Meat

My body is my temple. Admittedly, it’s a shoddy, makeshift sort of temple: the kind of temple that the Ancient Britons might have made do with while they were waiting for Stonehenge to be finished, and then kept pigs in, but it’s all I’ve got and it works pretty well, considering it’s been sitting slumped in front of a computer for nigh on twenty-five years. Lucy, on the other hand, looks like what you get when you take an old vacuum cleaner apart to mend it, then give up and heap all the bits in a corner of the garage, in the vague hope that a magical race of pixie shoemakers might happen by one night, looking for a career move.

            There seems to be a bit of a discrepancy here. In the comic books of my childhood, robots’ and androids’ bodies were lithely built from shiny titanium, housing lots of technical-looking gizmos that, in some unspecified way, gave them superhuman strength and agility. I don’t seem to remember any thick cables dangling out of their backs, leading to huge stacks of batteries or bulky compressors. They didn’t get bits of fluff jammed in their gear teeth, and they didn’t have to plug themselves into the mains for a fourteen-hour recharge after a mere ten minutes of fighting with Dan Dare. I think perhaps the sci-fi writers were glossing over a few of the snags. In fact there seems to have been quite a conspiracy of silence about how one is actually supposed to build machines that can move with the grace, strength and precision of an animal.

Copyright © 2004 Cyberlife Research Ltd.
Last modified: 06/04/04