Robotica
Robotica was dynamite.
With moletronic* grace,
She far exceeded anything
Conceived by the human race.
She shimmered free in 40D
In the planes between dimensions.
She fed and fused
Teased and amused
Your higher apprehensions.
Designed by generations of her cyber-kindred kind,
She was a neural interface
Within your higher mind.
A digi-spiritual upload
She had the power to cruise
Beyond the mirage of your soul
And there she’d interfuse.
There was no image you’d aspire to
She could not foreknow,
No place where you might find yourself
She’d not be first to go.
This ultimate envelopment
It was your prize to keep
But you were her reward as well.
In her
Eternal sleep.
Sarah de Nordwall August 2000
*Moletronics. I don’t really know how you pronounce it but I imagined it as being Mol-uh-tronics. The word came to my notice in 2000 in a Wired Magazine article – Moletronics Will Change Everything
Picture trillions of transistors, processors so fast their speed is measured in terahertz, infinite capacity, zero cost. It’s the dawn of a new technological revolution – and the death of silicon. Can you say Thiophene Ethynylene Valley?
By Rick Overton
However, I haven’t heard much about it since. The potential of it got me thinking though, and this short poem has a prophetic ring to it when you read Ray Kurtzveil and others who still speak with longing of the ‘age of spiritual machines’ that they hope lies just a few technical leaps away. Take a look at Forward to Virtual Humans.
Since 2000 of course computer gaming has progressed so fast that virtual reality immersion games and even holidays, that I was writing about in a sci-fi story a decade ago, seem almost inevitable now.
The need for understanding, exploring and holding onto our core reality becomes ever more relevant, as the illusions and the derivative ephemera become more and more invasive.
‘Robotica’ though, also evokes the other types of immersive experience that use the female archetype to lull men into spiritual passivity and moral impotence.
I was also struck when I heard that the recorded voice (on some contemporary bomber planes) that instructs fighter pilots what to do, is a seductive soothing feminine.
More Beatrice archetypes required to lead Dante to paradise! And women of true Cha-yil as they say in Hebrew. Women of potency, judgement and grace..
This has given me more than temporary pause.
To what extent is reality (our biological nature, the bounds of our experience) to be respected as divine gift – and to what extent is it permissable, even imperative to "make our own reality"? Overton's vision sounds like a hellish dystopia to me so I hope it's far from inevitable! (But that could be small-mindedness on my part).