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The Wall Spoken by "Fred" (Audio Quicktime Movie) You will need Quicktime player to hear this file |
| The Wall |
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The sky was still outside the dome, the day the team noticed the wall line; just a smudge on the electro scan, but one man there could recognise it had significance.... A barrier, or some kind of permanent defence. But though they had all read of walls and knew about their bricks of dried and heated clay, their gates with locks, their bulk... There was none there that could have understood the true import of that discovery. We had for many centuries been without such physicality; building all our walls cerebrally, and playing?.... well that was all but finished in the higher humanoids... a primitive life skill learning process, now surpassed by decades, eons, of pre-natal chip implants. So when that archeologist discovered the wall line smudge on the electro scan, he could not possibly have guessed that he would find the actual bricks, complete with white circles painted over them, and spots like targets in the centres, (ball games were recorded only in the early myths and there was no one on the planet who could even guess the rules, though some had heard the legends from their elder kin about the streets' collective incantations for the games with rope they played in things called teams). And, had one even had the wisdom to predict this find, who would have had the wit to prophesy the impact on our lives?... who could have thought that this discovery could lead us to a new reality? an age where once again we could embrace the physical affinities enjoyed by all those antecedent races in the latter twentieth century, as they played their street games opposite their human friends. So as you spend your leisure with your minds locked in battle with your digital assistants', piloting their red ball pixels to crash into the virtual orange bricks, thank the archeologist who said, 'A smudgy mark denotes a wall', and found that wall complete with painted rings, because although these things are boundaries it is true, you need to be locked in, in order to escape, you need to feel the wall, to sense your freedom and in any case the digital demolition of computer graphic walls is where you get your kicks. |