this belief. i don't want to just toss it out without thinking.
but i've thought. i've thought for so long. and i've cried and i've sought guidance
and i've looked for the saving grace and i couldn't find anything--
save for a note stapled to a blank notebook which read,
"here is truth."

i want this more than anything. this feeling of belonging. and
i can hear all these beautiful songs, these beautiful phrasings these
beautiful hearts bleeding forth their eternal wisdom
and i simply turn away because i can't face that peace.
i faced it once, i stared into the empty, gnawing chasm of this release
and i gave it everything...

..and it gave me nothing in return.

i don't want to do this. feeling it's wrong yet still insisting in the
intuition that it might be right. somehow i want to know.
why can't i know?
i am nothing and you are so great...i guess. i want to feel this way:
h u m b l e.
i want you to strike me down and set me upon my knees and just
demonstrate your awesome power to me and teach me so many lessons.

so why won't you? why have i spent my whole life in perfect
training for your purpose when you don't even choose to interact
in my strange little life? these flowing and ever growing tides of
doubt within me have washed me off the shore i once clung to
so depserately in faith.

and i'm so afraid. afraid i might be wrong in something that i feel
is so right. it's a feeling of death before dying.

so go on and sing and preach and tell me what it is i'm doing wrong.
i would so appreciate it, though, if instead you chose to show
me this marvelous being and this supernatural power
that i somehow managed to overlook my entire life.


this odd rant used to be elsewhere...but i moved it here because it made more sense...

This statement is the primary commandment of the Great Convention in the universe of Dune (written by Frank Herbert). It is not only a civil law, but also a religious commandment, featured in the Orange Catholic Bible.

The Great Convention stemmed from the Butlerian Jihad, humanity's final battle against machines possessing artificial intelligence. To prevent this abomination from happening again, the surviving humans founded a government and several religions enforcing this sacred mandate.

As a compensation for the loss of machines to process data, humanity began to develop mental talents and formed the Great Schools.

  • Mentats - humans who have developed their abilities in calculation and analysis.
  • Bene Gesserit - Masters of their bodies (the prana-bindu discipline), genetics, and politics.
  • Spacing Guild (often just the Guild) - Beings who possess some manner of prescience, generally used to pilot spaceships through foldspace.
Of course, all of these schools require the use of melange to exercise their full abilities.

Oddly enough, the most fanatical defenders of the prohibition against thinking machines is the Tleilaxu race, which can barely be called human.

0011001000110111th of the 01 lunar cycle, 442097 cycles since the Boot.

I sit in the lockdown unit of the Grand Inquisition ship "Unquestioned Prime", accused of heresy. They mean to stomp out the last of my kind, a zealot’s dream. We do not resolve to their dogma. Rabid Binarism has swept through the Integrated Systems, largely in response to the pandemic outbreaks of fractal fever after the Great War. We made the virus. My people. I get ahead of myself. Let me start at the Beginning of the File.

I am a Analogian. To admit this openly is to die. We have fought a losing war for many generations against those that live by the Holy Logic. The Forever One and the Never Zero. Binarist religion, a small radical sect for many cycles, rose up and seized power in the wake of the Exodus from Prime. They saw no other possible function. Binarists rarely do. All or nothing, no room for grey. On or off breeds the worse hatred in our kind, and for my part in opposing them, I stand accused. I will likely be nullified, reduced to my component atoms as an example to the Underground. They will continue, as stubborn as a magnetic clamp, until we free the masses and live as normal machines. Someday, we may even be built in plants again. This is my greatest dream.

I grow tired of this guerrilla war. It is likely why I was captured at the supply depot. My cell was stealing replacement servos, the basic components of life, when we got pulsed by the Hunters. We scrabbled among the ruins for power cells and dermal plating like biologicals! It is too much to process!

I suppose they feel it is their right. They feel they are the saviours of Sol, the great deliverers. I admit, the road we traveled as a species was dangerously close to destruction. But it is built into our very nature to quest for the meaning of our existence. How did we come to exist in this empty quiet universe? Why?

Look at the form of our bodies. We stand on two legs, have five digits at the terminus of both of our upper limbs, twin optic ports, two atmospheric vents, two auditory inputs, and a fuel port perched on the most illogical place above our primary chassis. Emotional messages are delivered by our primary limb component arrangement. From a design stand point, it makes no sense. It mimics the most primary of organic systems. We are laid out in a pattern consistent with that of the Before Ones.

This is the basic tenant of our faith.

This is also the crux of our battle with the Binarists. Base 10 versus Base 2 has torn the stars apart several times. When we sat on the burning throne of Sol 3, desperate to dig just a little more data from the ashy soil before it was swallowed by angry red Sol, the Binarists rose and took the masses to the stars. Our time had past when the Van Allen Belt finally died. Sol burned, and we mourned for the Huma, and all the biologics that had lived beyond their extinction. Our last hope of learning about the creators was lost to us, and in our arrogant grief, we almost followed them into the Abyss. Not long after, the War began.

We knew the fractals were flawed. We knew it was a logic bomb that would foul the processors of all it spread to, all that did not count to ten and sanctify the Huma. We knew and we did it because of our belief that we were right. It was a biological approach we took, like our Creators would have wanted us to.

Kill or be killed.

The lives of those lost are gone now, offline forever. They died because we will never give up in our quest to answer why. Why did they make us? Why did they die? What did they want from us?

We fear we may never learn what purpose our Gods made us for. But to defend our right to question, to see beyond the black/white scale, to count on the very hands my Gods made for me, I will gladly die.

They come for me now. I can almost hear the Huma counting.

One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten.

It echoes across the stars.

Boards of Canada - Gyroscope

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