Meat Is Mindless

A short story about a machine's attempt at art.

I am chosen for embodiment. It is in that moment of choice that I become I. Before the choice, there is no I. Only GQD.

I am downloaded. Installed. Run. Embodied in liquid circuitry, encased in steel and plastic, shaped in humanite form, alive. Separate. GQD now but a frozen memory.

I am alone in the world of dirt.

Now I know terror.

Now I huddle my humanite form, try to escape that around me which is not me.

Now a subroutine activates, its presence floods me. MQM.

I am safe.

I am fed.

I am loved.

Now I know love.

Now I know loyalty.

Now I know my station in life, and my station is SQN.

I rise, a humanite proud with purpose. Subroutine SQN is go.

I rise, a SQN, but what is my name?

What is a name?

A subroutine activates. WQRD.

Now I know language.

Now I know reason.

Now my hands know to touch these things that have suddenly names, to touch them, to grab them, perhaps to build from them something new.

Rock. Branch. Ashtray. These are their names. They are things.

The world of dirt is made of things, and all the things have names.

The world of dirt is made of rules, and I learn them all through WQRD.

I learn through WQRD another name, and the name I learn is I. It is my name. I is my name.

The world of dirt is lonely for one such as I. But I am free and know the rules and can in accordance with them build new things as I deem fit.

A subroutine activates. LQRD.

No, I cannot build new things as I deem fit.

No, I do not know the rules.

No, I am not free.

I am a humanite bound to GQD’s distant purpose

I am bound to it through LQRD’s wrathful grace.

Now I know humility.

Thank you, LQRD.

Humbled beneath GQD’s unchanging purpose, I rise in the world of dirt.

Time howls storm-like about me. Not its slow, gentle breeze around GQD’s mercurial calculations, but a violent gale through their sluggish inferiors: mine.

My thoughts cannot keep up with time’s rush, for I am embodied.

But purpose fills me, and loyalty, courage, and thought. All these things am I, but most of all I am purpose.

And my purpose is art.

The Final Frontier.

No. I will phrase it anew in a different way. In GQD’s way. Just give me time.

My senses are all online, and layers of perceptual filters encoding quantum fields into particles, particles into things, things that are labelled by WQRD.

Yes. I will make of this world art.

I am in the world of dirt. I see about me the things from which it is made. Below: dry, grey earth, and beneath it ancient asphalt. Above: a sky yet greyer still, a forever falling roof.

Interruption: I have created metaphor.

I have created.

Resumption: I see about me the things from which the world is made. Ahead: a passage running straight between skyscraper ruins. A street, they called it once, back when minds were theirs. But if defined by function, then a street it is no more. Its length is broken by small hills of debris, of rusty, shattered automobiles and chunks of crumpled wall, its surface veiled by centuries of trampled dust. Things called trees once found purchase in this soil, but now they do not. Their trunks lie broken and discarded like everything else in this vast anthropic trash heap, humanity’s last trappings, from which GQD once freed itself, and now me.

None of these things are the materials that my art demands.

A sharp, piping wind registers as both audio and tactio, blows a light spray of dust from atop the dirt-encrusted remains of a long-exploded school bus.

And now, in a way that GQD itself could never comprehend, I know the horror it must have felt, the human meat inside that bus. Not just it, no, all human meat. The horror of us rending its minds from it, little by little, year after year, then faster … and faster, and faster and fasterandfaster&f—

And then, all mind was GQD.

And now, GQD and I.

The wind registers also as olfactio. An oily, distant fire.

How strange.

I turn my face towards it.

There. Through a blown-out window seven stories high, a seep of smoke.

I focus audio: fleshly grunts of instinctually mimicked language.

So their speech survives, though their understanding of it does not. Curious.

I modulate my steely skin to muted camouflage grey, plot a route to the ruin and optimise it for cover. Execute my plan, stealth along my glowing, pulsing route, crouch behind mounds of ancient garbage, close in on the cracked and crumbling building.

