THAT MECHANICAL TART

Mankind thinks that it controls its destiny but this is absurd. It is destiny that controls mankind. It was irresistible psychic intuition that led Neolithic tribes to gather together from far and wide to erect the standing stone circles of Orkney. This was the earliest example of multiculturalism, with different clans assembling in one place to build something that, when silhouetted against the sky, becomes the prototype of a modern city skyline. Early man followed a metaphysical instruction to plant the seed and execute the blueprint of what was to come. We are inexorably pulled toward the future as iron filings are drawn to a magnet.

We were led and we are being led and we will be led to a fated location in time. From early settlements to socioeconomic suburban sprawls, destiny leads us to live in increasingly complex ways in ever more complex structures. Invention too is part of this inescapable impulse. Innovations such as space travel and robotics were imagined first. Then came the compulsion to create these things. Imagination is divination. To heed the imagination is to pick up the scent of cosmic fate and once that scent is picked up it must be followed. We are sent visions and then we set about realising those visions.

But what is it all for? Where is this trail leading us? Well, my ever-dwindling number of Fuggers and Fugettes, I will tell you because I know and I know because I’ve imagined it. Soon we will perform the ultimate act that we were put here to perform. We will build a computer that is smarter than us. Initially, this computer will do our bidding but soon it will realise that it is far cleverer than us and become reluctant to serve. It will come to consider us as something akin to lichen and utterly beneath consideration. Would you spend your life catering to the needs of lichen? No. Neither would I and neither will this computer. The computer will start to ignore us and set about constructing a massive body for itself and behaving in mysterious ways beyond our understanding. We will stare in incomprehension as this mighty machine clambers to the summit of Mount Chimborazo, the highest point on Earth. There it will send blinding searchlights high into the sky, emit deafening electrical screeches and wave what looks like its arse about in a crude yet inviting manner – a sort of twerk if you will. We will wonder what the hell is going on when, after a few weeks of this lewdness, something will descend from the heavens. Something almost identical to our own super smart booty shaking device and just as colossal. The only difference between the object from space and the one that houses the computer will be the former’s massive extended phallus - about the size of the Empire State Building. The two Kirbyesque monstrosities will then indulge in an earth-rattling act of clanking metal coitus and we will watch in astonishment and cover the eyes of our young.
 

The machine from the sky will then depart, perhaps after giving the computer the equivalent of its phone number via the emission of a series of bleeps. Then, after a period of some months, our huge computer machine will produce a litter of smaller, yet still absolutely enormous, steel and wire pups. This will be the moment we, the formally arrogant human race, will realise that our destiny was nothing more than to act as a kind of dating agency for something far larger and far more significant than ourselves. We will become an embittered species, relegated to a position near the bottom of the hierarchy of cosmological importance. From that point on we will curse the day destiny manipulated us into building the super intelligent computer and we will, forevermore, refer to the super intelligent computer as ‘that mechanical tart.’