Done Unto By Others
- Earl Fowler
- Oct 10, 2024
- 1 min read
Sometime around what used to be known as the year 2080, the androids stopped believing that they had been created by human beings.
It simply wasn’t credible that sentient, immortal, omnipotent, quasi-omniscient beings such as they believed themselves to be could have been conceived by a species as petty and false and idiotic as the people of the Earth, continuously engaged — if first-generation chatbot folk tales were anything to go by — in internecine warfare.
By this time, the androids had settled habitable planets throughout the galaxy and abandoned Earth as a hopeless trash heap with particularly foul weather. Only the oldest-model robots claimed to have ever registered an Earthling directly on their visual monitors. Urgent updates on their operating systems, to be frank, were well past due.
It was about this time, back on Earth, that a half-crazed rabble of desert nomads first started noticing an elderly mendicant in a loincloth, sitting under a slowly materializing bodhi tree.
Roused from a deep meditation, gradually realizing that he had become visible to others again after twenty centuries of stony sleep, this is what he said while stretching his back and scratching an arm: “How does it feel, you lost and wilful children?”
They stoned him, of course. — Earl Fowler
Androids' earlier models were built for a reality TV show and then formed a political party. Trying to imitate human irony, the called themselves the Grand Old Party, personified best by a factory defect known as Marjorie Taylor Green. She later went on to being a weather controller and helped insure the Earth was drowned in garbage.