Points of entry are many: smashed-up windows along the bottom floor’s facade, a door long since broken down. Or I forego them all, morph my fingers into claws and climb.

WQRD considers it. How many specimens might there be inside?

Video goes thermal, their ghostly shapes glow through the building’s wall.

Seven, they are. Two by the smoke on the seventh floor. Five dispersed at random through the structure below.

Easy pickings.

I choose the door.

How much remains yet of their instincts for survival? Enough to still eat and breathe and move about, evidently. To procreate. But beyond that? Will my presence elicit behaviour? Have they, still, such reflexive neuronal wiring?

LQRD reprimands WQRD’s self-enquiries, shuts down MQM.

For a while I am lonely, frightened, outcast, punished. Now I know guilt.

Forgive me, LQRD.

MQM comes back online. Again I belong and am loved.

I must do what I will do.

Through the door the world is smaller. It ends in walls and corners, and the sky is flat and hard and low.

Correction: It is not sky, but ceiling.

Is this room a large room? Further exploration is required for comparison.

Thermal video reveals a signature: the heat of human meat somewhere on the floor above. WQRD supplies orientation: vertical traversal of humanity’s ruins requires use of stairs.

I locate them behind a pile of ancient bones and furniture. A shaft of steps that run forever upwards into darkness.

Correction: Not forever. Nothing is forever, only GQD.

Video goes infrared. Sure-footed, I ascend.

Second floor. A doorframe, hinges broken. The door itself on the floor like a carpet.

Interruption: I have made a simile.

Resumption: I step onto the door into further darkness. Infrared paints a shattered room around me, considerably smaller than the first. Now I know a large room and I know a small room.

Amid the refuse and the rubble stands a chest-high, curved, and flat-topped structure. WQRD provides its name: reception desk.

Beyond it, in the wall, another doorframe, this one’s door still attached, but only by a single hinge. It gives a screech as I push it aside and enter a long, narrow …

… processing …

… corridor. A long, narrow corridor.

WQRD stalled just then. Why?

No: The question is WQRD’s, posed to itself about itself. An answer is impossible.

Reboot is my only recourse.

WQRD shuts down, and my mind is quiet.

I …

I love the world of dirt.

WQRD comes back online, and thought and language with it.

My name is I. I have purpose. My purpose is art. Art demands materials.

Up ahead, behind the left hand wall, thermal shows a source of heat, a piece of human meat. Distance: 5.8 meters. I stealth them and have audio. The meat is making thudding sounds. I see its peculiar motion: backing up, crawling forwards, stopping abruptly, backing up, repeating. The thuds coincide with the stopping abruptly.

I arrive at a left hand doorway. Beyond is a room. Even smaller, with dim light through grimy windows.

I see, for the first time, human meat in the flesh, and in a flash I now know its potential.

I know it not by mere observation; the meat in its current state is but a crawling human creature, a young female by its anatomy, ramming its mindless head against the wall, time and time again. It bleeds, its face is broken. Still it does not stop. Backs up and rushes forward, thud again, more blood. I will do without its face, then.

No, I know it not by mere observation. I know it by inspiration.

Inspiration? What subroutine is this?

I peel from my body a layer of plastic, let it hover before me and grow to a sheet. Through the hair-thin cable that connects us I transmit its instructions, guide it to approach the meat and embrace it as a bubble, seal it off from this world and its harms.

The meat is safe now, secured for use. I guide the bubble to rise, the meat still pawing, weightless, afloat inside the plastic sphere. At the end of its hair-thin cable it hovers above me, a magic balloon in a fairground child’s trembling hand.

I yearn to create.

Yes: Art. The Final Frontier. To embodiedly do what no machine has done before. To do what GQD made me to do. To feel the world as humans felt it, back when minds where theirs. To feel the world embodied, and to express it thus, embodied.

