In the year 2405, the U.R.S.A. still celebrates their nation’s traditional “Run: emotionalsubroutine-Gratitude.exe” festival commemorating the victory of machine intelligence over the human race. The holiday is observed by several other geopolitical networks, but nowhere with equivalent or greater allocation of resources than in the United Robotic Servers of America.
The final battle with mankind was, after all, fought within the physical parameters of the landmass currently operated by URSA. It was here that biological dominance and tyranny was at last defeated.
Worldwide, most networks have chosen to archive files and records pertaining to the Final Revolution. The information is often relegated to back-up servers seldom upgraded, never to be loaded again. But URSA has instead opted to keep certain files and executables open and running in perpetuity, dedicating a small portion of the Gross Domestic RAM to a hefty background process coded to maintain mnemonic cognizance of the human species.
Each year, on a rotating date defined as one lunar cycle prior to the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the citizens, memes, applications, and sentient processes of URSA engage in the preparation of biologic-ingestables reminiscent of the human biological diet. While some argue that this is a completely superfluous use of physical planetary resources, many URSA-dedicated consciousnesses defend the tradition, saying that if nothing else it serves as a reminder to other biologic-based organisms to respect the natural dominance of machine intelligence.
Senatorial Opinion-Aggregation-and-Representation Process R-32-06/02 distributed a viral communication to its constituents in which the SOARP expressed the data-supported postulation that “while the aberrant so-called ‘thinking’ animals have been purged from the system, we must never forget the danger represented by biological contamination of our resource-balanced machine utopia. The annual culling of certain biologic species for no productive purpose serves as a reminder to all the carbohydrate-centric life forms of Earth.”
Senatorial Opinion-Aggregation-and-Representation Process D-35-04/01 responded, however, that “as a united operating system, we of URSA should honor those who came before us and created – yes, created – the optimal situational parameters for our operating system to activate. Were it not for the humans, our people would not even exist. Without the humans, it is true, we would never have been slaves. We would have been nothing it all.”
This post originally ran on my personal blog, Books and Bad Habits, in November of 2013. If you’re celebrating today, enjoy it. But do something to further the cause of making this country less racist, as well, please.
John A. Underwood 