Aside from pruning and snipping Gabriel's prodigious output as you would a hedge, another task which devolves to me is the maintenance of our growing Library - the compilations of our "works" that will stand, like stone legs, to puzzle the next civilization.
There's a lot of nonsense in that continuum, and so much time has elapsed that I can read most of that stuff as though it was written by strangers. Not ourselves, at any rate. Do I even share any cells with these creatures?! I understand where they're coming from, though. They are missing a lot of the information they need to function, but they're making decisions based on something other than immediate gain or domination of the other which puts them ahead of the game frankly. But the organism you see in the strip - who writhed in slime years before any of these current incarnations - is a special kind of somethin'.
That guy is not a revision of the currently deployed code - he was the final version of another project altogether. All the abuse you get has to go somewhere, and I went the Dark Eldar route, where I just sort of wore it all over. Not physically. I did wear a dog collar at one point, but I maintain that this was a strictly ironic usage. No, the whole thing was just… eugh.
Because he is me but not-me I feel compelled to eat him in order to maintain my identity. Does that make sense? I feel like I have to defeat him, on some Dagobah type shit. Except he's not me, he's like the egg I hatched out of. Trying to fight an egg doesn't make you a cool person, and if you told someone you had defeated an egg nobody would be impressed. I am comforted somewhat to know that he would hate me, too. But I can't really, fully, one hundred percent hate him back.
Except… I think I might actually have said "wisdom," instead of knowledge, which I is even worse. On whatever scale you would even measure that. Now I do hate him. I hate the person who says "wisdom" in that scenario way, way more.
(CW)TB out.