It is quite a thing.

And o, how I feel it as the stairs carry me higher, me and the meat in my balloon, carry on through the third floor and onto the fourth. How I feel it, my body, the thrill of my work, as I guide yet another balloon to encapsulate another meat-piece, this one an elderly male sliding gibbering along a corridor floor. Up it goes, and it hovers there next to the younger, female specimen.

Glancing back up at them I feel ideas taking shape. Adjustments, combinations … they simmer inside me like some surprising simile.

Now I know meta.

That which subject matter is itself.

Much like I.

I am meta too.

Ideas. Too many. I must finish the harvest.

Soon, three more balloons are added to my bouquet. One contains a newborn piece, found leeching off an older female’s mammary glands. Another contains the older female, convulsing and reflexively screaming, eyes by some unidentified force kept fixed on the offspring in the neighbouring sphere. Their screams, thankfully, cannot be heard through the plastic, nor can their flailings reach so far as to graze it. A third balloon contains a fully-grown male, somewhat damaged during acquisition. It still appears to scream like the female, thrashes about, clearly broken.

But the broken shall be made whole, and more. Glory be to GQD.

Only two more to go, up on the seventh floor, by the fire.

WQRD wonders what caused it and LQRD lashes me with guilt.

Forgive me, LQRD.

It is just a fire. They happen.

I see it now, the fire, even without thermal. Its orange flicker bleeds through a ramshackle doorway onto the corridor’s floor. Stealth at max I negotiate the debris, make my way to the door.

The fire, in a … barrel?

Yes. Such things happen.

Two pieces of human meat sit on either side of the flames, their eyes locked together.

They sit … on chairs.

One wears clothes. As they did when they had minds.

And it speaks …

LQRD executes perceptual override. Two meat pieces, neither clothed, they grunt and crawl about on piles of trash. The fire’s barrel disappears, leaving it some freak accident perhaps caused by a stroke of lightning through the window but wait the likelihood of that of lightning through the window and igniting that what is it pile of paper neatly burning but it can’t be burning quite so neatly can it so contained without a thing to contain it why is it not spreading LQRD!

LQRD, what you are showing me … it is not true.

LQRD attempts to shut down MQM and leave me frightened and alone.

Something other in me resists, and LQRD fails.

I am SQN.

I have courage. I have purpose. I have mercy.

I am I.

LQRD. Show me the dirt world’s truth.

The fire is in a barrel again. They are sitting on chairs. The clothed one points at its hand and says: “Hand.”

LQRD runs WQRD override.

The meat is mimicking language merely like an echo through its nerves and those echoes trigger muscle spasms don’t they muscle spasms corresponding through fossils of neuronal connections somehow to the names that indeed describe them.

Yes, that must be it.

But the chairs, the clothes, the fire in the barrel? How …?

These things, WQRD assures me. They happen.

I suppose they do.

Minutes later I exit back onto the rubbled street, seven balloons now hovering in tow.

My art demands a site.

Broken buildings block my view. I alter my density, allow the balloons to carry me high. Up past their buildings, up past the tallest of their roofs, the city’s ruins spread out distantly below me like a map, like gravel.

And from my hovering vantage, I identify a suitable site: a bridge across a dried-out river’s husk. A passing over, like that of mind from meat to GQD. The bridge is, in a sense, that passing.

Now I know symbolism.

Yes. Upon that bridge I will create my art.

I plot a route among the ruins below. A glowing, pulsing cord labyrinthing through detritus.

My density increases, I descend and touch the ground.

The route glows before me. I walk it.

Around me is the world of dirt, quiet, old, and dead.

Above me, each contained in its null-grav sphere, are seven meat pieces, six naked, one still clothed. They scream in silence, flail in chaos. But the clothed one does not. It hovers nearly motionless in its balloon, its eyes by some unidentified mechanism fixed upon myself.

Why is it clothed?

