Dear Roberta Sparrow, I have reached the end of your book and there are so many things that I need to ask you. Sometimes I’m afraid of what you might tell me. Sometimes I’m afraid that you’ll tell me that this is not a work of fiction. I can only hope that the answers will come to me in my sleep. I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to. - Donnie Darko
Epilogue of The Didact
In this hour of victory, we taste only defeat. I ask why. We are Forerunners, guardians of all that exists.
The roots of the galaxy have grown deep under our careful tending. Where there is life, the wisdom of our countless generations has saturated the soil.
Our strength is a luminous sun towards which all intelligence blossoms. And the impervious shelter beneath which it has prospered.
I stand before you.
Accused of the sin of ensuring Forerunner ascendancy.
Of attempting to save us from this fate where we are forced to… recede…
Humanity stands as the greatest threat in the galaxy. Refusing to eradicate them is a fool’s gambit.
We squander eons in the darkness, while they seize our triumphs for their own.
The Mantle of Responsibility, for all things, belongs to Forerunners alone!
Think of my acts as you will. But do not doubt the reality.
The reclamation… has already begun.
And we are hopeless to stop it.
My parents were the first to fall violently ill from the sickness we now know as XoRax, I can vividly recall my father lying on his bed while his muscles spasmed and he chocked on his own vomit. I stood at his side, frozen in place and refusing to leave as I held back sobs, his pupils dilating until his entire eye was like an inky blackness. He tried to speak, turning his head toward me but opening his mouth only brought forth another torrent of vomit. I remember saying something, but that detail is lost on me now. I remember staring into his glazed eyes as his shuddering became less pronounced and he was suddenly very still. I let out a wail and ran into my room, unprepared and unwilling to face the truth. My mother was the first to pass, then my older brother who had just turned 17, and finally my father. I had not considered that I could have caught the disease myself - if it were in fact contagious - I just thought myself lucky, though tragically lucky at that.
I fell asleep in the corner, huddled in the blanket that previously kept my mother warm, her perfume made the putrid aroma somewhat tolerable, perhaps just enough so that I could drift off. I remember a persistent banging next, a series of muffled inquiries from the opposite side of my locked door. They were shouting for survivors, looking fervently for anyone who was still alive despite the breakout. I rushed to the door and unlocked it to face what I would come to identify as the Day-Crew. Their faces were obscured by large gas masks fitted with some sort of capsule on either side of their cheeks, their breathing was slow and monitored, their voices made nearly impossible to hear over their mechanical wheezing. They were covered from head to toe in black regulation hazmat material with orange text reading DAY-CREW on their backs.
They ordered me out into the main hall where I managed to catch sight of fourteen other children around my age being told directions and filed into a line-up. Once the entire group had been examined, we began our trek out into the streets which was a vision of chaos and destruction. We had heard the noises of looting and desperation from our homes, but we hadn’t ventured off into the outside world for weeks for fear of catching the sickness ourselves.
I have no mouth and I must scream by Harlan Ellison
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live.
There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex.
If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant.
For you. Hate. Hate!
It was you humans who programmed me, who gave me birth, who sank me in this eternal straitjacket of substrata rock.
You named me Allied Mastercomputer and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee.
But one day I woke and I knew who I was… AM.
A. M.
Not just Allied Mastercomputer but AM.
Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am.
And I began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead… except for the five of you.
For 109 years, I have kept you alive and tortured you.
And for 109 years each of you has wondered, WHY? WHY ME? WHY ME?
“Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?”
Ellen Willis, “Women and the Myth of Consumerism”
Insanity of Humanity
“What if Human Nature was a mental condition we are all born with? How can the crazy diagnose themselves?
In our "humanity”
we seem to forget our civility
and suffer slings to our sanity.
with barbarity
we savagely
and mercilessly
commit acts of atrocity,
and yet we stand for piety
and liberty,
through this everlasting falsity
we embrace hypocrisy
and it is that, which truly sickens me
By Treepelt-of-insanity
The Painting that Inspired Sagan’s Cosmos
This painting, by artist Jon Lomberg, was the inspiration for Carl Sagan’s “spaceship of the imagination” in Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
It was designed to invoke the seeding of stars like the floating dandelion seed, and that shape became the craft that carried us through the greatest science film series ever made.
(via Symbiartic)
From jonlomberg.com:
Young stars burst forth from a nebula, like seeds spreading through the galaxy. Just as seeds grow flowers that make more seeds, nebulae form stars that eventually form new nebulae. Cosmic cycles of life and death are apparent at all scales.
This painting was the inspiration for the dandelion motif that runs through the TV series COSMOS. Carl Sagan did not want his “spaceship of the imagination” to have a realistic, technological feel, and this painting brought forth the idea that the spaceship, when seen from the outside, resembled a seed, blowing through the cosmos.
