2 legs 1

[Sepia]

-You know you've got the most beautiful body I've seen in years?
-This old thing? The legs are too long and too thin and the hair is hell to maintain.
-But you got this presence you know?
-Presence has nothing to do with the physical.

It was a factory, quite big and with wheels and cogs all over the place, the machines on the inside were flexing their muscles as the sun rose over the mesas and they paused and beheld it, saw it progress through life, saw it on course to where it was heading, to the dreams of all those it would awake in its' fluctuating flow through the lives of all of us and like a fine person it would create wars, stirr rebellions and revolutions, make everyone believe in magic and the darkness but it wasn't long before it'd gotten too far over the mesas and it was yet again just the sun and the machines relaxed and returned to their work.

The work would continue for days and weeks the man in the top floor discovered as he was given a moment of clarity and felt a sadness upon him. He saw the city from his office, he saw the sprawling streets and the buildings and the synergy inbetween them all, he saw beauty in the concrete, steel and glass. He had a window he could open, with a little balcony on the outside which you could get through the janitor's office and outside was a chair, a pellet rifle and pellets and every day between 1200 and 1300 he'd sit out there and shoot whatever came into his fancy or mood.

The machines saw the world as a complex cloud of superimposed minds they could not comprehend, a sort of vague chaos that wasn't programmed but learned and stored in the dna, machines were somewhere else, too far behind to matter in our intuitive calculations of the universe. We saw the machines the way we've always seen machines, small helper boys, retarded little helpers doing what we've grown tired of doing. The rise of the machines, the conflict of Frankenstein vs Monster will not be born in hate or jealousy nor will it be born from love or vengeance but it will come through an anthropological curiousity and we won't die but we'll slide into the obscurity as other civillizations have disappeared under the waves and all we hear from Atlantis are vague legends.

The world will end in 2012 and after that we will forget the Mayans, their place in history will be someone else, older chinese dynaties or däniken theories and as we tug towards the time which they will refer to as the age where they believed in xenu, we will after enough time take the tribal places as we become a tribe instead of a civillization, we become barbarians and we will not be judged as we judged, not cordoned off and ignored but they will see us on display at a museum, a wandering exhibition and the machines will be able to see us in new york, tokyo and paris

There is no madness further, we've grown beyond the barrier and we know, not where it might lead or what it is but there's this, this old ballad that keeps going on repeat

"O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the path of righteousness,
Though after it but few enquire."

"And see ye not that broad, broad road
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Though some call it the road to heaven."

"And see ye not that lovely road,
That winds about the fern'd hillside?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night must ride."

(The ballad of Thomas the rhymer)