Thursday, 8 May 2014

a one hundred and sixth story...'calendars and clocks'

There was once upon a time such a thing as a biological clock other than the sun, and the moon, and the stars.  It lived inside human beings, and was triggered after they had been running around their planet eagerly for between eleven and fourteen years, and went on chiming for another fifty – like a demented alarm, it was hard to shut off, or indeed ignore.

Gregory first noticed his biological clock ticking when he was twelve and at a school pantomime.  One of the girls in his class was wearing black fishnet tights and a short pencil skirt.  Gregory felt a stirring in his still developing loins and thought how he would very much like to touch the girl’s legs, and perhaps squeeze her abdomen.  He spent the next seven or eight years fully developing his loins, and adding to an increasingly long list of things he would like to do with a girl’s body, from head to toe and all the parts in between.

Most of the girls, meanwhile, had long since considered and experienced what they would like to and what they could do with a boy’s body – it was a fairly short list by contrast – and had turned their thoughts to having babies; they after all had a far more significant part to play in the reproductive process than their male counterparts.

Gregory had watched quite a lot of movies before he finally got around to experimenting with his long list.  And not entirely to his astonishment he wasn’t quite as capable as Oliver Reed at manipulating a girl’s body for his own pleasure, never mind hers.  Indeed his first few experiences were like wrestling with the eyes of the blind, and it didn’t help that on each occasion he had a different opponent, more or less willing.

By his mid-late twenties Gregory’s biological clock was beginning to tick insistently.  He felt the need to have babies as much as girls had felt the need for many years, some of whom had now indeed had babies.  But Gregory couldn’t find a regular mate, and life had become anti-climatic as a consequence.  While for many, typical activities such as drinking alcohol helped the search for a regular mate to have babies with and render biological clocks somewhat irrelevant, as well as being in some way a celebration of life, for Gregory drinking alcohol became a way to escape the fact he was alive, and lonesome – it didn’t help him find a mate.

It should also be noted that once upon a time there was such a thing as an artificial life calendar - seasons came and went, it snowed, it rained, the sun shone and so on, but as time advanced some human beings became increasingly aware that they had not done many of the things anticipated by their artificial life calendar.  The artificial life calendar they carried around in their heads, and Gregory’s was, by the time he turned thirty, looking rather blank. 

It was a major cause of anguish to Gregory.  Perhaps even more so than the infernal ticking of his biological clock.

At thirty it was anticipated by the artificial life calendar, which was more or less the same inside the head of every human being (in certain parts of the world), that one should be coupled, preferably with babies, be relatively wealthy with an inscrutable job title, own and be able to use a mode of manufactured transport other than ones legs, go skiing once a year, have been to at least two or more far-flung parts of the planet for R and R, smoked cannabis and be saddled, or about to saddled with a mortgage.  As well as to enjoy, and indulge in, talk of the future.

The future to Gregory, thanks to his inability to fill his artificial life calendar, was once again blank.  And every time its featureless yet somehow ugly spectre was raised his heart sank all the way to his shoes. 

Today, it is amazing to think that a human being could get all the way to thirty years old without having met the anticipations of his or her artificial life calendar.  However, a thousand years ago brains were largely unprogrammed and were often entirely disconnected from bodies – this made filling in the artificial life calendar a far more erratic process.  All I can say is thank heavens for Google CNS!  All I have to do these days is tune into a surface wave if I want, for example, to visit a far flung part of the planet and enjoy R and R, or simply recreate the effects of smoking cannabis.

Indeed, today, it is amazing to think that a human being could get all the way to thirty years old and still be worried about his or her biological clock.  In fact, the idea of a biological clock is frankly absurd to people a thousand years on.  While I still have to wait for my loins to develop, as soon as they have and I use Google Mind-Reader to see which girl thinks my body an interesting play-thing, hey presto, I plug into a socket, and pleasure and babies are easily downloadable.

There was a lot of discussion a thousand years ago about integrating artificial intelligence, micro chips and so forth, with the human brain and body, but today, as I know you’ll expect me to say, it seems it was all unnecessary.  The decision to create a more controlled and automatic brain interfaced with the body – arms, legs, reproductive organs etcetera – should have been, ironically, a no-brainer!

Life, today, a thousand years on as an organism more than half under the command of digital algorithms is a whole lot less complicated and a whole lot more fulfilling.

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