Homeless Story of J, 4

This is entirely a work of fiction. The author in no way implies endorsement of the ideas inside. Homeless Story of J, 4 I have lots of time to watch people. From my vantage, they move in swarms with predictable rhythms, and show hardly any creativity at all. They seem like parts of something. When they get in a car, they become a car-flesh creature with a new personality. When they enter a mega-store, they become an enzyme in a beast of sarcoid cement. J’s Second Law of Social Physics: Humans + Machines = new creatures with their own behaviors that are neither humans nor machines. A person driving an SUV is neither a person nor an SUV, but rather a cyborg beast, commonly with the trait of belligerence. I have come to define “machines” very broadly to include buildings with moving parts like sliding doors, carts and forklifts; and also humming infrastructures of wires, ducts, fans, spy cameras, muzak, and megaphone announcements. Once you add humans to buildings you get strange cyborgs of great size and hunger. Humans + Buildings = Hungry Monsters. For a long time, I puzzled over the role of parking lots in the constitution of mega-stores. Parking lots are full of car-flesh creatures that act out linear and tedious variations on simple patterns. The car-flesh beasts, which are cyborgs, are somehow part of the mega-store, which is a machine if empty, or a hungry monster if there are enough humans inside to provide a pulse. It dawned on me that not only humans could be combined to form greater entities. Hence corollaries: Cyborgs + Machines = New Creatures Cyborgs + Cyborgs = New Creatures Cyborgs + Hungry Monsters = New Creatures You can then plug in the specifics to solve the problem of parking lots, which are collections of car-flesh beasts: (car flesh beasts) + (buildings) = new creatures with their own behaviors that are neither car-flesh beasts nor buildings. Every time you add a human to a machine you get something new; and every time you add a cyborg to a machine or another cyborg, you get something more than a cyborg or machine: you get a collection of cyborgs, a Colossus, which is part human, part cyborg, part machine. An example of a Colossus would be a Wal-Mart complex, which includes humans, car-flesh beasts, and machine buildings, all interacting to create a huge hungry life-form. Colossi can probably be combined too, and on and on, up the scale. But those tremendous conglomerate Leviathans are beyond my observational range. Ask Hobbes. At the heart of it all, scurrying in streams that make a pulsing blood, are humans, humans who wash over machines like magic potions, turning them to life, which in turn births new life and more technology and more machines. The humans have no idea what they are doing. Their awareness is limited to servitude. Even the machines they create are meant to help them be better slaves. I am not sure of the role of thought. Clearly thought makes it all happen. Thoughts are the most powerful and dangerous things, at least in the minds of humans. Thoughts are addictive drugs. Thoughts are spells. What I hope is that some thoughts are good. Some might be from angels. And these, I pray, can help set me free. J