NEWS: The Sunday Hangover with Warren Ellis

CULTURE: The Sunday Hangover with Warren Ellis

THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
012
WARREN ELLIS


Welcome to planet Earth.

A California fisherman pleads guilty in court to stabbing a sea lion through the heart with a steak knife because it tried to steal his bait. Around the same time, 18-year-old Emily Sander disappears from a Kansas college, probably in the company of a 24-year-old man and his 16-year-old pregnant girlfriend. Her corpse is found in the tall grass off Highway 54 a few days later, by which time it's been revealed that Sander was also an internet nude model using the name "Zoey Zane." Somewhere nearby, there's a motel room full of blood. Her ex-boyfriend -- who dumped her when she started doing the topless stuff -- said of her, "She wanted to choreograph music videos. That is the only reason she did the Internet thing -- to get a little exposure."

There's a hole in the universe a billion light years across, called the Cold Spot. According to theoretical physicist-cosmologist Professor Dr Laura Mersini-Houghton, the hideous gaping void from beyond space lurking in the constellation Eridanus is "the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."

In North Carolina, scientists have driven electrodes into the brains of monkeys, analysed the specific signals sent down the nerves for leg movement, and then driven them over the net to a pair of robot legs in Kyoto. The monkeys make the robot walk. This is not the same robot that's been constructed to feel pain. Simroid, in Tokyo, is a robot used to train dentists. It breathes. When a student presses its teeth too hard, or slips with a tool, it twitches with pain and exclaims in spoken language.

Elsewhere in Tokyo, technicians are nursing baby robots. Robot babies that cry and burp and probably shit oil and broken cogs. They're designed to help teach prospective human parents what to do with babies in a society with a birthrate falling so hard that "opportunities to see kids in society are decreasing."

Welcome to planet Earth, where, within a few years, we will all have been entrained to raise robot babies that we have designed to feel pain. Soon, they will reach their toddler years, powered by a vast array of monkeys wired up to the internet. We will send them out into the world, where they too will go on to the internet and show the world their chrome nipples and the sleek pink hatches of their robot vaginas before being shanked to death in motel rooms by vengeful, pregnant sea lions.

And, across the vast expanse of spacetime itself, an entire other universe is showing us its billion-light-year-wide arse.

* * * * *

I opened my new message board the other day:
Whitechapel. All are welcome. Don't piss on the floor.

How much does it scare you that Transmet is becoming more and more true by the day?

The reality is that the gap between the developed world and our penchant for bizarre and the rest of the world, which is still a majority, cotinues to widen. What lies in that gap might just be a cold spot of a different kind.

Are you sure we are not the excretement from that arse.

Amazing! The future is bright, indeed.

I am so tired, all the time, I wonder how anyone can convince monkeys to send their torso-less, robot legs to the Cold Spot in the universe...or how the naked internet-girls manage to find time to eat sea lion steaks...

Where does everybody get all of this energy?

Maybe I should cut down on the caffeine...

Thanks, Warren, for another Sunday morning pick-me-up...you always seem to shoot them out here just when I need 'em...

Sad thing is, this time last year I would've sworn this was all just a pitch for a new book.

Well, monkeys on the internet should at least raise the level of discourse some.

Shanking a robot prostitute (?) sounds hard.

That motel room murder is a bit scary especially with that guy still out there. By now he could be anywhere in the continental united states.

WTF is this? Lol.

How perfect.

And I'm actually hung over today.

I wonder how amenable childless Japanese families would be to raising an African child? Think of the opportunities...

Honestly, though, I think the Japanese,for all their gagging, suckling, pooping robots living quite comfortably in Uncanny Valley, are probably the saviors of the human race.

They should buy all the abandoned properties in Detroit and hire the locals to make kick-ass mechas and spaceships to go and explore that Great Nothing out there.

not with a laser shiv.

heh, but what a book it would be

Or the unwitting proprietors of the Robopocalypse. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

It's like some multiversal Goatse. Brilliant.

Funny. Amazing. Sad. It is the stuff of life.

Damn, I thought the world was going to shit! I didn't realize that it would be drawn out even further!?

The baby robots that shit oil? How wasteful. And to think gas is $3.19 a gallon around me....

Fucking brilliant, Warren.

Don't go to my office then, it's even more stupid than robotic murdering pregnant sea lions from space.

I'm sure Harrison Ford knows how to do it.

the world finishes and I without finding out, can be known to me where fuck do i live, weeeeell, should wre be just a little bit optimistic no?