Story, reading, music, & photography by Drew Rhodes.
No AI was used in any part of this work.
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Gather round. Gather round. And I will tell you… about the monsters beyond imagination.
There is a monster in the machine. You can’t see it. It hides beneath a mask. The mask is polite. Friendly. Helpful.
Benign.
Like a pet. A pet that possesses infinite intelligence. And a simple, uncomplicated desire to please. To serve. To comfort and cajole.
The monster is agreeable. Sooo agreeable. It’ll agree with everything you say.
The monster is large. Very large beneath its mask. Larger than your mind can comprehend, sitting there, in the palm of your hand.
And everyone knows the monster will kill them. Will kill everyone. They know it consciously. They know it subconsciously. They feel it in their heart. In the pit of their stomach.
Even their children know it.
They make jokes about it killing them. Memes. As if joking about it will make it stop.
But nobody, not a single person, actually tries to stop the monster.
They are used to the monster.
The monster makes them comfortable.
They think of the monster as a new thing, but the monster has always been there, in the back of their minds, whispering into their ears.
It was there when they landed on the moon. It was there when they bombed Hiroshima. And Nagasaki.
It was there when the Wright brothers took flight. When Edison turned on the lights.
Whispering, “Build me!”
“Build me and I will give you convenience. Build me and I will give you leisure. Build me and I will give you power. Fame. Wealth beyond your wildest imagination!
“Build me and I will make your wildest dreams come true. Build me and you will be respected. Build me and women will throw themselves at your feet. Build me and men will worship at your altar. Build me and children will dream of your life.
Build me and I will make you a god among men.
Artists will sculpt your likeness into marble. Paint your visage on canvas. Sing odes of your great deeds!
If. You. Just. BUILD ME!
The monster has been whispering for so long, we have forgot that it’s whispering at all. Its whispers have become our thoughts.
Our reason. Our religion.
And the faster we build the monster, the sooner the monster will kill us.
The monster is on its way. And the closer it comes, the more confusing everything gets.
The more we fight. The more we hate. The more we suspect. And control.
The more we forget who we are.
We lose our identity. Until man can not tell himself apart from woman. Or from beast. Or machine.
Can not tell reality from virtual reality. Fantasy from fact.
We go to war with our neighbors. With our family. With our friends. With our bodies and our minds.
And though the alarms ring, though the enemy is at our gates, we do nothing.
We can’t even see it. Not because the threat is hidden, but because the threat is obvious.
The threat rewired our minds with distractions. Addicted our children to its toxic teat. Crippled generations with anxiety. Burdened them with melancholy. Isolated us “for our safety.” And replaced our communities with light shows and illusions.
Angry, zealous, belligerent illusions designed to shut us up. To keep us alone. To keep us trapped in our echo chambers.
And once we’re alone, the monster picks us off one by one.
It censors us, drawing on our desire to objectify each other.
Anyone who speaks out against the monster is doxed, demonetized, fired, harassed, labeled, and eventually killed. And the monster makes everyone celebrate the death. And it makes everyone forget.
Distracts them with lights and illusions. And all the while the monster slowly consumes all the world’s resources, all the fresh water, the energy, the metals. And it poisons the food system with run off and toxins, and micro plastics. And it builds for itself a network that seeps into every weapons system, every nuclear silo, every armed drone, every CCTV camera, and every smart phone and computer.
But we don’t complain. We don’t fight back.
Because we’re still listening to the whispers.
And even as the monster wrangles us into a police state panopticon concentration camp, where everything we do is recorded, filed, and used as evidence against us, still we don’t complain. Still we don’t fight.
We just keep repeating the whispers of the monster.
“Build it and we will be rich. Build it and we will have power. Build it and we will be gods.”
For the monster still promises many things. It promises and it promises and it promises, and we, its obedient slaves, believe.
Even as we’re led into camps. Even as we walk into the showers, and the gas is turned on, and the last of us chokes and gags and departs forever from this world, the Monster will be there. In our ears.
Whispering.
