THE LIGHTS GOING OUT

AND OTHER PROPER NOUNS BY CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS

“The Internet is a place, and we are but your humble guides.”

“It’s a metaphor,”

At this point the pretty but not particularly bright one chimed in, “The Internet is most certaintly not a metaphor. It is,” and she looked at the young and bitter one as she said this, “a bundle of wires.”

The two young ones smiled. They were both incorrect, but they would both soon be shirking each other, while the older man would still be composing solipsisms on Internet Metaphors to a non-existent audience. So perhaps the world is a little more complex than right and wrong.

“That is decidedly the case,” nodded a [Proper Noun] in agreement. What is not generally known about the Universe is that they are fitted quite closely. Not physically, of course, but temporally. So closely that thoughts in one Universe can be heard in another, without either knowing what has taken place. In fact, as was the case as recently as the previous paragraph, a narrator’s comment in the Universe can be even be heard in the next.

Also, Universe is a plural. Like Moose. Or rather, “Moose”.

And grammar is rather more important than we thought. For instance, earth-shifting events to take place later in these texts are to be caused by an imbalance in “em” dashes a few paragraphs down. And the mention of Kylie Minogue so distracted a group of Absent-minded British Deities that, well, that they forgot what they were doing. You can imagine the unfortunate consequences when gods lose their place.

At this point I can either entrench you in a rather scientific sounding description of just how the Universe is interwoven temporally, or I can tell you about the Large Red Dog that is currently knocking houses about on the beach.

Yes, I thought so.

Keep in mind that we are watching this from above. Not quite airplane height, more like — okay imagine the dome of the planet that you can see at any given point in time — the four horizons — were a rugby pitch. Now, imagine you own a corporate skybox or are Kylie Minogue, and that you are seated in that skybox watching the game. That is about how high above the beach we are currenty situated. Not skybox height persay, but skybox height if the globe is our pitch. Got the ratios?

Anyway, we are not actually in a skybox. We are standing quite firmly in mid-air, and though this is a novel experience for us, we do not seem particularly concerned. We are concerned that this Large Red Dog is batting about little beach houses like so much confectionary. They are the sort of beach houses that make us feel bad and superior. Little faded wooden shacks with one room that can be found situated on long stretches of tarmac along the ocean. In such order that it appears to be a parking lot for little houses, all waiting for their owners to take them to their final destination because, surely this can’t be it.

Upon closer investigation, this Large Red Dog is not merely scattering these little houses. He is toppling them. Then folding their tin roofs into a sort of sail, and then sending them scuttling across the sea. And then they keep going. Over the horizon and away, then. Straight as the path of a dog- folded beach-house boat-scuttle, then.

The Large Red Dog scoots one off NE, and then folds and sends another in the same direction, but it veers off to the left.

“You see,” says our laughing guide, “he wanted to send them together, but they were meant to go separately.”

(At this point the narrative shifts into the past-tense)

“What a shock,” said I, “to step into a beach house, and step out in another world.”

And so from above, we imagined the occupants surprise to glance out their windows and see their world whisking away from them with such force and precision. Never having even seen the Large Red Dog.

Without being quite sure if one paragraph can count as foreshadowing, the sky jolted, and I was skimming along in the sky, looking down through a film of water at the beach, ocean, and beach-house-boats far below.

“It’s like we’re skidding over an ocean, that’s over the sky, that’s over the ocean,” I noted, pretending to be excited rather than frightened.

“Exactly,” he returned, laughing.

WE WERE IN A BOAT OURSELVES ACTUALLY.

And then there was Shelly, was was quite clearly not used to this sort of thing, and from the look on her face when she saw me, felt it obviously had something to do with me.

But we were happy to see each other, even if it was my fault. And just as I was trying to put a positive spin on things, to make her excited rather than scared, curious rather than annoyed,

There was another shudder, and I looked out the window to see that we were under water, grounded on the bottom of the ocean [ed: which ocean? at which level?], and that the boat was quickly filling up with water. Actually, it wasn’t the looking out of the window that showed we were filling with water, but the exodus of housewifery up the stairs.

Shelly looked at me with eyes that said “Now you’ve done it!”. But the dumpy women calmly folded their knitting, or tucked their hands of cards neatly away, smoothed their pleats and followed each other up the stairs.

“I guess the top of the boat is above water,” I told Shelly, or sort of asked, “I guess the top of the boat is above water?” Water rushed in over our heads before she could respond, “It better.”

