I've said for months now that I want to be culturally literate. I want to be plugged in. I want to have information around me, for my enjoyment, in my head, at my disposal. An anthropologist studies human culture and society: I want to be that, but more than that too. I want to be a historian, a media accumulator, a consolidator, a scientist, a writer. Not many people realise that we're living through one of the hugest cultural revolutions in human history: instant connection with information from anywhere in the world. On every scale there has been and will be cultural, social, and technological change because of the world wide web.

The pace has changed. New parameters have been set. A new language is now on everybody's tongue.

 

And I want to take part. 

Three peripheral carbon branches
   don't react but recompense.
I can't escape my decadence.
   The harlequin is dead
         but his mask is grafted on
and the tears cannot dissolve the plastic
    yet the laughter is fantastic
    he can't say he's not happy
but it's getting hard to breathe.

My friend, the muse, is dead
or at least he's soulless on this plane.
   Humans are to him inane;
   I race, yet I agree.
But to him I am that which is awful:
   While I play the game so well,
I let the demons of this hell
    arsefuck me while I cry.

The best machines are simply so.
    Their manuals simply written
and the world becomes so smitten
    with their reachability.
I live my life a hybrid android
a thinly rigged pastiche of lives
a headcase full of kitchen knives
but a brain set out in code.
  I'm not hooked into the framework
  Programme out through different lines
      The harlequin is dead
But the body's giving signs.  

An excerpt from something I wish to have finished by the end of the year.

 

"The prosthesis procedure is expected to be turbulent. The nature of the surgery is such that blood circulation can be increased rapidly which will in turn lead to the anaesthesia depleting from Boy A’s system too quickly. This is dangerous for a number of reasons: the first and foremost of which is that Boy A may wake up during the surgery and experience the life-altering trauma of witnessing the removal of his limbs, which in a worst-case scenario will kill him, costing the facility millions upon millions of Yuan. As we cannot guarantee whether or not this will happen (not to mention when it might happen), we remind all personnel present during tomorrow’s procedure to be at full alert.

 

An emergency situation can be dealt with as follows. Boy A has three major input pipes- two pipes, coloured blue and yellow, lead into Boy A’s cardiovascular and neurological consoles and either of them, when unplugged, will kill Boy A instantly, with the same financial repercussions as mentioned above. The third pipe however, coloured red, is connected to the respiratory console and when unplugged will starve Boy A of oxygen, rendering him unconscious. This pipe MUST be plugged in again within five to ten seconds, at which point Boy A will be pacified and can be readministered with C^x .  

Supplementary to the C^x  chemical batch is a neurochemical called phenonsylexic acid, which decimates recorded information in the brain in order to reduce an individual into a state of memory pause. For the purposes of this project, phenonsylexic acid is used to keep Boy A in a state if passivity until the more psychologically intrusive procedures of the project have been completed. Of course an unavoidable externality of the use of this acid is that Boy A is essentially in constant mental stasis, as the acquirement of new knowledge is beyond what the chemical allows him. Hence he has no comprehension of his presence in this facility, let alone his reason for being here.

     In summary, Boy A is psychologically foetal. He does not have a wealth of human experience to call upon because it has been erased- therefore he is not aware of basic ethics or media of communication. Although he is tenuously acquainted with his own emotions these links are broken each time the acid is administered following hypertraumatic surgery.

 

As always, we stress that the safety of our employees is our foremost concern, but we emphasise that care must be taken to ensure Boy A’s survival, at least while the company is responsible. As a precaution, only S rank staff members are allowed on the surgery floors tomorrow, as our insurance policy holds us accountable otherwise. "