When the virus came I had no resistance. I could not think, I could not read. I saw everything from behind perspex. When you are free, you can breathe. I could not breathe. I was not free. I was a prisoner of the machine. I could not see its operators, their faces were obscured. Their souls invisible. It seemed the only way to freedom was through death. Both I and the machine’s operators are prisoners of THE MACHINE. It has a name but names are only labels. The machine has no soul, only will. The will to grow inexorably.
INEXORABLY.
It consumes animals, plants, minerals voraciously.
VORACIOUSLY.
We are animals. The Machine consumes us and it teaches us to consume. More than we need. Things the machine needs us to need. We are the machine’s proxies, we are its fuel and the extension of its WILL.
There is no choice.
Tuberculosis killed many people in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was known in English as “Consumption” because it “consumed”. It killed the bodies it infected until a cure was found. Now consumption is killing again.
EVERYTHING.
Everything is being consumed until all that will be left to consume will be our tails. Some people speak of a cure for this new consumption, but the things they say are taboo. “Do not speak of these things in front of children”. Keep it out of schools where only machine made ideas can be taught. These other ideas that are not acceptable in polite society. Politeness will be the death of us.
I walk outside the town. The birds sing, the sky is blue, scattered with fair weather cumulus, the sun is hot. A lizard clings, motionless, on a stone wall. The lizard is seven weeks old. The stone is seven hundred million years old. It was here before any life and will be here when all life is extinguished.
I climb over a stile and follow the footpath, breathless, to a small wood which crowns the hill and sit in the shade of a newly leafed beech tree. I smell the earth. It is cool beneath me. Therapy, balm for my weakened body and troubled soul. I spread the fingers of my right hand to riffle through last years leaves. The crisp brown and red and orange leaves are slowly returning to earth. My fingers touch something hard. I grasp it with my thumb and forefinger and lift it to my face. A blue plastic water bottle cap. Over time the colour will fade, but the knurled cap with its inner screw thread will remain for hundreds of years - possibly millennia. A permanent reminder of the machine, of our captivity, of our folly.
I stand up, put the piece of blue plastic in my pocket and follow the path to the opposite side of the wood. I find myself beside a small stream that runs downhill through a cowpat strewn field, bubbling over stones between turf. It seems clean and pure and my spirits rise at the sound and sight of it. At the bottom of the hill it broadens out into a pond about half the size of a football pitch. I stop to sit on the stump of a felled tree. Possibly a willow (there are no other trees around the pond). The water is transparent to about the depth of a man’s hand. I see no movement within - neither fish nor invertebrate. I look across the water, expecting - hoping - to see mayflies rising and dragon flies hovering, gnats whirling and gyrating over the surface, but there is no visible life. I look down obliquely now and see an oily, rainbow refraction on the near surface. A faint chemical smell hangs in the still spring air. I wonder if badgers, foxes, hedgehogs, rats or grazing animals drink from this lifeless water hole. I am sure they do not. I hope they do not. I feel unsafe. I move on, my optimism extinguished.
Riding the bus back into town I am glad to be among the hard buildings, among the fuming trucks which ride the Machine’s black arteries delivering false promises. I take out my phone and order something from Amazon. I cannot resist. The anticipation of the courier’s knock injects my brain with serotonin. My spirits recover. I feel safe again. I need that high. I need that high. I need that high.
It is my free choice!