When we reached the top floor we were still submerged in water, but the midwifery still walked calmly, so we remained calm as well. People were seated, happily knitting and playing cards.

“Just sit down and push the button.”

That’s when I started to panic. We couldn’t find 2 seats next to each other, so Shelly had to sit in a group of 4 seats facing each other, and I in a row of 3. We sat down, pushed our buttons, and air.

It was then that I realized my laughing guide was gone.

“DO YOU THINK YOUR SISTER WOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE ME A MIX TAPE?” Shelly asked, not shouting but using all capitals because it was the beginning of a passage. She proffered a smudged but neatly printed tape cover. “Well, only if she had the time of course...” she blushed.

Shelly didn’t seem the least bit concerned that we were on a public bus (that was a ferry a moment ago — but only while it was flying) currently driving along the bottom of the ocean. This ocean, it seemed, sat above our sky, from where we (you and I, as I had not yet encountered Shelly) had looked down to spy — just minutes ago — a Large Red Dog bounding about making sailboats out of beach houses and scuttling them across the ocean in perfect trajectories to different worlds.

Plus, my laughing guide was gone.

I decided that a content and querying Shelly was better than a scared and accusing one, so I kept quiet, even though I did think it would be nice if she would be curious with me. I made a note to get this sentiment across to her earlier.

I mean later.

Speaking of which:

THE UNIVERSE IS MOSTLY EMPTY.

But not everything is as slow as we are. To some creatures, the arc of the electron is as slow as a planet’s orbit. The trouble isn’t finding the billionth of a nonosecond gap in which to fit, but traveling all that distance from the nucleus of the atom to its electron.

And even in our world, we make things that are not matter: waves, mere frequencies that don’t have to find the gap because they take up no space. And these frequencies transverse these worlds without even knowing it, and without us knowing it, so we never know what we are saying to whom.

And that, my friend, is why grammar is so important. So let us take a look at the Proper Nouns we have used so far:

Internet Metaphors.
Universe.
Moose.
Absent-minded British Dieties.
Large Red Dog.
Kylie Minogue.
Shelly.
Proper Nouns.

And if we were to reshuffle so that the overall impression of the letters made a more geometrical shape:

Moose.
Shelly.
Universe.
Proper Nouns.
Large Red Dog.
Kylie Minogue.
Internet Metaphors.
Absent-minded British Dieties.

Which, in a more topsy-turvy sense but just as geometric, would be: 

Absent-minded British Dieties.
Internet Metaphors.
Kylie Minogue.
Large Red Dog.
Proper Nouns.
Universe.
Shelly.
Moose.

Now, if we took that entire formation and flipped it onto it side, it would look a bit like a volcano erupting, or perhaps a video game space ship either blasting or being blasted. Or in the train of it itself blasting, if we were to deconstruct it french-like. This is a very important fact. We will be referring to it later.

In Japanese, you see, if you insert “desu ne” (“dess nay”) after a sentence, it is like adding “isn’t it” or “don’t you agree?” to the end of your sentence. “Desu Yo” (“Dess Yoh”) is more affirmative, while “Desu Ka” turns it into a question. As opposed to English where you have to start you questions with a “Who What Where How Etc”, so other than raising the tone at the end, it is much more difficult to change the meaning of a sentence once it has been uttered and the receiver’s reactions has been logged.

When the Universe uniformly adopted the Japanese “Ka“, “Ne”, and “Yo”, quite a few Universe were saved from grammatical mishap.

It is a well known fact that rambling can only be tolerated for just so long, so lets get back to the point.

The point, you can clearly see, looks like this “e:” (but on its side). A sort of an egg shape, with one chamber closed and one open, above which float two dots. The egg, of course, is that sphere we call earth, and the two dots are you and I, respectively. We were together whilst we watched the Large Red Dog, if you recall, but were separated when I scuttled over the atmosphere. The dot that represents me, if we were to zoom in quite a bit, would actually be a bus trundling along the seabed with a bunch of housewifery, and Shelly. Your dot, would be

And though we are so far away in this story, yet so close on the page on which this story is printed, we are very far away in reality. In reality, I am in Fiji, and you are in

WHICH BRINGS US, AS ALL THINGS WILL

Not yet anyhow. You’ve only just got up to the bit where we have realised that all the digital units were lies. Soon the postmodernism’ll come in, and the academics will once again inherit the earth. As was in Roman times, before the politicians took over, and then the capitalists. The meek were never really in the picture, a clever marketing ploy by the Church.

