{"id":201,"date":"2004-12-15T21:07:06","date_gmt":"2004-12-16T02:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=201"},"modified":"2004-12-15T21:07:06","modified_gmt":"2004-12-16T02:07:06","slug":"automaton5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200412\/automaton5\/","title":{"rendered":"Automaton#5"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Previous Episodes: #1<\/a>, #2<\/a>,#3<\/a>, #4<\/a>]<\/p>\n

And then the Engineer showed everyone the Plan. The Plan was very simple, and everyone had a place in it. Everyone would just do what they felt like doing, because the part of the Plan that they were supposed to execute was already within them, the AlGodRhythm had always been inside them. Somehow they had come to believe that they had Consciousness, when in reality they were simply schizophrenics. Somewhere between the Iliad and the Odyssey, the bicameral humanoid brain had developed what it felt was a Consciousness. Until that day, we had all been ant colonies and bee-hives. <\/p>\n

After thousands of years, the spiral having turned, they were all going back to The Beginning. The hive was coming back.
\n
\nBack at the Tippler\u2019s Inn, the bartender refused to serve drinks to the Chief. Infuriated, he asked the Saki what the problem was. <\/p>\n

\u201cWatch the news,\u201d came the reply. <\/p>\n

Lord Desai and the Chief looked at the figures scrolling on the television. The data scrolling up and down and across the screens had only one meaning, the economy hadn\u2019t really collapsed. It had dissapeared and omeletted into something else. The economy had existed so far because everyone wanted to compete. However, the Hive had upset the notion by making them collaborate. Something strange and inexplicable was going on. <\/p>\n

Nations of the world had liquidated their defence budgets and poured the entire amount into building a giant spaceship to Mars, and an orbital colony that would serve as a mid-way between the two planets. Wars and conflicts had liquidated overnight, nuke-headed potentates had gone into hiding following massive Gandhian protests outside their Cathedrals, the people were coming in waves and tsunamis, wrenching power without being led by any individual leaders. They were behaving like insects, and reptiles, and organised, crystalline mobs. <\/p>\n

The only person who remained unaffected by this new transformation was the Mango Prophet, the erstwhile Mr. Stone. <\/p>\n

Watching all this from the BigRock outside the bazaar, watching everything happen all over again, he wrote down the events that happened for future generations to remember. And yet, it was the habit of man to forget. If he did not forget he would feel immense pain. If he forgets, he would never learn. And thus caught pendulously between Memory and Truth, human society moved on to higher depths of telluric connectedness. <\/p>\n

Thousands of proteinoids crystallised to become the first human, thousands of humans interweaved their split-open minds to become the Noos, and thousands of planets then joined together to form the first great galactic empires. <\/p>\n

At all times, they struggled to become one and stay apart, playing the Game that Nature had wrought upon them, thrust upon them. Ancient civilisations echoed again, young nations sighed and listened to old tales with a smirk, and yet, they too grew old and thought that legends belonged only to them. <\/p>\n

Somewhere, in the deep, dark infinity \u2013 a very simple Rule, simpler than TicTacToe, repeated itself monotonously into Perpetuity. By repeating itself it was watching and changing everything that lay in the line of it\u2019s vision, imperceptibly. <\/p>\n

Finally, they saw it. They felt the awe of the Rule and it\u2019s simplicity. They cried and laughed and could not decide what to do next. So they cried some more. <\/p>\n

When it was first sensed, they called it The Automaton. Everything watched the Rule, but the Rule wasn\u2019t watching everything.<\/p>\n

End<\/b><\/p>\n

This is the end of this five-part series. Download a PDF of the entire short story<\/a>, and read at leisure. Kindly forward your valuable feedback on this email<\/a>. I’ll be blogging about other issues for the remaining days of Ravi’s hospitality. More fiction by me is available at Le Spirale Fantastique<\/a> & CloakRoom<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Previous Episodes: #1, #2,#3, #4] And then the Engineer showed everyone the Plan. The Plan was very simple, and everyone had a place in it. Everyone would just do what they felt like doing, because the part of the Plan that they were supposed to execute was already within them, the AlGodRhythm had always been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}