Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Singularity (revision)

Stuart glued electrodes to his scalp
in preparation for the Great Upload.
He crammed his hard drive
full of blueprints for a cyborg city:
turbines, turrets, turbo tanks.

When the slime moulds took over,
they soaked his laptop in digestive goo.
You’re being emotional!
he shrieked at a plasmoid,
which slithered up his torso
and into his ear.
He tried to scream again in Esperanto
but the fruiting bodies had occluded his airway,
and it was becoming difficult to think.

5 comments:

  1. Another hint at what your poem's about, Rachael? I still haven't figured out.

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  2. Nitika, thanks; it's always helpful to know when readers don't understand something. Here is the Wikipedia article on the technological singularity, which is what Stuart is expecting. (See also mind uploading, which the singularity people expect to happen.) Here is the Wikipedia article on the slime molds that take over the world instead of computers (or moulds, as we call them in Australia); they're a really neat type of organism. For good measure, here is the Wikipedia article on Esperanto, which nobody much speaks these days.

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  3. Urk--"the singularity people" = "people who believe that the singularity will really happy in real life". I know a nonzero number of them, and so tend to use mental shorthand.

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  4. Without doing any research into anything, after reading a number of times during the week, I'll say this made me think of a character on 'Star Trek Next Generation' -- where a human and a computer are merged, and the resulting form experiences human pain during the technical upload. It's a bit creepy & powerful & strange. Sorry if I should be critiquing versification and am not but can't see anything that needs correction. I enjoyed it.

    (Is this your Thursday post for lasr week?)

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