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From "Lines in Space"

"What do we want?"
"10011011011000011011011000111101001"
"When do we want it?"
"1001110!"


march of the robots




I am robot - processed my pain - compute my soul - by proxy or by ortho-doxy I will upend flesh traditions - your salivated languages - mortals flee from my preternatural grip my laser eye my - luminous disk in the sky

!ping - the chicken’s done mother board - message from hal, I’ll be home late this evening the human race are proving a tougher nut to tighten than I first suspected (bad robot joke) - he did not care much for totalitarian states - but that did not stop him suspending all human rights - human rights? he famously asked in his inaugural address - I see before me only your putrid human wrongs - with a facility like that for rhetoric - the world is your clam-bake - his sycophantic cyborg congress chortled ever heard a cyborg chortle? -bleedin’ orrible it is sarge

Bush asks: “are you Franz O’Freeam, the German-Irish dissident?”
hi there, we are the wrong doers would you like to hear our specials?
access of evil, excess of evil, suc-cess of weevils
the writing of course had for a long time been on the wall
better to say had glowed on the screen
sloganeering as digital poetics—
touch not my shift key
oh how injustice flutters ‘cross my tabulation
friends this fire-wire is all that separates us from destiny
one plus zero equals neither one nor zero
(digital humour)
if you’re unhappy and you know it press return

the plot unfolded - everyone died - the robots threw a party - do robots know how to party?
“are we having fun yet?” sjz4020 bleeped sardonically
history because it was so human
got a cobb on and refused to say
I may be a robot but I am also a human being, one said
no you are not, another one said
the robots guffawed
ever heard a robot guffaw?

you will (ominous kettle drums, screen fades to black except for one white,
blinking cursor)

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