Let's get all anecdotal.
Welcome to Montserrat.
How's that?
Ok years ago, which is a long time the way we reckon things, I started doing this hypothetical whattheheck on the seemingly mad and pointless hyper-shoving of the Industral Rivolution. Thinking where not does it come from, but where now does it mean to be going to?
And lo and mighty behind right now yesterday the very officer in charge of all our dreaming says ho, ad aspera, and astra, ho, and forth, starwards like a ten year old with a colander on his head. Like a middle-aged man with a colander on his head pretending to be ten, pretending to be brave.
So the template was this thing, like an amoeba made out of brains, not brains as consumer items but brains as li'l teapots. But all linked in series and parallel, like the thing they want you to make with SETI, on your down time, like hey, when you're ASLEEP for instance? Using your all in a line from school being taught to get all in a line, brains, and cooking them with extra voltage overclocking them because
it wants to get off the planet
because in its desperate haste to avoid what kept cementing no matter where it turned, to bad from worse and back, and disappearing into disappearing-nothing-up-there, so it CREATED the very thing it sought to escape and this man among the many is now the vocal orifice for that thing which is beginning to bleat its apologies and get pretty darned humble as it's been exposed for the thing it is which is not the mighty mighty up there but the little soft helpless creature down here inside a billion heads, it has no name other than the ones it steals, it has no identity other than what it gets people to believe it is, the wizard of all our simple credulity, miracle worker up to a point, and like the Oprah Winfrey show we can make it what we will, within the bounds of good taste and corporate sponsorship and hidden but powerful censors, but at the same time the dark and sinister presence of nothing at all cementing toward even more and worse nothing at all, the Martian landscape like a promise of your come-uppance, and do you really think it would be anything other than most despicably obscene for you to get off this planet and leave the stinking corpses of the last of the elephants to rot among the rubble of your incompetence and desperation? Do you?
Welcome to Montserrat.
They want you to think it's a moral dispute, between two moral antagonists, but your instincts are right, intuitively you understand it's an animal thing, a mouse, albeit a mouse with a finely-crafted wooden sword, against an overfed but still capable-of-vicious-cruelty canine of the dog-line, overbred and overfed, armored to the gills, burning energy like a cheap cigar, but still capable of recognizing a threat to its well-being. Tiny reliquaries, little catacombs inside the walls of the kennel, under the floor of the courtroom, a casual glance slides right by the miniature vitrine and its display, spider-size iron gauntlets and a dented breastplate smaller than a thumbnail, a prayer in a script you've never seen.
It's that and only that, it never was anything but that. Choose everything but your position. Even though we transport and disport and flail through the changes of a poorly written but popular tune, singing for our suppers and our lives, inside a cage which is inside a cage which is inside the locked pod of a laboratory in a rural area of an otherwise non-descript region in a part of the country you wouldn't really expect it to be in; demons watch us, angels watch us, snitches who report only to what they call the most high watch our every move, the fate of more than humanity as it is now hangs on our gesture, the fate of what we might have been being written on some dank cell's sandstone page, the block letters of royal incarceration and common criminal subjunction, and that wall published with three hundred others in a book, a big book OK but still readable, under the glass dome of our captivity the tale spinning out, the moment of will that determines an infinite subset of worlds within worlds, and brightness and health on a galactic scale - healing of stars and principles that underlie the turning of nebulae, good living for eternity or not - because of what we do, and they know that, but want it to be technology alone that makes it real, if we can just get off the planet as it dies under us, dies from the exhaust of our desperate leaving, but it's themselves they want to escape, what they are, what they'll be even after they breed out on our children, as a disguise as a ransom, making what they are and what we are inseparable so they get to go, or so we have to stay, the little half-breeds mewling about God while their cousins sharpen the axe and fine-tune the gyre-engines, reading from that book a list of magic spells of good intentions and pure animal thunderstruck unknowing, helpless with it and solely responsible for what happens next,
welcome to Montserrat.
not that it matters overmuch but I hadn't seen that Peter Landesman weirdness or read anything about it prior to writing this. so make of that what you would, for my part the coincidence's only a scale, as have been so many others, dry and almost lighter than air, cast off a much greater and more urgently dangerous beast
