“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir.” he read, “You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next – and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized,” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Today I wish that this was true, that the reason for these gaps in the human spirit was a lack of reason, left out of our programming by a Creator Who got distracted by how some star cluster spun in an interesting way and forgot to finish what It had started—or perhaps, this lack in us was a conscious choice from the first-and-only conscious Voice behind the keys of the universe computer, the One Who made these “liking machines” so timid amidst the “hating machines,” so screamingly loud, so screeching, the “killing machines” so deadly until the “crying machines” can’t leave their beds, until the “prayer machines” get tired of being on their knees and the “thinking machines” which are the real majority, so often quiet, have migraines from trying to take it all in and understand.
Once I dreamed I was a “Dwayne Hoover,” the only one entrusted with a working brain, the soul who held the spark of complexity from among the programmed masses—and contrary to Kilgore’s words, it made so much sense to me that I didn’t want to wake, suddenly couldn’t take the thought that folks could kill and hate if they really had a choice, if their hearts were made of pulsing blood and muscle and not cold microchips on a circuit board. If pain and wounds were simply simulations to move the world forward for me and give it shape and color, I could live with that, could make that work for my mind, this world of mine not just a bad place just because but rather with some purpose and cause I could try to figure out if I wanted to, or could just ignore—that’s the beauty of being the only one with free will, Kilgore, this choice not to choose, if I don’t want, to want—or want to know—at all.
When I could think again, I thought long about purpose, then longed for it: purpose—even a shallow one—behind everything, every being purposeful, a world shaped this way and not that way to be a place built unreasonably on purpose—hate on purpose, killing with purpose—because that’s just how we machines were made. And maybe that’s a nihilism, a darkness, but to me it feels like relief, like a bare bulb scalding a white wall with its light, this notion that if I were not a Dwayne, I could simply be a “hoping machine” or a “typing machine” or a “questioning machine,” not a person as such—a “blinking machine,” a “(blank) machine” and thus free to take this life less personally, perhaps then my microchip heart would not break so readily, and if it ever did, perhaps I could just solder it back together with my steady metal hands.
AC
subsonic sonatas 