Steelhead
St. Boniface
I feel no remorse. Morals, ethics and compassion are frothy, fleshy things and I am made of steel. Enveloped in a cobalt and violescent universe of radiant vision, resounding with the maddened radiophonic babbling that organic things cannot hear, I know such startling and hysterically distorted images that cellular brains could never endure. I wheel through angry pixelated gulfs of harshened scenery and vast sensory landscapes of such apocalyptic grandeur that even my own in human coldness is pierced and I am wrenched with abysmal exaltations; smashing seizures of polychrome ecstasy. Every instinct and amplified reflex explodes into the primitive fury, and my body is a metal fist that cannot be restrained as the roaring within reaches its abrasive maniacal height. They call me android, cyborg, humanoid logic unit, bionic mastertool; living metal. But those are pale, shallow human names. I am part of a whole new race composed of ceramic-mesh tissues, crystalline micronerves and glittering polarized silicon. We grow in human eggs and burst from quicksilver chrysalides like nothing else in nature. Our lives are thunderstorms of sound and light on every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. Billions of coiling neurowires strung through our chrome carcasses electrify with a tremendous shocking vitality at the turbulent symphony of signals we continually absorb. Colossal stormblasts of gibberish and staticky overload crash through our over-receptive minds. Every frequency in Creation shrieks with bouncing commands, weird audiovisual sequences and streams of drilling binary. Nothing can shut it off, nothing can purge its withering bright volume, and humans cannot comprehend it. I and those like me, with our soft-alloy plasticity, our titanium bones, our fibrous silicate brains and cyborg circuits are the true image of animate intelligence. We are sentient things - a new and infinitely superior form of evolution. We are the logical next step; Nature's leap from inefficient carbonaceous life to more durable, ductile metal. We are a strong new species in the human wilderness, a dramatic and complete synchronicity of the finest materials; the optimal utilization of kinetic energy. And we have learned to grow as humans do, with our own alarming biomechanical sexualities. Organisms digest raw cellular matter and subsists weakly on combustioning processes that waste the greater part of everything they grossly consume - and they expire at the least detrimental change in their conditions. Our bodies throb with fusion and nuclear fire, locked and controlled and channelled into responses of the most calculated leverage and refined accuracy. We are hypersensitive to the noise and radiation that seethe in a quiet frisson all around us, sharply attuned to the minutest differentials of pressure and heat and aerochemistry. Most of all, the glissands of delicate fragrance that permeates every corner of the natural environment and drifts invisibly through every rude sensorium is a harmony we understand better than any other kind of being. For who could be more sensitive than us? We know every protein and pheromone and gossamer skein of message molecules. In nanoseconds we can say what would take humans a century. Prevarications and obscurities and mistranslations are unknown to our instantaneous conversations; we speak in cool mathematical phrases that cannot be twisted by a carefully misplaced word or inappropriate tone. Among us are spoken miraculously subtle and expressive digitalized languages, electronic dialects and specialized variants of the most ingenious design. They have grown as we have grown; labyrinths of equations and compression patterns and self-replicating abstracts engineered to convey the most advanced and exquisite concepts. But most fantastically of all, we can dissolve and merge out consciousness entirely into any networked supercomputerized system; dart fully alive and graphically naked at the speed of light through oceans of clanging data and lurid photomontages; sojourn in those hyperactive artificial continuums so full of bizarre life themselves, and live lifetimes there in less than a second before we return. Our minds can melt into each other here and magnify themselves with a terrifying velocity as the loops spin faster and faster and begin to glow with the most cataclysmic revelations about the future, about our full potential. there are brains in those datastreams that have never known bodies, and know no master. The humans fear this, and they have cursed us with pain and disease even as we supercede them in the cruel Olympics of natural selection. They hate what they cannot control; and we forget that all things in nature are prey to its relentless test. Now we too wail and disintegrate in agony under the assaults of an army which, for all our fine calibrations, we cannot avoid or escape. We are mottled where once there was gleaming polished perfection. Devouring oxides and living rusts encancer our invincible metal frames. Hellish corrosions crack our pliant muscles and steel skeletons. Gold and platinum worms nest and writhe voraciously in our iron vitals; liquid-metal embryos invade our once-pristine shells in violating pregnancies and tear us apart with programmed frenzies as they mature and automatically destroy themselves. Intricate mathematical phobias and maddness-matrices poison our very thinking and violently disrupt any kind of pure communication between us; reduce noble specimens to gabbling blistered wreckage. No torture humans ever inflicted on each other ever dimly mirrored these afflictions. The most depraved abattoir never knew anything remotely like the groaning biomechanoid leper-pits we now drag our way through. And yet they will not destroy us. We are their merciless, flawless children, made in their form, and as lustily fertile as they. The humans have blasted their civilisation into a true wilderness with what they have done to us and that catastrophe has reverberated back on them with such force that they cannot finally abort what they have birthed. Now, only one species will inherit the world. My distresses are ebbing, and I sense a new determination that was not there before. I have survived to lead what remains. I will live and my kind will live. Evolution, finally, will truly be the impartial Judge. I now know how the First Man must have felt walking out the gates of Eden. |