Round
Acid     The
Clock
Thursday, September 9, 2004
Progress Over (If you Want It)
source: Till the End of End
posted: Sept 9, 2004, 7:01 PM
by: jhc
Progress is over. The future of technology is a future of window dressing -- applied to itself.

So, 5 years from today, even if they survive today, the people of today can no longer walk, or sit, or talk and soon thereafter, they die. Thank you for your service. This has been the world.

And though, in the final version of their days, back-projected behind them will be the future, things will be happening much too fast for anyone to notice how that back-projection really isn't the fucking future at all, but is really just what we have today, set to only slightly different music, implying what everybody already knows but everybody has to keep telling each other anyway, that you can not fully LIVE, if you have not first destroyed yourself completely, many times over.

At least, that's what they kept telling Christ and Hitler, but obviously C & H weren't listening.

"We need a new mix of advisors," Christ told Hitler in secret, with only our documentary cameras present to record their duplicity for posterity.

"Galileo has nothing more to tell us," Hitler said, subtly. And they both looked at each other and smiled and despite having lived in cultures 1900 human years and millions of light years apart, and despite having never met or spoken prior to this week, and never having read the slightest dossier on the other, and having heard not one descriptive word from anyone about the nature or character of the other, they both simultaneously knew, and knew that each other knew, that the only replacement for Galileo was Robin Lane and the Chartbusters. And simultaneous with Christ speaking the name, Altman-style, Hitler wistfully admonished whoever not to wait till tomorrow.

They returned to the conference room where all their advisors were sitting around talking quietly among themselves and collaborating on weighty philosophical tracts by candlelight, after a hard day plowing the fields -- anything, to avoid the masses who are the robots of these tribes in their extermination battles against each other.

"Galileo wants to spend more time with his family," Hitler announced, when they had everyone's attention again. "He's suggested Robin Lane and the Chartbusters as his replacement," said Christ.

Fine said Sandy Koufax, but then let's have the Drop 19s too. I mean, let's just get the fucking CURE up here and get it over with. There isn't anything THEY can't fix.

Koufax paused and calmed himself down through internal mediation. "I'm sorry," he said, "I always get a little edgy around Yom Kippur."

Christ smiled and nodded recognition. Hitler frowned, but then caught himself. "Yom Kippur, already. Shit. I'll have to go out and buy some Matzos," he said, looking around for someone who wanted to come along to the deli and help carry back the gefilte fish.

"Jesus, Hitler, Matzoth's for Passover, not Yom Kippur! Don't be such a fucking Goy!" Ghandi blurted out impatiently.

All eyes turned to him.

"Who invited YOU?" Einstein said to Ghandi, expressing pretty much the sentiment of all assembled except maybe a few members of Sunny Day Real Estate, who didn't seem to care either way.

Ghandi's assistant showed a printout of an email he'd received saying the group was in trouble and desperately needed his assistance.

"That's obviously a forgery -- but it's too hot to argue," Hitler said and he embraced Ghandi who didn't embrace him back but only, he told Hitler, because he was saving himself for all those 14-year-old girls he had to sleep with but not fuck in order to show his purity and maintain his legend.

Christ explained the story to Ghandi: OK, so there's this guy out there who's trying to exterminate the cosmos, but he's so fucking lazy that he wrote a program to do it for him and so it's out there now, searching, searching, and integrating everything it finds, and then it tries things and fucks up and tries again and refines future tries based on results. And many copies of this program are now running in parallel, hosted unwittingly on hijacked machines around the world -- so eventually they will succeed in finding a cutesy way to exterminate the universe. Our job is to find some offer we can make to this fucking lunatic to get him to stop.

"Why not just kill him," Ghandi said, "That's what I'd do. 'Specially if I caught him messin' with any o my bitches."

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copyright © 2004 by HC