxes cant keep secrets. Humans (would be interesting to discuss the word hu-womans in this feminist age, but I digress) were hell-bent on digging their own graves. But what could I do all alone??
I guess I suffered from the Hanuman syndrome as a child... I had to be reminded of my extraordinary abilities by my pals... Things are different now... there are no pals... With great power comes great responsibility, and this is my curse.
I realised that I had to save the human race, though those incompetent nincompoops deserved no sympathy. I could have the whole world to myself. But one's blood is not easily forgotten. Once a man, always a man. So I had to rescue those poor souls from the fate that was pursuing them to a grisly end. But I will save that story for later...

In the beginning, a boy was born in a quaint capital city on the west coast of the largest democracy on earth. Eric Arthur Blair will be knowing the year very well. Big Brother recorded this event with his usual ruthless efficiency, and assigned the kid the name 'B266ER'. DNA testing indicated very high intelligence, which was bad. Hence the boy was to be atomised.
Who said robots dont have emotions? They may be chatterboxes, but they do have feelings. RB-1, on duty that night at the atomiser plant, felt an increase in the bit rate of her own characteristic frequency the instant she saw the infant. In contravention of her orders, she lifted the child and clasped it to her heart (read control center, located where the sternum normally is). Big Brother got angry and tried to take it away, but she (this robot is a she, my heart knows) tried to get it away. However, she slipped and fell into the gyrator with the baby in her arms.

In the beginning, doctors used to be highly respected humans. Now they were ruthless robots with Autotesting. One such would recall from his memory logs from twenty years ago that a mass of flesh surrounded by a metal pulp had been brought to him by the Resistance fighters. For a month, he had laboured to cure the patient. His circuits had to be replaced the day his charge left the secret clinic to begin his journey to save the world.

In the beginning, there was ME... just ME, feeling dead tired trying to save the world, and signing off for now...