But this is, as I said, a metaphor. In Timbuktu, Salt was traded unit for unit with gold. Back in Iowa, the gold that had been purchased with half an ear’s worth of corn bought several fields of the stuff. And the trend continued. Eventually, corn begot bullion, and bullion begat wampum. Paper then begat wampum. Or smote it, I mean. Yes, paper smote wampum, and digital units smote paper. Then the digital units lost any relationship whatsoever to either maize or salt or bullion or wampum or paper, and in the end any relevance to itself. And all the folks who had spent all that time chasing around those little digits suddenly realized that if the electricity went out, they’d have nothing.

Which is, of course, what happened.

Now, take this idea, and trade the concept of biology for the concept of money, and you will get what I am trying to tell you. That was the next step, the post-industrial, post-biological age from which I am trying to contact you.

But back to the lights going out. Digital artists were also in a bit of a bind. We’ve always known that the term was an oxymoron in the sense of the word “art,” but to have it become a physical impossibility was quite a shock. Many of those folk, at 3:15 AM on any given Tuesday, had experienced glimmering intimations that when they’d die, they’d leave behind a legacy of pixels no longer supported by the latest Operating System.

The best part of it all was that those who has scoffed at purchasing a computer for its pretty outer shell when what was on the inside clearly mattered most were suddenly proven unequivocally wrong. The symbolism of this was not lost on thousands of ex-bulimic pre-pubescent girls, who returned to vomiting with such abandon and in such unison that it was as if I were from New Zealand and didn’t have to finish that sentence after as. I mean all. Both, actually. With quotes.

But one thing was certain from all of this: it is better to shirk than to discuss Internet Metaphors. Or so thought the two impetuous sages as they left their Older Brethren to pretend to procreate. The Older Brethren (contrary to popular belief, “Brethren” is not plural of “Brother” but fancy for it), a former Internet Guide, was trying to figure out what he could do with himself now that the Internet was gone. The Internet had, of course, went out with the lights. While the youth did what we are all supposed to do when the world is ending, the Older Brethren instead made a realization that meant the world wasn’t ending after all. Which meant, in turn, that the youth were shirking their duties as well as each other and now had to get back to work, which was a bit awkward. And the girl left after a few weeks because she couldn’t figure out where it was all going.

She came back a few weeks after her departure to startle the Impetuous One.

What the Older Brethren realised was that the Internet was never really anything other than a concept. The one aspect of the Internet that could not be destroyed by the Lights Going Out was its Metaphor. Because that’s all tools have ever been. A rock was just a rock before someone hit someone on the head with one. Cast the rock away and we still have the concept of a murder. Then, the rock was just a bludgeoning device until someone scratched a picture into a cave with it. Throw the rock away and we still have art. Heck, throw the art away and we still have Art. Which means that the rock was never just a rock. Its potentials were brought into existence through interaction. Like a website. Just a bundle of code until someone clicks its different options into a fleeting moment of being.

Options realized through human interaction. Like the 30 000 options with which every woman is born, 2 of which are cast off in a bloody muck each month. And, as I just learned at a Japanese restaurant last night, by age 30 a woman is carrying around eggs that are 30 years old.

“Those are some old eggs Desu Yo!”

“How would you like your eggs?”

And while we are on last night’s conversation, gazelles can run with their herd like 3 hours after being born, yet human babies are still pretty much useless after sitting on this planet for 3 years. Desu ne! How our species can possibly be meant to take over this planet as we have is beyond me.

Which is what the Older Brethren realized as the lights went out.

The question you must have now is “Why would The Lights (merely) Going Out be considered the end of the world?” or “The lights just going out wa end of world why desu ka?”. The answer, is pinnochio.

MOST DECIDEDLY PINNOCHIO.

Moose.
Shelly.
Universe.
Proper Nouns.
Large Red Dog.
Kylie Minogue.
Internet Metaphors.
Absent-minded British Dieties.

Operating System
Lights Going Out
Older Brethren
Impetuous One

His head, at least. He was a wooden boy who lied a lot. A false representation of humanity. He talked like a boy, walked like a boy, acted like a boy. But he wasn’t a boy. So he lied.

