Post-poqalypse

Amy zipped up her eiderdown anorak, stuffed the key-card into her pocket and opened the door.  She jogged down a few winding stairs to the ground floor and left the apartment.  She could see more than usual were out walking today:  old families, new lovers, kids on scooters and bikes.  They had come to the Lily’s windswept promenade to see the purples and oranges of twilight on the waves.  They had come because there was nowhere else to go: if they wanted to walk, this was where they had to walk.  This evening, though, they had come for another reason.  They were out to look at London.

The Lily was drifting over London, following the deep currents of the Thames, and here and there the old London still broke defiantly up through the sea.  Amy could see the shattered spires of the City; empty steel skeletons, because the glass had long ago been bashed in by waves and storms.  The eroded finger of Big Ben, and the strange gull-stained circle-island of St Paul’s dome.  The stubborn brick tower of the Tate Modern, and in the distance she saw Primrose Hill (an island now, with a few shanty huts of corrugated iron clinging to the top).  Hiding like reefs beneath the waves she could see the bridges of the Thames, and the abandoned railway lines, Embankment and Waterloo and London Bridge, a spider-web above the rest of the buildings, which were too murky to see.  Here and there a street-light still shimmerered weakly like a will-o-the-wisp, like the lure of an electric fish.

Beneath that, Amy remembered what she had heard of the Tube: an endless flooded network of caverns and tunnels, full of eels and bottom-feeders, and maybe darker things lurking in those lightless places.  Legend had it that Victoria Underground Station had been strangely preserved in a trapped bubble of air, and that (if one was brave enough) one could dive past Buckingham Palace and the old theatre musicals, swim down the motionless escalators and surface in the station, and see the peeling adverts (sell your car on Gumtree!  New V&A exhibition:  Guns of the Conquistadors!  Asda prices!) of the 21st century.  It sounded so foreign to Amy.

She spent a moment more, wondering at the inventive chaos of London, envying the freedom they must have had, marvelling at the diversity of life, mourning its loss.  But she didn’t blame her ancestors for what they had done.  She wouldn’t have changed her ways either.  Then she took out her key-card, and went back to her flat.

Tomorrow, the Lily would sail for port (the first time in months), in Salamanca.

Summer Days, Summer Nights

The New York Times has seen fit to report on the deep and strange power of the American summer, and poq thinks they have found a thing, hidden somewhere in the langourous courthouse in which the Constitution was written and the lazy eddies of the Mississippi and the croaks of the bullfrogs and the hazy fields of gold barley and wheat in the Midwest and the red barn where the bats come flickering at dusk and the scattered fires in the brown poppy-studded hills of California and that old fairground with the caramel apples and the decaying merry-go-round and the ferris wheel and the sound of the ice cream trucks and out in the suburbs the necrotized grey asphalt parking lots and the box stores and strip malls and the air-conditioned cars all running along the highways of L.A. and the smog in the sky and the children playing with lawn hoses in the yards and selling lemonade out of garages and the bugs floating in their pool out back, and the adolescence and the highschools where the same musical is played again and again in the school gyms and theatres, forever forever in summer days and oh for the summer nights.

The Last Giant

He got big fast.

He got big so fast, that when they took him out of the cellar he was shaped like a box for a week, with his head bent down in prayer and his knees knocked together, but it wasn’t fear of God that shaped him so, it was the imprisonment, and the cruelty of the small-town folks who just wouldn’t let him out.

He remembered stomping and storming and howling in the cellar, all to no avail.  He remembered tearing out the lead pipes from the ceiling (stopping the sound of the showers in the morning) and bending them all to knots at his feet.  He remembered how they would throw food to him – a live rabbit, a brace of rats, or a seagull.  He remembered how he would wait eagerly by the door for that moment when it would creak open for dinner, and he would open his mouth and suck greedily at the fresh air from the pantry.

Most of all, he remembered the deep stain of darkness, so bright that it had burned itself into him and coated him like tar.  He felt wrapped in darkness, and even now, even now in his nightmares he would open his eyes and see nothing at all, nothing, and when he woke he woke with terrible rage in his eyes.

“Mudman,” they called him, “dirt face, Neanderthal.”

His own people had no use for names.  They lived out in the night without fire, and the cedar and the starlight were their roofs, and the pine-loam their beds.  Names were things humans used, to seperate themselves from the earth.  His people were from the dawn-times, when everything had a name held only in silence.

But he had been locked in a cellar for eight years (as far as he could reckon).

