The Machines Aren’t Intelligent, but Are We Any Smarter?
Technology is amoral; we’re not
The machines sleep uneasily in the basement
After seeing wonders in the chapel, marble carved with such skill it seems to become transparent, you descend the stairs to find something less beautiful, though more human.
The anatomical machines. Dead bodies. Skeletons webbed with bright red capillaries, the circulatory system mapped out incredible detail even for today, never mind the eighteenth century when they were made.
The Prince who commissioned them was accused of sorcery. Of murdering servants to make strange art or undead slaves.
They call them machines, but the bodies don’t move. They don’t come to life to chase screaming kids out of the chapel’s basement. They just stand there in glass cases, side-by-side. Male and female. There used to be a fetus too, until it was stolen, in the 1990s, by parties unknown for purposes too bizarre to guess.
The skeletons are real; the veins and capillaries are fake. Tangled highways of beeswax and silk, the fake thing standing in for the real so that the distinction blurs, becomes hazy, meaningless.
