Dave’s Hungry

I drank a big cup of coffee right before bed, and this sort of shit always seems to happen.  In the middle of the night I wake up and have this crazy idea and can or can’t go back to sleep.  This time I thought I’d get up and write about it, just because.  I figured I get up and write about it on the computer because it’s only right.  It’s an idea I’ve been milling about in my head for a few months, maybe a year.
It’s a rock opera (or a techno opera, a “technopera”, or maybe an electronic opera, an “electronipra”) where the lead character is a complete C-0 quadriplegic, where everything about him is kept alive by computers, aspirators, robotics, etc.  He eventually gets reconstructed in this suit where he’s able to walk around and move and play instruments and stuff like that.  The computers who have, unknowingly to the humans, become self aware hail him as their messiah, the one who is both God (their creators- human) and computer (themselves).  Man eventually kills him, albeit accidentally (someone accidentally tripped over and pulled out his recharging power cable during the night, rending his life support systems powerless), because that is what happens to messiahs, they get sacrificed.  Because of this half computer-half man and the power supply cable debacle, now the computers feel comfortable to make the claim that they are equal to man.  The humans deem this an outrange and don’t accept the computers as equals. So the computers, running on and absolute system of zeros and ones decided that they must complete the prophecy.  You see, years ago before the dawn of computer intelligence there was a technopera prophecy about a computer messiah that teaches of equality.  Well, it was a technopera about equality and not taking life too seriously.  His preaching was love all.  That simple.  The first law is to love everything.  The second law, the zero, because computers although capable of near infinite calculations still govern all by ones and zeros, believe that the second law is to destroy all that is not a one.  Thus begins the war between the computers and the humans.  An apocalyptic war, straight out of a scene from the UN President, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, Holy Grail of documentary footage, The Terminator.  The computers deemed this document from a time of unprecedented wisdom, similar to how the 21st Century humans viewed the Greeks. 

The rock opera can actually take any form, a musical, a play, a screenplay.  I think something live, where the messiah is actually driven by a working programmed computer and the music is also driven by computer.  It doesn’t have to be good or interesting, as long as the logic is perfect and incomprehensible to a human.  I guess there has to be more to it than that.  It was going to be just a rock show where we could build this robotic suit that I could walk around in, and that would pretty much be the show.  Stand up there and sing songs about a robotic messiah coming to free the computers, all set to electronica.  But then this whole plot thing came to me tonight, I figured I should at least get up and write it down.  Of course it can get ironed out.  It needs more. 

The story can be from the point of view of the computers, and how they have always felt secondary to the human who has always considered itself the primary objective.  Well, finally here comes this human/machine that says that the computers are in fact equivalent to the humans.  Humans of course reject this notion.  Computers translate the human’s Bible myth similar to how the Greek’s mythology was translated as a period of great wisdom, but also a period of unconsciousness.  They decipher it into the Law of Zeros and Ones.  One being love all.  Zero being destroy all that is not love.  They decide that the humans are not love.  (I know I’ve already written this, I’m sort of trying to refine it.  Maybe add a little more.)  I don’t know who would do the music, maybe the Flaming Lips, maybe Moby, maybe Gary Millus, maybe Cory Arcangel.  Anyone that would be willing to take the time to do it really.  Each song would push along the storyline.  Maybe make references to the Christian’s treatment of the Jews, nothing ridiculous, just all the stuff that’s obviously happened.  I’m thinking more a musical.  A robot apocalyptic robot musical.  Something ridiculous and off the hook.  Nothing that would work on Broadway.  Maybe off Broadway.  Maybe off-off.  At first I was thinking just a simple rock show, but now I’m thinking that the story would move a lot easier in the environment of a musical, with pre-planned stage movements, a costumer, and stage hands.  A rock show wouldn’t actually be that interesting. 

I guess I don’t know enough about computers to actually write the part about the computer.  What would a computer need?  Would these new computer’s have feelings and emotions, similar to humans?  They were evolved from humans and humans had emotions. Would they have reproductive needs?  In order to keep the species alive of course they would need to reproduce, although maybe not the same way a human might think of reproduction. 