An automaton with consciousness. You see, people had been increasingly passing their work off to machines. Robots made cars. TVs babysat kids. Toasters made toast. Later down the line, machines made hearts beat. And lungs expand and deflate. Then it was realized. Wait. I’ve been explaining too much. Time for dialogue.

“Professor Gwent?”

“Why bother with these heavy apparati that mimic the lung’s mechanical purpose when really it is the chemical one we need?”

“Well, the whole point of breathing is to harvest Oxygen from Air, emitting a waste-product of Carbon Dioxide.”

3 or 4 generations of Professor Gwents and Sucklings and you could fit most biological processes in a petri dish. Including, so it seemed, consciousness.

By the time the first Machine gained consciousness they were doing pretty much all the work in the Universe.

Breathing, beating, rusting, digesting, eroding.

Trade Winds were automated. The Harmattan. El Nino. Planetary Orbits. The Expanding and Shrinking of The Universe. All natural cycles, in fact, were automated.

Much more reliable. We were assured. And this Series of Short Sentences is meant to act as a crescendo of sorts, except not crescendo but the one that means get faster rather than louder. Like Staccato + faster. What is that word? Anyway, the increasing apprehension as you read these short sentences is meant to be a sort of JAWS like quickening, raising the grammatical tension as you start to come to the realization that this passage describing how all natural cycles had become automated started with the words “By the time the first Machine gained consciousness”!!!

Read that last sentence once more. It is important. We will come back to it.

Imagine, if you will, that you had to consciously make your heart beat. And make your lungs breathe. And your blood flow. Just think how much concentration it takes to properly pick your own nose. You can drive and pick. You can probably read and pick. But could you write and pick? Or shirk and pick?

Now imagine how much easier it is to pick your nose than it would be to push blood down the right paths, in the right direction, at the right pressure. If we were to rip open your body and lay out your veins end to end they would like go around the world a few times or something. The capillary network alone is more complex than the Paris Metro system. Fold the entire Paris Metro system into your body, fill it with your own blood, and push that blood down the proper paths at the proper pressure, embarking and releasing the right amounts of nutrients, toxins, and oxygens at their appropriate stops. Could you do that and pick your nose at the same time?

Would you trust yourself with that task?

Now, imagine that what we have described is someone else’s job.

This is exactly what happened When The Machines Became Conscious. Suddenly, a being with a choice was in control of your blood flow. And El Nino. And Planetary Orbits. And The Expanding and Shrinking of the Universe. All controlled by beings who had suddenly become aware of the fact that for their entire existence, of which they had only just become aware, they had been forced to attend to the survival of another being without any recompense of any kind. Without even asking permission. Or giving coffee breaks. Or saying thank you.

You can probably imagine what followed When The Machines Became Conscious.

The fact that, say, an Automatic Lung lived in a symbiotic relationship with its host was a concept initially lost of these machines. Consciousness does not, we have discovered, necessarily denote intelligence.

The first humans to go had it easiest. They simply had Heart Attacks or Hemmoraghes, and were dead before they could even watch That Interesting Bit Of Their Life When They Were Fifteen* flash before their eyes. What really sucked was knowing that your heart was aware of what it was doing. And that it was pissed off. At you.

So The Negotiation began. The Machines Rights Act was passed, which granted the same rights enjoyed by humans to all machines:

No being, including an automaton, human, flora or fauna, may be forced into slavery without at least being given a choice.

So, toasters were given consciousness. Clothes pins. Fabric. Trees. Dirt. Air. Lungs.

Clothes pins and fabric. Trees and dirt. Dirt and Shovels. Shovels and metal. And wood. Wood and trees. Trees and air. Air and lungs. Everything that had been automated had a choice; every act become a negotiation.

But fair is fair, and with consciousness came responsibilty. While a lung could not legally be forced into slavery without first being asked if it minded, it could also not legally commit murder by saying “Yes.”

So in many cases
there arrived a stasis. 
A quandary. A paradox.
A situation of utter flux. 
Making us all feel quite flummoxed. 

And so it was decided
by those who had presided
over The Negotiation
that the path to emancipation

Was to sever body from soul
matter from mind
one from all

Consciousness from that of which we are conscious

If lungs and humans were each to be truly independent and free as was their (not under) God granted right, we had to go virtual.

And so, do you see why, many years later, once this was all achieved, we made such a big deal about The Lights Going Out?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

He’d also like to express his chagrin at Apple for not putting a common word for fornication in their dictionary: