| A lake was dammed and harnessed just to feed the guzzling mainframe. Another, used as coolant just to ease its sterling migraines. Ten rooms thick, and ten times that high, the metal cornucopia split weather in the sky. And a single mite of dust could knock out its magnetic brain. We loved our wise and fragile mainframe. And it took a city's populace to maintain and repair. The synapses would fry if ever they were touched by air, so work was done in vacuum, and you couldn't take a breath. The sigh of pulsing lungs could fuse its hardware half to death. At the merest thought of cigarettes it grumbled like a train. We put them out for the mainframe. All the nation's thinkers bunked inside it everyday, interpreting the bursts of static phrases it would say. Who to vote for president and what to eat with wine. What the price of oil would be in seven months time. Our trials took a second and the sentences were tame, but that was life with the mainframe. And a plane was circling endlessly above the foreign lands. The pilots pulled their visors down and wrung their restless hands. Their cargo was a bomb stenciled, "Fatter than the Rest". They waited for the oracle to tell them when to press. All it said was "Gentlemen, the world is at your thumb," and that's how the end was begun. That's how the end was begun. We pressed and watched the show. |