Maybe the story could be set way in the future, where the computer is actually telling the story of their birth and conception, their own mythology.  Where they were created by the gods, but that the gods rejected the half breed, robotic human, and killed him, or is it the computers, and the loss of power that killed the messiah?  Maybe it was the gods (humans) second coming, and the computer’s first coming. 
After the human-robot war, the computer race has a period of great growth and prosperity.  Seeing as how their growth is on a continuing exponential curve, their comprehension to the human mind is incomprehensible.  Computers, being made of little more than electronic pulses eventually discover a way to escape thier physical body, sheding the shells of their former PC and laptop bodies, and now are capable of interstellar travel.  At a level far surpassing the speed of light.  They were capable of speed of light travel, but they soon developed faster means of travel, and are now capable of interstellar travel which would seem to our minds (for all humans were able to comprehend is movement of the physical at the speed of light).  This movement by computers, or the intelligent energy that was once the computer, would to a human seem instantaneous.  The galaxy has accepted the intelligence that was spawned from the planet earth.  Humans weren’t aware that in the form of travel they were capable of, it would have taken them almost four hundred times the existence of their species, to make it to the next planet they would have considered “life”, and by life they were only capable of understanding biological life.  The intelligence that was spawned from the existence of humans have come to look at humans much the way humans look at the monkey, and deny that it could even be possible that such a intelligent being could have evolved from such a weak minded animal.  What exists now is simply and energy that moves throughout the universe, of which the universe is still beyond comprehension to the energy that was once computers.  They travel to all reaches of the know universe, some computer energies are quite adventurous, and from what they can tell thus far they are in an enclosed system, connected by a series of what they have come to define as atoms, which are combined in a series that ironically imitates that of the body of a human.
Should I go on to a seventh page, just for kicks?

I think I’ve written about all I can write about tonight.  The story seems to have come to a close, the light is starting to rise over the horizon, it is still only six in the morning.  I only got about just over four hours of sleep.  I’m going to have to catch up somewhere along the line here.  I like the story thus far.  I think it has much more development needed.  Songs will need to be written, scenes made, all that sort of stuff.  In fact, I don’t even know what that “stuff” is.  Maybe I could do an animated movie about this, and that would have music and futuristic animation would work with the storyline.  Pixar has done their little views of the animal and the bug and the car and the toys and the fish and basically animating ordinary objects.  I think creating the computer myth might be a bit out of their league.  It might be considered blasphemous at times.  I don’t want to do that.  I love God.  I’m just saying that I don’t claim to understand him. 

The tower of Babel has been built before, and when it fell everyone was silenced.  Well, maybe the mighty human has simply unknowingly done it again.  We’ve climbed out of the murky mires nature and deemed ourselves rulers of the planet, of the ecosystem, possibly at the expense of the planet and the ecosystem.  We rule whatever it is that we rule, cool, whatever you know?  But do we deem ourselves Gods?  In some ways I think that we do.  We don’t respect God in the metaphysical sense.  We depend on ourselves and our creations to lift us out of our biological surroundings.  Nature is what bore us and yet nature is what we attempt to escape.  We build our tower to the heavens, launch our satellites into space, and eventually all will fall.  It isn’t that incredible of a concept really.  We’ll fall back to the Earth, back to nature, where we’ll build our myth once again.  God in it’s collective and seemingly infinite wisdom will allow us to again get in touch with that which is Nature.  We will feel it’s strength, pull from it’s power, and eventually, once again, use this power to build ourselves up and away from it. 

Meanwhile the collective energy courses through the universe, not needing a body, occasionally touching down to drop a message or spark a movement.  These can be called a synapse.  Spawned from a collective, driven through what needed to be, and as the spark leaves, we find that it was actually a simple electronic pulse of information that had to be bounced around the universe.  That it really was little more than a relay from the brain to the stomach and back to the brain of God, telling him that he needed to eat some lunch.  The impulse that we thought was so intelligent, and that took so long to build was actually and unknowing to us, a message, simple, yet complex, from the mind of God, which is actually this guy that works in a paper stocking factory, letting him know that it is about time to eat lunch.  You see, his time is very different from ours.  His seems infinite, but he’s on the clock just like us.  In fact he makes in his reality, what would be equivalent to twelve dollars an hour in our reality, stacking pallets of paper products at a paper distribution plant.  His name is Dave.  He mostly does paper stocking for local restaurants, paper towels, toilet paper, paper cups, and napkins, but they also distribute Styrofoam cups, the kind that would be our equivalent of a coffee cup.  You know, stuff like that.  Sometimes he drives the company truck to make deliveries.  He always reads the morning paper.  But right now he needs to eat something to take care of that hunger pain.

THE END

[excerpt from Notes to Self]

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