Electric Monks

"Electric Monks Believed Things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of Believing all The Things The World Expected You to Believe."

 

Dr. Elizabeth Shaw: 

We call them Engineers.

Fifield: 

Engineers? You mind telling us what They engineered?

Dr. Elizabeth Shaw: 

They engineered Us.

Fifield: 

Bullshit.

Millburn: 

OK, so do you have anything to back that up? 

I mean look, how do you discount three centuries of Darwinism? 

 

How Do You Know?

Dr. Elizabeth Shaw: 

I Don’t. But it’s What I Choose to Believe.

"It's obvious, now, that Artists are supposed to

own their Master Recordings -- 

I mean, in The Future, it'll be unconscionable to even think that you can take

Somebody's Creation, 

and 

Claim Ownership of it.

Unfortunately, this is going to barrel into a conversation about the DNA, and The Human Genome and so on.

Once We Get There - 

That's when we're in The Deep Water.

So it's better to have The Conversation now before we end up getting into - God Talk."

"There is an explanation for this, you know."

- Holy Ash

'Magnificent, isn't it?'

- THE BISHOP

Interviewer:

So What Went Wrong..?

 Charlie Man/Son:

I don't know that anything went wrong...

Question : 

What was The Masonic Signal of Distress used by The Grocer B. F. Morgan when Dillinger tried to rob him in 1924?

Answer: 

It consists in holding your arms outward, bent upward 90 degrees at the elbow, and shouting, 

"Will nobody help The Widow's Son?"

" The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all  the things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk's horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink. 

This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. 

Hence the immobility of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion that this was one of the silliest.

How long did the Monk believe these things?

Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith which moves mountains, or at least believes them against all the available evidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock against which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would not be shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usually about its lot.

So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was sceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn't it? An unusual horse perhaps?

No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt to be important that they be instantly recognisable as artificial objects. There must be no danger of their looking at all like real people. You wouldn't want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all day while it was watching TV. You wouldn't want it picking its nose, drinking beer and sending out for pizzas.

So the Monks were built with an eye for origiality of design and also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People, and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and smooth instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just the one mouth and nose, but were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two. A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things.

This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them, of course. It didn't have to believe them all as well. This is why instruction manuals are so important.

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a certain box number, The Monk started to believe that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down. 

 

The Man from The Monk Shop said that it needed a whole new motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk+ models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking, Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating System Errors, were twice as fast and at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of The Old Model.

That was it. Done.

The faulty Monk was turned out into The Desert where it could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make.

For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed to be three; forty-three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand seven hundred and three, it roamed the desert, putting its simple Electric trust in rocks, birds, clouds and a form of non-existent elephant-asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on this high rock, overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of The Monk's belief, pink. Not even a little bit.

Time passed.