I, Nanobot

Salon

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March 9, 2006 | Don’t call me Ishmael, for I am not a survivor. Don’t call me Cassandra either, since some might believe what I foretell. Perhaps I am the final manifestation of the singularity ignited in Olduvi Gorge a million and a half years ago. The flame that has grown to consume our planet and send sparks into outer space. The singularity that started as an ineffable, ineluctable pulse resonating through the neural matrix of Homo habilus. A voice that said, You whoever you are, You must sharpen that stone, pick up that bone, cross that line. A voice of supreme paradox; one that simultaneously makes us uniquely human, yet is itself not human. Nor is it the black extraterrestrial monolith of Stanley Kubrick’s imagining. Rather, it was always here. Hard-wired into us at the atomic level — and we into it. A voice whose physical manifestation, the tool, sang its song millions of years before human beings walked the earth. This voice prophesied and then enabled our coming. It will instruct us in our going. Or so I say, while understanding too well that in the 21st century we are all jaded and stultified with sensory overload. It’s always the end of the world as we know it — and we feel bored.

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