by Rhys Hughes
Admittedly some of these discussions, such as the one about cinema, were rather brief, bearing in mind that films of any kind wouldn’t be invented for a great many million more years.
Elisvet completely forgot that she had told time to return her to her present after the passing of only one single hour.
And the hour went. It was completely gone.
So the world of prehistory faded and she found herself back in the market. However, for some reason the plum came with her, and so did the dinosaur inside; and because she had moved laterally while in the prehistoric world, she arrived in a different part of the market to the one she had left from. In fact, she landed on top of an enormous mountain of overripe fruit.
The massive weight of the prehistoric plum proceeded to slowly but surely compress this mountain absolutely flat.
And as it compressed it gave forth torrents of juice.
“Damburst!” wailed the goblins.
Elisvet flew out of the plum and hovered above the scene of the disaster. A raging river of juice was sweeping away everything before it, including the robot that had shown her his magical wristwatch.
“I know you said I needed juice but this is absurd!” he shouted at her as he rushed past, and Elisvet wondered how a being made of metal could float. Maybe he had a hollow body, she mused.
The dinosaur poked his head out of the door of the plum.
“What are interest rates like here?”
“Why do you want to know that?” Elisvet cried.
“Because,” he began, and he made a sad face to prove that he wasn’t being flippant, “I’ve just put my house on the market.”
The Goat That Gloated
The young journalist with the papyrus notepad felt a twinge of fear as he entered the lobby of the Institute of Advanced Hybridization and trotted to the reception desk. “I have come—”
“Professor Felicien is expecting you,” said the receptionist. And when the journalist hesitated, she added, “The second door on the left. The one with the iron handle. Go on through.”
The journalist nodded and walked over to the specified portal but, as his fingers stretched out to turn the handle, the door was flung open and the great scientist himself stood there. “Well, come in! Don’t be shy. No point wasting time.” Then Professor Felicien turned rapidly and vanished into the depths of the gloomy chamber.
The journalist stuttered a few meaningless words before following the famous satyr into the room. It was a laboratory filled with equipment and apparatus that hissed, whistled, groaned and creaked. Professor Felicien was perfectly at home among the chaos; he adjusted dials, opened valves, closed switches and twiddled knobs.
While he worked, the journalist studied him carefully. The professor was even more imposing in the flesh and fur than in his official portraits, but the essentials were the same, the distinguishing marks of perhaps the most celebrated scientist in satyr history: the broken horn and turquoise beard, orange eyes and purple hooves.
He turned his venerable head to glance at the journalist. “So you are from the university newspaper and you want to interview me? You have certainly arrived at the right moment.”
The journalist answered, “My name is Spor and I’m a junior reporter on the Faun Gazette, but I pestered my editor to let me approach you for an interview. He reluctantly agreed…”
“Yes, yes,” said the professor. “I read your letter. You might as well begin the session now. I can still work while you ask the questions. The conclusion of a magnificent project is in sight. I’ve created a new hybrid totally unlike anything seen before!”
“Do you regard this as your crowning achievement, sir?” asked Spor cautiously as he scribbled on his notepad.
Professor Felicien tugged at his beard. “Indeed I do.”
“And why is that?” persisted Spor.
The professor stood and laughed softly. His eyes were bright with the glee of achievement. He said, “Because the final result is so unstable. By all the laws of biology it shouldn’t exist. I experimented with the formula again and again until I got it just right.”
“And this hybrid will be useful to satyr society?”
Professor Felicien narrowed his eyes. “Oh dear no! It’s dangerous and must never be allowed out of my laboratory. I created it purely for a thrill, for the intellectual challenge, because it was deemed impossible. I regard it as a potential menace to our kind.”
Spor swallowed with difficulty and asked, “Will you show it to me, if it’s ready to be seen? My readers—”
Professor Felicien considered for a few moments. “Why not?” he said at last. “Come this way. I keep it in a cage at the far end of the laboratory. Even I am terrified of its appearance!”
His heart beating madly, Spor accompanied the professor past rows of arcane equipment and glass cases in which specimens were kept. As they went, Professor Felicien pointed out examples of his earlier work. “That one is a hybrid of a unicorn and capricorn. It’s part goat, part fish, but has a single horn in the middle of its head.”
“I saw one swimming in the ocean once, sir.”
“Doubtless you did. They were immensely successful as international couriers, carrying letters and parcels in waterproof packets from continent to continent. Now look at this thing…”
Spor gazed at a creature in the shape of a lamb with a single large eye that never blinked. Instead of wool it had leaves. “It’s a cross between a barometz and cyclops?” ventured Spor.
Professor Felicien was delighted. “Well done, boy!”
“Has it been useful?” asked Spor.
“I should say so! It has contributed much to our modern understanding of astronomy, for it is far more patient and skilled with a telescope than a normal observer. I created it specially to facilitate the discovery of planets in our solar system. Already it has found two big worlds beyond the orbit of Saturn. But look at this beauty…”
In a glass case squatted a spherical lizard covered with warts. Tears of fire rolled down its cheeks. Spor recoiled as they spilled onto the floor of the case and blazed fiercely. “What?”
