[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

thing in life he would ever see. No human companion, but the black steel skull of the Fury.
It took him nearly a week to reach Hartz. During the week, he changed his mind about how
long it might take a man followed by a Fury to go mad. The last thing he saw at night was
the street light shining through the curtains of his expensive hotel suite upon the metal
shoulder of his jailer. All night long, waking from uneasy slumber, he could hear the faint
creaking of some inward mechanism functioning under the armor. And each time he woke
it was to wonder whether he would ever wake again. Would the blow fall while he slept?
And what kind of blow? How did the Furies execute? It was always a- faint relief to see the
bleak light of early morning shine upon the watcher by his bed. At least he had lived
through the night. But was this living? And was it worth the burden?
He kept his hotel suite. Perhaps the management would have liked him to go, but nothing
was said. Possibly they didn't dare. Life took on a strange, transparent quality, like
something seen through an invisible wall. Outside of trying to reach Hartz, there was
nothing Danner wanted to do. The old desires for luxuries, entertainment, travel, had
melted away. He wouldn't have traveled alone.
He did spend hours in the public library, reading all .that was available about the Furies. It
was here that he first encountered the two haunting and frightening lines Milton wrote
when the world was small and simple-mystifying lines that made no certain sense to
anybody until man created a Fury out of steel, in his own image.
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite iso more. .
Danner glanced up at his own two-handed engine, motionless at his shoulder, and thought
of Milton and the long-ago times when life was simple and easy. He tried to picture the
past. The twentieth century, when all civilizations together crashed over the brink in one
majestic downfall to chaos. And the time before that, when people were . -different,
a
a
T
T
n
n
s
s
F
F
f
f
o
o
D
D
r
r
P
P
m
m
Y
Y
e
e
Y
Y
r
r
B
B
2
2
.
.
B
B
A
A
Click here to buy
Click here to buy
w
w
m
m
w
w
o
o
w
w
c
c
.
.
.
.
A
A
Y
Y
B
B
Y
Y
B
B
r r
somehow. But how? It was too far and too strange. He could not imagine the time before
the machines.
But he learned for the first time what had really happened, back there in his early years,
when the bright world finally blinked out entirely and gray drudgery began. And the Furies
were first forged in the likeness of man.
Before the really big wars began, technology advanced to the point
where machines bred upon machines like living things, and there might have been an
Eden on earth, with everybody's wants fully supplied, except that the social sciences fell
too far behind the physical sciences. When the decimating wars came on, machines and
people fought side by side, steel against steel and man against man, but man was the more
perishable. The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against
each other. Societies splintered apart into smaller and smaller groups until a state very
close to anarchy set in.
The machines licked their metal wounds meanwhile and healed each other as they had
been built to do. They had no need for the social sciences. They went on calmly
reproducing themselves and handing out to mankind the luxuries which the age of Eden
had designed them to hand out. Imperfectly of course. Incompletely, because some of their
species were wiped out entirely and left no machines to breed and reproduce their kind.
But most of them mined their raw materials, refined them, poured and cast the needed
parts, made their own fuel, repaired their own injuries and maintained their breed upon
the face of the earth with an efficiency man never even approached.
Meanwhile mankind splintered and splintered away. There were no longer any real
groups, not even families. Men didn't need each other much. Emotional attachments
dwindled. Men had been conditioned to accept vicarious surrogates and escapism was
fatally easy. Men reoriented their emotions to the Escape Machines that fed them joyous,
impossible adventure and made the waking world seem too dull to bother with. And the
birth rate fell and fell. It was a very strange period. Luxury and chaos went hand in hand,
anarchy and inertia were the same thing. And still the birth rate dropped .
Eventually a few people recognized what was happening. Man as a species was on the way
out. And man was helpless to do anything about it. But he had a powerful servant. So the
time came when some unsung genius saw what would have to be done. Someone saw the
situation clearly and set a new pattern in the biggest of the surviving electronic calculators.
This was the goal he set: "Mankind must be made self-responsible again. You will make
this your only goal until you achieve the end."
It was simple, but the changes it produced were worldwide and all human life on the
planet altered drastically because of it. The machines were an integrated society, if man
was not. And now they had a single set of orders which all of them reorganized to obey.
So the days of the free luxuries ended. The Escape Machines shut up shop. Men were
forced back into groups for the sake of survival. They had to undertake now the work the
machines withheld, and
slowly, slowly, common needs and common interests began to spawn the almost lost
feeling of human unity again.
a
a
T
T
n
n
s
s
F
F
f
f
o
o
D
D
r
r
P
P
m
m
Y
Y
e
e
Y
Y
r
r
B
B
2
2
.
.
B
B
A
A
Click here to buy
Click here to buy
w
w
m
m
w
w
o
o
w
w
c
c
.
.
.
.
A
A
Y
Y
B
B
Y
Y
B
B
r r
But it was so slow. And no machine could put back into man what he had lost-the
internalized conscience. Individualism had reached its ultimate stage and there had been
no deterrent to crime for a long while. Without family or clan relations, not even feud
retaliation occurred. Conscience failed, since no man identified with any other.
The real job of the machines now was to rebuild in man a realistic superego to save him
from extinction. A self-responsible society would be a genuinely interdependent one, the
leader identifying with the group, and a realistically internalized conscience which would
forbid and punish "sin"-the sin of injuring the group with which you identify.
And here the Furies came in. -
The machines defined murder, under any circumstances, as the only human crime. This [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • mons45.htw.pl
  • Wątki
    Powered by wordpress | Theme: simpletex | © (...) lepiej tracić niż nigdy nie spotkać.