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...