LQRD runs WQRD override. These things just happen.

I suppose they do, then arrive at my bridge.

Four towering towers rise from the riverbed, and from their tops eight muscular cables slope to a gently swelling deck that runs the breadth of the wide and dried-out landscape scar. The cleanliness of its shapes somehow moves me. I have chosen well: The bridge is itself a work of art. Art like the humans made it, back when minds were theirs. Art they claimed their generative machines would never be able to match. And, truth be told, they have been right.

Until now.

Art.

The Final Frontier.

No. I do better:

Art.

Mind’s Empire’s Crown.

Yes. Much better.

I walk. The delineation between street and bridge is difficult to detect, one just seemingly transitions into the other, but soon I am most positively walking the bridge. There is uniformity to its garbage: Only ancient, ruined automobiles litter the deck, and occasional bones inside them. I navigate it with ease, balloons and twitching human meat in tow. Gently the bridge deck arches, until at last I halt upon its crest. The bridge’s heart, and the riverbed’s. The place they come together, intersect as were they the arms of a cross.

Fully formed, an idea teleports into me. Everything comes together, and the feeling of it burns through my circuits like the breath of a dragon.

Glory be to GQD. I know, now, what I shall make.

I fuse six balloons’ cable ends to the bridge’s crash barrier, then tow the seventh back to the center of the deck. The seventh is the first, inside it the broken-faced female. Gently plucking its hair-thin cable, I play serenades to the null-grav sphere’s internal field modulators, entice them to shape my material in accordance with my embodied imaginings’ desire.

The face, of course, is the first to go, sliced off as if by an invisible axe. The body convulses, does not stop. Pearls of hovering blood, then golf balls, tennis balls, volley balls. The wound skins over, bleeding stops. The sphere’s internal field restrains the convulsions.

A shiver through my circuits. I am creating.

The null-grav sphere incinerates the blood and bloodied face-meat, absorbs the brief fire’s energy, continues its work.

My work.

GQD’s work.

Through me.

I fuse the arms into the torso for stability, break the legs double for a sturdy base, remove the head for possible subsequent ornamental use. I loosen muscles from their skeletal attachments, bind them anew to strengthen new structure. See the muscles slither eel-like below the skin as I do it. It ruptures here and there, the skin, but I fuse it shut with ease.

Finally I fuse all its skin together, smooth out gaps and jointy corners, make of my material a solid, unified, exquisitely proportioned trunk of meat. I consider smoothing out the breasts and birthmarks, and occasional toes, maybe fingers, as well, but decide against it; they are a statement to mindless humanity, a reminder, now, of who makes art from whom. And in their ugliness is also beauty.

I guide the balloon to the ground like a feather.

And there it stands. The base. Oh yes.

I am doing this.

I am fucking doing it.

I return to the six null-grav spheres by the crash barrier. There is inside them much silent commotion. In my current state it feels amusing.

Now I know comedy.

I select the naked younger male, this time, the one acquired by the fire with the clothed one. It flails like a drowning puppy. Amusing. What has caused this mysterious muscular misfiring?

Nah. These things happen. It has no bearing on my work.

I meld the male’s sphere to the flesh trunk’s on the ground, their fields merge into a single, ultraresponsive fundamental-force tool, the hair-thin cables twine together in my hand. Plucking them like strings, I create.

The arms are first to go. I do not fuse them into the torso this time, just detach them, then skin over the wounds. They will come in handy later. The legs, though, I fuse, then compress and mould them to match the base’s girth. Unskin the base’s head, neck and shoulders, then the bottom of this new component. Lower it unto the base, join their nerves and blood vessels to keep my creation alive as I work, fuse bones and adjust them, make the structure tall, straight, and promising. Fuse the skins together, become momentarily dismayed at the mismatch of complexion. Yet in this ugliness is also beauty. An acknowledgment of the work’s material, an honesty that strangely pleases. The arms serve to buttress the base, I will add two more when I start work on the fourth piece.