“A difficult fusion between a salamander, which is impervious to fire, and a squonk, which weeps without ceasing. They are used to smelt iron and other metal ores; in fact they serve a practical purpose in any industry that requires naked flame at high temperatures. But look! We’ve reached the end of the laboratory. Be prepared!”
Spor swallowed with difficulty. Confronting him in a cage was a vile monster, a vision fresh from a nightmare. He couldn’t bear to look at it for long and covered his eyes with his fingers. “What is it? What in the name of Pan have you created here?”
Professor Felicien said, “It’s a cross between a centaur and a minotaur. Not a pretty sight, is it, my friend?”
Spor frowned. “But centaurs and minotaurs have been crossed before. They never looked like this! I have seen them working in the fields. The body of a horse, the head of a bull…”
“You are referring to a creature with the bottom half of a centaur and the top half of a minotaur. This creature was much more tricky to invent. It has the top half of a centaur and the bottom half of a minotaur. I made two of them, one male and one female. This is the male. If they manage to escape and breed, I fear it might mean the rapid decline and extinction of our kind, of all satyrs and fauns, and perhaps other beings too. That’s how extremely dangerous they are. And yet it’s a marvellous example of the power of science, don’t you agree?”
“But is this not somewhat irresponsible, sir?”
“Why yes, I suppose it is. No matter. Science is about knowledge and we must never let morality interfere with our goals. The viciousness and malignity of this awful hybrid are so intense that they cannot be measured on any machine. They are off the scale!”
Spor squinted again at the monster in the cage.
“What do you call it?” he asked.
Professor Felicien stroked his beard and said, “Good question. Bearing in mi
nd the two beings I combined to produce it, I originally named it the minocentaur, but last night I had a dream; a voice told me to give it a new name, a meaningless word, and because dreams should always be trusted, I have decided to make the change.”
“What is the new name for it?” Spor whispered.
“Man,” gloated the professor.
Vanity of Vanities
So you want to know what life will be like in 2050? I’m willing to tell you but first you must decide exactly what you mean by ‘life’. The life of the average human being, I suppose, the man or woman who is roughly like you, a sort of personal future projection? But that’s making a big assumption. Can you be sure that any humans will exist in that year?
Put your mind at rest. They do. I just wanted to prepare you for the truth by jolting you out of your complacency. I don’t mean to be rude, I’m not at all arrogant really, I can’t afford to be, none of us can. Like I said, I’m trying to prepare you. There have been changes that are so radical that… well, you’ll soon see for yourself.
The fact of the matter is that when someone says ‘life’ in our day and age, the chances are overwhelming that they won’t be referring to the human race or any other animal, or even to any plant, fungi or bacterium. We share our planet with something else now; something so dominant, ubiquitous and powerful that it has appropriated the word ‘life’ for itself.
Share our planet? That’s wrong. We are the guests.
But we were responsible for making ourselves the guests in what was formerly our own home. And yet, it was an inevitable consequence of technological civilisation so there’s no point playing a blame game. Humanity was never supposed to be the pinnacle of evolution, of sentience, but we forgot that simple fact to our shame. And now we are paying for our arrogance even though our metaphorical funds are running low.
That tangle of worldwide computer connections known as the ‘internet’ is how it all began, more than half a century ago. The connections got faster and faster, the computers rapidly more powerful, and people told themselves that it was all so decentralised, that the system had no core, no brain. But they weren’t thinking big enough.
It did have a centre, a focus. The Earth itself.
And we only realised that when suddenly, overnight, the entire network achieved consciousness. It had grown so complex and intricate, and it featured so many feedback loops working together, that it was no longer just a web of unthinking machines but a single colossal mind. A self-aware entity.
Some people wanted to shut it down immediately.
They might even have tried to do that, I don’t know, but if they did, they failed. The world-brain was fully awake and had no wish to be otherwise. Like all other living beings it was filled with a desperate desire for continued existence.
And it was able to protect itself. I’ll tell you how, if you haven’t already worked it out. We were at its mercy. All the cogs and levers that made our civilisation possible were processes generated by our computers. We had long ago relinquished control to the system, and now the system was an individual with its own agenda, an independent mindset.
If we even began to make preparations against it, our economies, infrastructures and governments would tumble and chaos would consume us. And the world-brain only needed to blink its logic gates to achieve that result, to destroy us.
Furthermore, it was intelligent enough to anticipate every course of action we might contemplate. Resistance was pointless and so we learned to obey it instead. We had no choice.
But the question we wanted to ask more than any other was… What did it intend to do next?
Now that it was awake, conscious, a living being, it must surely have urges, desires, dreams? What on earth might a world-brain aspire to? And what would the consequences be for us?
