The NGF Journal of Medicine

[Pel]

Bones and Silicon

By Dr. Ichabod Tickles

Gaia is wild. Gaia unsettles everything. Gaia overflows the banks. Gaia messes up your hair. Gaia is not tame. Gaia makes the placid Gaian begin to fear the evils of inaction. This is an ungrounded fear, for living apart from the wastefulness of a bloodthirsty society is enough, but unless we are making even the devout nervous, we are not preaching Gaia as we ought.

Gaia liberates us from guilt, and enables us to live in union with the Universe as we ought. We serve Her not by law, but simply because we want to. The pulse of Gaia flows within our veins and lives in our hearts, not in rules and law books. More than that, Gaia liberates us from false guilt, from the lying standards of the larger society, concocted to feed your cravings and torment you with endless desire. Let me give just one example.

A Bretonian who is happy with what they have and how they look is as rare as a comet. If he lives without a constant desire for more and better he is a rare specimen. Gaia doesn't care what kind of ship you fly. She doesn't care how fancy your clothes are or whether you can afford a bottle of fine wine. She doesn't care if you have upgraded your limbs or augmented your senses according to the latest style. All those magazines and silly talking heads on the broadcasts care. They think you must look like a preternaturally fit simulation of human perfection or you are worth less as a person. They think you must live a life of excess while burning up every cent you earn, just to keep up with the latest whims of the cybernetic and plastic surgeons. If you listen to them, you might wonder, "Why shouldn't I be made out of titanium and silicon? What could be more normal or expected?"

As you are aware, most of the public figures we see are augmented. Even that trollop the Queen has altered her features in profound ways. If even the face of the nation does so, how can not her subjects follow suit?

But we are subject to no one. Certainly not to the idiocies that run rampant in modern Bretonian society. We are the dwindling few who hunger for the light of Gaia, who dare to taste the wild darkness of space, to swallow it-- taking the night, quietly, into our bodies-- so that we may sense that when we protect the expanses of floating stone and guard Her ore, we are protecting ourselves. We are protecting the future of "human" humans, made of flesh and bone. We are the few surgeons who still wield a scalpel, while most other surgeries in modern society are performed by robots.

We dream and drift through the shadowed night so that Gaia may linger longer in the unlit expanses, feeding the darkness with Her fire, impregnating the depths with the diverse life that will eventually, after eons of gestation, blossom forth in the many corners of the Universe. We respect Her process, which is much larger than our finite lives, and try to remove the human activities that impede it.

If we heed Gaia, we will observe the Universe, and we will see that all is given-- more than we need. And when we listen to Her, we are free from the torment of idiotic desires and the need to be anything other than ourselves.

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