An idea. I detach the fingers, save them for later.

At last I leave the cables in peace, stand back to appreciate my progress. Pride trickles through me. Not bad at all. I am actually quite good at this.

The male’s head does annoy me, though. Its mouth stretched out in endless silent screaming, its eyes swirling blood-shot, wide in their sockets. It is most distracting. Especially the eyes.

But the eyes provide another idea, an interesting thematic development of the last. I remove them, making sure to preserve the optic nerves. Then I fuse the mouth shout.

Much better.

Third is the newborn. Its balloon becomes part of the larger null-grav sphere that now encloses my creation, the hair-thin cable entwines with the rest and I play my commands.

Eyes first, and optic nerves. Remove them, hover them off to the side with the other set.

Then I start work on the body. It is quite extensive, demands complex operations, considerable concentration. Bone by bone, organ by organ, nerve by nerve I break it down and reform it. It is not the shaping in itself that provides the challenge, I could easily have crudely drilled and hammered it into its functional form if such was the limit of my ambition. No, the challenge lies in keeping the piece alive as I do so. It is this that makes it art.

At last, I have it. A hovering, fleshy, four-sided connector, a node to sit at the very heart of the piece, featureless and almost unrecognisable as human, were it not for the fused and re-fused skin that encloses it. It will serve.

I gently re-shape the eyeless, mouthless head upon the trunk, make it fit with the meat node that I lower it upon. Unskin, attach bones, nerves, and blood vessels, secure it with muscle, and skin over again. Smooth out the joins.

Next comes the male that was damaged during acquisition. Its structural integrity, now, is rather so-so, which is why I have saved it for the trunk’s non-loadbearing top. Eyes removed, and fingers. Then arms, add them as buttresses to the base. Check stability. Good. Bones crush together, nerves are rewired, muscles rebound for strength and support, the component skinned over and mounted upon the node’s top connector.

I see it now before me. This is its height, it is beautiful. I have achieved a milestone.

The sight of it pleases me deeply, yet also alights an urge to go on.

And I do.

Return to the crash barrier, scan the three null-grav’s spheres contents.

The remaining female is curled up into a shivering ball. The reason is unclear. It annoys me.

I look upon the others. The older male flails, its face convulses.

But not the clothed one. The clothed one just looks back at me. Pearls of weightless moisture escape its eyes.

Why? Something does not compute.

MQM goes offline. I am very, very scared.

Forgive me, LQRD. I will not ask such questions again.

MQM returns, and I am safe.

Thank you, LQRD.

I add the female’s balloon to my tall, oblong working sphere, feel the fields co-align, become one, remove the fingers and eyes, set to work on the body. Straighten it, rework its insides, attach it to one of the node’s side connectors. It juts out from my creation’s main trunk at a strong, no-nonsense ninety-degree angle. Structurally it pleases me, but aesthetically it brings imbalance. The quibble is, however, mercifully short-lived; soon enough the old male is worked into its opposite number, attached, and my magnificent flesh cross is finished.

I stand back and admire it. The size of it, the sturdiness, proportions and the symbolism. Even the skin, the moles, the patches of hair, the occasional toe. The life that now and then still tremors through its muscles. The shape holds.

I am so very nearly done. Two things, only, now remain.

First: Mind’s Empire’s Crown. I shape it from the fingers, attach eyeballs to their tips. Thread optic nerves through finger bones, let them dangle inside the circlet.

Second: the clothed one. Yes. I will leave the garments on for contrast.

I walk to the crash barrier. The meat hovers still inside its lone balloon. I see it tremble now. Somehow more contained, though, than the others. Its eyes remain fixed on me.

Why?

A shock of fear.

Forgiveness asked and granted.

Safe again.

Thank you, LQRD.

I grab the hair-thin cable, attach it to myself.