When they took him out of the cellar they leashed him with shackles and an iron collar that made the sweetest melody he had ever heard.  They took him down a winding gravel road where only crows sat in the trees to a coal mine and gave him a pick, which he used straight-away to kill the foreman by one blow to the head.  The other miners came running, but he brandished his pick-axe and they scattered like sparrows, and left him alone to freedom at last in the flickering light of the kerosene-lamps.

His people had no use for names, but he’d been locked in a cellar, and a killer now too.  So he made a name for himself from the anger left inside him, for it was the only thing he had left.  He named himself Ishmael, orphan, exile, and out of the mines he rose as an etiolated colossus, with a bloody pick in one hand and a thirst for vengeance in the other.

Yeah, they’d later say, he got big fast, but still – he was so small inside.

From Where, Mind?

In many ways, mankind’s story has been a search for meaning (maybe here, maybe here, or maybe not anywhere in here at all).  An appreciation of meaning, or so we are told, is what makes us different from these and these. Even if we can’t find it in the general sense, the fact that we believe there is any at all makes us different from these.

The links above all do the same thing:  they connect the sentences above to symbols from which you can derive meaning.  Seen as they are here, they are just blue underlined words.  Click them, and meaning will come at you in a rush, and the sentence will make more sense.  Symbols can be imbued with different meanings through hyper-links, which are after all only connections between bits of information.  By connecting them, we are making semantic connections. And yet hyper-links are dumb.  They do not tell us how the information is linked; only that it is.

Imagine Web 3.0.  What would it look like?  The first Web connected information.  The second Web connected people.  Perhaps the third will connect meaning? And imagine the mind-machine which would search through all of this information.  Once meanings are part of the Web, it will be searching for meaning.  Just like us.

That, truly, would make it an artificial intelligence.

An Incident of International Consequence

It was a fine summers day in 1850, why, mid-June I believe it was.  Perkins Dreyman was a-wandering, as he was wont to do, taking for himself the pleasure of an afternoon perambulatory along the old docks and warehouses of Bermondsey.  He held upon himself – as he unfailingly and always did – the dutiful burden of conversation with his younger brother, the headstrong Barclays Dreyman, and together they were discussing in edifying detail the curious vanishing of John Franklin’s expedition to find the Northwestern Passage, and the chances (which appeared slim) that the lone USS Advance, dispatched in late May, could find him.

“He was a good man, was Franklin,” declared Perkins, but then – quite suddenly – he was cut short by an astounded exclamation from Barclays.

“Good lord,” Barclays cried, “Good lord!  It’s the Butcher of Austria, General Haynau!”

And with that the brothers fey leapt up and beat him with sticks upon the head – as if Morris dancing – until the luckless General was bloodied at their feet and sobbing for clemency.  The Draymen (for they were not men of genteel blood) were content to leave him there, but eventually settled for some modicum of mercy and allowed him re-entry to the brewery which he had recently left from, where they bought him a keg of bitter for his woes by way of apology for their impulsive natures.  The Dreymen were, after all, good Christian men.

Later, Garibaldi himself upon a visit to London came to commend the Dreymen brothers on their virtues, for both their vindicative act of retribution for all those lost and flayed in Brescia to the Butcher, but also for their saintly generosity.

“It is no small matter to part ways with a keg of bitter,” he solemnly declared, “and it was only this action of spontaneous virtue, in retrospect, which saved Great Britain from a costly war with Austria.”

By the Banks of the Limpopo

“Oh he dwells down by the banks of the Limpopo, in the hollow of a great baobab tree.  I heard he eats the fruit at night and spits the seeds into the river.  Down they go, ever so slow, down the lazy old Limpopo to the end of the earth, when the water pours over the edge in a mist-fall, down it goes, into the void.  That is why the Little Prince is always scared of the baobab trees growing on his little planet.  Because the man on the banks of the Limpopo won’t stop eating and spitting those seeds.

He’s a man from the old times, from the dawn times, and he lives in an upside-down tree and watches as the water-buffalo yonder march.  Sometimes he sees stripes in the grass, and sometimes he sees spots, oh, the man by the banks of the Limpopo sees it all.  He climbs it high, and sits on a hammock and watches the stars, and once in each while he sees the little planet go by, and the Little Prince so frantic to dig up those baobabs, oh but they’ll keep growing and growing again.  He climbs it low to sit and talk with the hippos by the water, and they don’t have much to say and he likes it that way, ’cause he’s a man from the old times, a man with nothing to say.

He live in the baobab tree, they say, and if you see him, you tell him what an ass he is for spitting those seeds, and tell him to stop before the poor child in the sky goes mad, its breaking my heart to watch.  If you see him, you tell him.  What an ass he is.”

- A conversation, recently overheard, between the Spider-god Anansi and a wanderer, by the banks of the Limpopo.