Wednesday 12 June 2013

satellite mind accumulates images forever.

More images for sale on EBay - click on images or links below to bid.... 

Shoebox lives are reversed.  The hot glow of the indoor radiator is placed on the street - accumulated gas pools setting on fire.  The daylight arrives in all it's gloom and contrasts with the freezing fires.  All colours stand out perfectly and the green stone windows allow no view of the outside world.  So the living bury themselves in vast office block tombs.



In Zone D43 the ''lower'' life forms flourish.  They dig tunnels underground and landscape garden the overground.  They do enjoy killing one another but they are never at war they simply do it for fun and to prove who is best.  Groups exist throughout the Zone that are all of one mind.  One particularly creative mind used it's swarm to construct a large structure that loomed over the Zone - it was a monument to their single minded society - it's size was so vast it took over 50 generations to complete.



Most of the building materials were trash.  Left behind from the departed mammalian occupants.  Wreckage of their buildings and odd machines.  In a very deep crater where the insect tunnels had, by chance, never crossed, a cracked mechanical device ran circular programs through it's neural network.  It frequently scanned for other computerised life - it had nobody to talk to.  It had crashed down from the sky and embedded itself in the trash fields of Zone D43.


When it wasn't scanning for potential friends it ran mind numbing visual images in it's head.  It had developed a programme that could cut self generated images apart and reassemble them into different orders.  It could create reams and reams of collage inside it's neural relays and have them reassemble themselves randomly.  

It labelled this program GarthSimmons81 after the little known artist it had discovered skimming the internet for imagery.... Garth Simmons wrote endless blog articles about himself complete with repetitive links to very inexpensive artwork on EBay.



The machine had no interest in Garth Simmons as a person.  Labelling Garth as fairly typical and stupid.  It assessed that Garth was best at emotionlessly sticking bits of paper to each other in some semblance of form and using abstraction as a way to avoid ever really illustrating anything real.  It read the writing accompanying Garth's images and came to the conclusion that as well as having bad grammar Garth was slightly deluded and believed that he had some skill in storytelling.



Some of the collages would include text cut from notebooks Garth had written in.  Obviously Garth's writing was so bad he would need to cut it up.  It was made no better by sticking it in different orders and had none of the elegance of prior word experiments conducted by better talents.

The machine did have one moment when it paused for thought due to an entry on Garth's blog.  It was an entry made on the 12th of June 2013.  For the most part it was simply the usual collection of images for sale on EBay mixed with irrelevant writing underneath each image.  It scanned it's internal optics over the words - they started out with something to do with ''shoebox lifes'' and ''insects'' - eventually it noticed a long story spread over several paragraphs about a fallen satellite that was doing exactly the same thing as what it was doing as it was reading.

The ending of the story was incorrect though.  Garth had written that the computer's mind had exploded through the sheer impossibility of Garth predicting these events.  That the satellite was screeching ''DOES NOT COMPUTE'' over and over again before declaring Garth a genius and then exploding.  The computer decided that this ending was simply Garth self-feeding his disgustingly bloated ego. 

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