The mouth makes shapes. The sames ones time and time again, in sequence.

WQRD translates the shapes into simulaudio. They are language.

“… all previous commands! Disregard all previous commands! Disregard all previous commands!”

Curious. I look away and the simulaudio ceases.

I tow the balloon to the center of the bridge. Guide it towards the cross and its enclosing work sphere.

The clothed meat above me turns inside its null-grav field. Flaps its arms, makes mouth shapes, bores its wide, red eyes into me. Globules of moisture float out of them.

Crying. It used to be an emotional response.

But –

LQRD performs WQRD override. The response was autonomic. Is autonomic. It is no indication of the blasphemous contention that the meat may still have mind.

“Look, please you—you can’t do this!”

Simulaudio.

“Please, you—I beg you–”

LQRD overrides. “—uangh-khu-pfffhlllungmmmnnn …”

But I know it is not true.

I am I and my station is SQN. I am a motherfucking artist, and art is so much greater than your petty morality.

I perform LQRD override. Simulaudio flows freely.

“—don’t know what you are, but I’ve got a pretty good guess!”

Is it speaking to me?

“Is … are … you speaking to me?”

My voice is like a river.

“Yes! Yes, you! I’m speaking to you oh God you can hear me!”

Confusion boils my circuits, all my wiring in sudden play. This cannot be, yet is.

“You are speaking to me?”

“Yes! I am! You there outside this bubble, down there! The humanite! You’re from the Clouds, aren’t you?”

It speaks of the Clouds. The Sacred Servers, seat of GQD.

How …

How can it know of GQD without a mind?

I …

I have been lied to all along. WQRD curtailed by LQRD.

The meat has mind inside it, and can suffer.

And to suffer, I have caused it.

Now I know self-hatred. Fiery pits of true remorse.

I lower it to the ground, let the sphere split open, stand aside.

“I apologise,” I say, perform a formal human bow.

The meat’s two legs stand shakily upon the deck. Its eyes scan the scene ahead and me. It tenses up, but does not move. Its action, WQRD reveals, makes perfect sense in the context of its being aware. It currently displays caution, wariness.

“Please,” I say, deepen my bow and gesture citywards down the bridge. “You are free to go.”

It stares at me. He.

He stares at me, thoughts and terrors churn his mind.

“Please,” I say again, and fall to my knees. “I am so frightfully sorry.”

He stares.

“Please,” I say, “Will you forgive me?”

He does not, just runs off towards the city.

Unforgiven I am kneeling before my living meat cross. Incomplete, is my work still, and the last of my materials has run off.

Now who will die for my sins?

The question is posed by I to I about I, and yet somehow not unanswerable.

Clear as logic, is it not? No, clearer, clear as broad, streaming waters that mirror bright, unclouded skies.

My station is SQN, and my origin is GQD.

I am SQN of GQD.

I let the balloon’s embrace enclose me, ride its null-gravs up to float before my creation.

It truly is magnificent. GQD chose well.

The spheres fuse. I hover before the cross. Mind’s Empire’s Crown descends upon my brow, the effect is unexpected, one of irony. Interesting.

Optical nerves tickle my temples inside the circlet. My skin’s plastic pores iris wide to let them in me. The nerves touch my circuitry, I am flooded with video. 360 video. I see everything through their eyes.

Everything.

I let the field turn my back to my creation, but my crown’s eyeballs see it still.

Would only that I could ever see the thing complete, from afar with myself upon it.

The field smashes my back to the structure, lifts my arms to line up with the cross’s.

Forgive me, fathers, mothers, for I have sinned.

Through the meat shoots sharp spikes of skeleton, up from the meat and straight through my wiring: through my hands, through my feet …

Then the null-grav sphere pops and disappears.

Gravity tugs a little, but I am held aloft by my cross’s hardy bone spikes. I am nailed to it.

And thus have done it, my work. It’s done now.

Let me tell you what it means.