From Benign to Vile

 


Here they caught the last gasp. Here they tried to resolve into a singular persona. The world was nothing like it seemed. They stalked through liquid air and tumbled out of cupboards, while out side the encampment ape like creatures thrashed and grunted through the surrounding bush. Beyond that dark, creepy, dangerous forest lay the open lands, where ethereal blue lakes echoed an ethereal blue sky, and the voice kept saying: it's all happened before. 

Here on Planet Earth, well Oak Flats actually, the streets were quiet, his dismal flu was showing some signs of improvement but he still felt terrible, and all around the sweep of discontent and Struggle Street and Strangulated Dreams. They couldn't succeed. They couldn't climb out of their holes, or rabbit warrens. They couldn't become rich, or even middle class. They could only go through the days and hope for the best. 

He had been in a society of bustling hard work, of hope, of humility and good cheer, well obviously life was easier with a little foreign currency, in your pocket, but even here, down at Vung Tau, he had been transfixed at how benign everything was, and had never been more relaxed. He wasn't used to it. The experience showed him something he wasn't used to, optimism, good cheer, a healthy bursting society, children everywhere, a proud place with well groomed people and optimism, that's what it was, optimism, and a cheerful enjoyment of the day in simple things.

His head had been a ossuary, a closet full of bones, he felt nothing, his bones poked through his flesh, nothing that happened was of even the remotest significance, the addiction to American podcasts and the admittedly fascinating theatre of American politics was simply a way of passing time, it was all nothing. They were on the precipice of Great Change.

And it was that Great Change, the imminence, the slow motion happening of it, that induced the ennui, that made everything seem so insignificant.

This was now, just  like that, the era of AI. Smarter than 98 percent of humans, read one recent headline, which was already untrue even by the time the author put in a final full stop. All those pundits over all those years who wrote that one day, at some distant unthreatening time, say 2060, that AI would surpass human intelligence, they must have known, even as they wrote their bullshit, that it was untrue.

And the voice kept saying one thing: It's all happened before. 

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