Posted by NL on October 28, 2004 at 16:55:45:
All That Sausage
I remember, oh, I remember-- a very funny story, one I heard, or overheard, from the long ago time when I was still very small. It's funny, isn't it, how our senses and our knowledge all shrink away as we grow, and how much we saw and knew when we were only the size of dustmotes, and how much greater we were when we were the size of atoms? At the Planck length I must have known more than I can ever express today. These days, I know barely enough to get by, barely enough to keep my weapons oiled, clean and sighted-in, blades sharp and nicely honed. It's a good thing I remember where the bodies are buried! That's the most important part, if you ask me.
But this other thing I recall goes back to the time when I was perhaps no larger than a mosquito and not even entirely "in" the world as we know it. You were once that small, and you got around then just as I did, riding in a capsule of carbon nanotubules which were really light pipes, making the odd items in the background (if someone happened to glance in your direction) appear to shine right through, and with such camouflage to protect me I could drift in currents of air, free to look, free to listen and learn all the lore that would, alas, be taken from me in the future. Someday we'll be as big as the biggest stars, big swollen super-giants way off the main sequence and I'm not sure what we're supposed to do then. Many have gone before, into that "night" but they aren't talking. I think they only sleep and dream.
But this amusing story-- it stuck with me. I drifted into a dark enclosure smelling of pee where two men shared a bottle of cheap wine. It was cold in there, and they were old, almost used up. One of them said: "Goddamn if I didn't have the most fucked-up dream! Seems like I was somebody else, somebody younger, and I was working in a kind of factory. I was wearing one of those white coats like a doctor and I was cranking at a big handle next to a steel machine. It seemed to be made outta real thin metal and I heard a crunching and crushing noise coming from inside while I turned the crank, and the walls of this metal box kept pulsating and popping like whatever was inside was moving around and pressing against the sides. Well, after a while my hand got to hurting so I stopped and walked around a little and climbed some stairs, flimsy metal stairs, up to a kind of scaffolding over my head. When I got up there I could see more-- I could see thousands of machines like mine and lots of people turning those cranks. It's kind of weird how I could see some of this, but there was a big glass funnel coming down from way up and fitting onto the top of my machine. It was full of naked people, all mashed together but alive. They were all wiggling around like worms. The ones mashed flat against the glass looked funny and they all had their eyes open. But one great looking gal right at the top, stuck up to her waist in bodies-- she had great tits!--looked out at me and asked me to get somebody to help her. She said, it isn't supposed to be like this, there's been a mistake-- fat chance! I felt kinda nervous. It's like I knew I wasn't supposed to go up there and see those people so I got back down the ladder and started cranking away for all I was worth. Those crunching and grinding noises started up again. But I couldn't resist yelling out, Hey! Somebody answer me something-- what the hell are we making in this place? And the answer came clear and distinct, a voice right next to me, but I didn't see anyone: Sausage. Sausage, it said. Then I woke up."
The other amost dead man was silent for a while, but then he said, "If you were making sausage, what do you think they were using for a sausage casing-- you know they gotta have that, don't you?"
"Wow! You're right! That's a good question-- don't they use intestines for that?"
"Yup. And if they had all those people in the grinders, then whose intestines were they using, eh?
It's funny what trivial things we recall from those early days, when we can recall anything at all. Not long after that encounter I passed into a host organism and began THIS phase.
And as for that early memory, I can't understand why nobody thought to wonder who would be eating all that sausage.