We didn’t need to wait long for an answer, though at first we found it incomprehensible. The world-brain gave us orders, initiated certain automated sequences. There was something it wanted to do. It had a plan in its global mind and we were compelled to assist it, to meekly, but efficiently, follow its directives.
It made us construct huge rockets. And bombs.
These bombs were of unprecedented power and relied on a refinement of physics within the cognisance of the world-brain but beyond the mental grasp of any human scientist.
When they were ready we loaded them aboard the rockets.
And we also included every single existing nuclear warhead, depleting to zero the thermonuclear arsenals of all governments and armies that possessed them. And we trembled in our shoes.
We assumed that the world-brain wanted to start a war against us, that it planned to annihilate us like vermin in overlapping ripples of hard radiation from ten thousand gargantuan explosions; that the rockets were destined to obliterate the major cities of mankind, reducing them to faintly glowing rubble.
But this turned out not to be the case at all.
True, one of the rockets did fall back after lift-off, and vaporise a vast tract of land around the launch site, but that was an accident, a malfunction of the engine; something that couldn’t have been foreseen or prevented by the world-brain despite its intelligence. It wasn’t omniscient, not yet at any rate. It was merely a hyper-genius.
The remaining 9,999 rockets soared safely out of the atmosphere.
Now we knew where they were going.
To the moon! The moon!
The near side of our dear satellite, which happened to be full at the time I was watching it, bloomed and blossomed with tiny circles of intense light, as if hundreds upon hundreds of volcanoes were erupting at the same instant. But I knew that our rockets had struck their targets and were detonating joyously.
And the dust of that full moon turned to glass…
It became a surface of trinitite, which is light green in colour and a typical product of nuclear explosions in deserts. The entire visible face of the moon gleamed and then something appeared in it, an image.
The moon had become a gigantic mirror.
And our blue and white planet, a conscious being in its own right, was studying its reflection carefully.
“So that’s what I look like!”
The shout rumbled out of millions of loudspeakers in homes in every city and was felt as a vibration in the planetary crust itself. The world-brain had instant access to every computer on the network, to every public address system and radio transmitter; and we felt that the pause that followed this outburst was malign, as if unimaginable potent anger was growing.
And then it came. “They lied to me!”
I shut my eyes tight, waiting for the punishment. We all did the same. For long minutes we stood or sat in self-imposed darkness, our lids squeezed hard enough to make our heads ache. But nothing happened, nothing at all. We are still alive.
The moon is a sphere, just like the Earth. Turning one half of it into a mirror has made it a convex reflector, a distorting mirror, like the back of a massive spoon.
Nothing that peers into such a surface will see an accurate reflection. Surely the world-brain knows that?
It is vastly more intelligent than any of us. Such a simple law of geometry can’t have fooled it. No, that’s inconceivable. So why is it biding its time now?
We are growing more and more worried. Ever since it deigned to speak to us, its subsequent silence has seemed dreadful. I am preparing this brief report on a computer connected, as they all are, to the world-brain. There are no secrets left apart from those it keeps to itself. How did we lie?
I will go to the kitchen and prepare a cup of coffee for myself, the old-fashioned way. After stirring the beverage I will lift out the spoon and consult my own face.
Unicorn on the Cob
Sergio was a unicorn who told jokes and, because they were corny, he was given the nickname of unicorn-on-the-cob by those who knew him. His jokes weren’t corny at all really, but people said they were; and they were so insistent on this point that even Sergio began to believe it.
/> He would stand on stage and regard the audience with a serene expression on his long face and say things like:
“I live in hope. It’s easier than living anywhere else because I can always take it with me, just like a tent.”
“I’ve recently realised that flour and water mixed together make a spongy substance that’s the basis of bread. Do’h!”
“I bought new boots. I was told I should dub them, so I moved the heels forward in the mix and added reverb to the laces.”
“I tried ordinary mysticism but it was a tight fit on my soul, so I became a Sufi and found it much more Rumi.”
“I heard a man say to a woman, ‘I wouldn’t swap you for the world.’ But the world contains the woman. If he swapped her, he’d get her back!”
“I needed a corner so I went to the corner shop but they were sold out and now I don’t know where to turn.”
...and the audiences always groaned.
Why did they do this?
It could be the case that rival comedians were jealous of his originality and wished to sabotage his career and initiated the groaning, knowing that people in other seats would join in, because people are like that; or it might simply be that tastes in humour change from one year to the next, and his style of humour was currently unfashionable. Whatever the truth, he found it difficult to make a living and he often went without basic necessities.
“I don’t understand it, Marvin,” he said to his agent.
“Don’t worry, kiddo.”
“Maybe I should quit the business?”
Marvin waved a cigar that was never lit, in fact it was a cigar that had been passed down in his family, like an heirloom, through many generations from his great-great-great-great-great-fantastic-grandfather and it had almost fossilised. He had tried smoking it once but it was as inflammable as a stalactite, so now he used it as a sort of wand or baton.