The Problem with the World

I have just been on holiday for a couple of weeks, which has unfortunately necessitated my spending more time in proximity to The Great Unwashed than I usually prefer. I have no problem fighting for justice and righteousness on their behalf, I just don't want to have to be around them that much. Between choking down waves of nausea, I noticed something about people that has eluded me these last few years.

People are really not very good at being alive.

People's lives, comprising mainly the working week and the associated shenanigans of clothes buying and the purchasing of comestibles, has equipped them superbly for their Life, which entails performing the same tasks endlessly without any need to engage their brain. People are robots.

Take basic perambulation. The mechanics of walking, once mastered at an early age, pass into the realm of unconscious competence; the robots can walk without worrying about which actuator to contract next. Given this surfeit of computational bandwidth, once would logically assume that the robots would dedicate some of that blistering capacity to basic time / space calculations and collision avoidance. Alas, no.

Attempting to navigate a mall at any time other than midnight, at any speed swifter than snail, is a exercise in futility¹. The primary directive of the robots is to consume, a directive that drains all available clock cycles from their central processing units.

Now, here in the Palace, being proud swallowers of our own special Red Pill - it's more of a scarlety-crimson, really - are able to view this robotised civilisation from the outside. What concerns me is that I'm starting to see what all the "bad" guys in movies have been saying all these years.

Agent Smith was right; humans are a virus; specifically, a self-inhibiting virus, albeit not a very good one. We can take a perfectly functional system and converting it into a shambolic nonsense.

Introduce a single human into an otherwise balanced environment and within a week, there will be one-way systems, government bureaucracies and forms in triplicate, and the human will be sitting on a patch of bare earth, staring vacantly into space, completely unable to do anything, due to the lack of the correct permit.

¹ BoosterBoy and I have invented what we hope will become an Olympic demonstration sport, that of Mall Running. The name has yet to be finalised, but it amalgamates the essences of parkour, speed walking and a flagrant disregard for the young, elderly or infirm. The aim is to navigate a mall at maximum speed. We have developed special spectacles that filter out anything beige, therefore enabling the Mallrunner to utilise "spaces" that may otherwise not appear.