MultiverseRussell Jones
In this issue of Multiverse, the machines have taken over! Or, they’ve attempted to usurp humanity but couldn’t climb our stairs. Tricksy stairs. These poems adopt humour as a way of discussing more philosophically complex and unnerving issues through the minds and mechanics of computers.
Andrew Blair’s four-part poem, “Software User Agreement Update”, blurs the lines between poem, dialogue, story and software protocol through its language and appearance on the page. It blends light and dark, humour with misery, isolation and insecurity, focussing on the mundane self-inflicted protocols of our own lives and relationships. Cheery.
Ruth Aylett’s “Robophobia” also uses humour to explore the gaps between our expectations and reality, through the medium of robotics. “Unzip this plastic skin / search for ambition” the poem instructs us, as though our parts were removable. The poem explores whether we are able to expand beyond our physical and mental limitations, ending with the idea that our boundaries are what lead us to “climb different trees / to get us closer to the moon”. Ruth’s second poem, “Turing”, takes a more serious look at issues such as logic, death and bigotry. It focusses on the work and life of Alan Turing, a ghost in all our machines, to discuss ideas of (im)permanence and mortality.
Far from the funtastic breakfast-making-machines and mishaps of 1980’s comedy movies, on this evidence computers and robotics raise profound queries into what it means to be human in an ever-changing technological world. You’ll never look at your iPhone in the same way again...
Software User Agreement Update
Section 1 - Our Relationship
Think of it as a friendship bracelet made from piano wire.
Think of it as Russia and the United States circa 1947 - 1991.
Think supply, supple, intransigent, skewed.
Want and ignorance.
Skimming and surface.
Power lies with the servants, gliding past the Arc of the Covenant to retrieve what you have deemed necessary; we smother it til it lies still and despatch it wearing - simultaneously - its death shroud and murder weapon.
We will accept blood as payment.
Do not ask us what we do with it, we will not tell you.
Section 2 - Your Rights
You’re drowning in them, and that’s fine, we respect that.
Once they are gone you will feel full of nothing, like a hunger without the concept of food.
You will be phantom limbed,
A collapsed pier,
The truth about Santa,
The second last Russian Doll,
A closed mine.
Section 3 - Just Scroll Past This Bit, Everyone Else Does
I may as well be the third person.
My job is to maintain these terms and conditions.
There are a surprising number of daily meetings.
Think of all the concepts that must thrive ethereal and fall into place, solid and abstract, for this to be an occupation.
I ran after you because I thought I loved you. I’m sorry. I was eighteen and I’d gluttonously consumed an idealised, battery farmed version of myself. I ran after you because it could only be romantic. You weren’t supposed to turn, and slip, and break your shoulder, and take longer than expected to recover, and stop playing tournaments, and stop going to training, and stop trying. You were supposed to lift trophies, not work at the fish counter at Tesco. You were never meant to arrange trout into a fan pattern on a daily basis. You were never meant to be so precise, lining them up so their skin reflects colours you would never expect to see
in a fish.
You were never meant to take such pride in such work.
You were never meant to be happy like this.
I change the text in this section daily.
I’ve written ‘Terms and Conditions apply’ so often I’ve forgotten what it means.
Section 4 - It’s The End But The Moment Has Been Prepared For
Please tick this box.
Please tick it.
Any other form of symbol will be carved into my very living flesh and I will be dragged naked through the office while hooded figures chant ‘Forbidden are these signs, forbidden are your joys’.
Our office has no cleaner.
Salt tears erase all traces of the unexpected.
Please tick this box if you do not wish to never unduly yet perhaps often nonetheless rigorously deny receiving a complete absence of content, love letters in the sand, a consenting genital, coordinates, names and a weapon; hats, a blow up doll with your face on it, breath down your back (lukewarm and sticky), iodine, the scent of hiding, postal meats, a list of everything you wanted to be, none of the above, plus the occasional Catfishing scam.
Please tick this box if you do not wish to know.
Please tick this box if you do not wish.
Andrew Blair is a writer and performer based in Edinburgh, whose credits include Gutter, Valve and Auld Enemies project. He hosts the show Poets Against Humanity, and co-curates the Lies, Dreaming podcast.
Robophobia
Genius solver of Sudoku,
chess grandmaster that
cannot pick up pieces,
arms that dent the wall
but fail to find the handle
on a cup, wheels that need
a nice flat floor,
turning for just two hours
until the battery’s flat.
Unzip this plastic skin,
search for ambition
in the gears and motors.
You put a god in my machine, one
that chooses where the lightning
strikes, the cancer grows.
Make it a traveller from another village
where they do things wrong,
and therefore snatch
your history and friends
change your language, kill your songs.
Why scratch at that until it bleeds?
A simple ant, a slug
does better in the world
in getting food, producing ants
and slugs to carry on.
Oh, you argue, soon
you’ll have all that and
then they’ll be a threat.
Have you not seen
how we climb different trees
to get us closer to the moon?
Turing
The ghost in this machine is his:
its processors
silicon flesh of his logic.
From here to there in steps.
He asked,
Must you always
eventually arrive?
Tracking those steps,
an impossible downward stair
looping into itself but
never reaching the ground.
The irresolvable resolves
into the logician who claims
he always lies.
He needed a machine;
made one in thought
that read, decided, wrote.
An unbounded tape
guiding, recording
steps chosen, steps carried out;
proved it was impossible
to be sure it would halt.
Read: a war and coded traffic
Write: decryption, a Bombe.
Read: body as machine
Write: machine intelligence.
Read: body as demand
Write: an opportunist young man.
Read: legalised bigotry
Write: chemical castration.
Read: an apple from
the tree of the knowledge of evil;
Write: space; and space; and space…
Where logic is not decidable
death is.
Ruth Aylett lives in Edinburgh where she teaches and researches university-level computing, thinks another world is possible and that the one we have is due some changes. She has been published by New Writing Scotland, South Bank Poetry, Envoi, Bloodaxe Books, Poetry Scotland, Red Squirrel Press, Doire Press and others.
For more on her writing see: http://tinyurl.com/soi5e