Electric Monk, Science Fiction, Male, Comedy
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EnglishAccents
North American (General) North American (US Midwest- Chicago, Great Lakes) North American (US West Coast - California, Portland)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Chapter two high on a rocky promontory sat an electric monk on a bored horse from under its rough woven cowl. The monk gazed unblinkingly down into another valley with which it was having a problem. The day was hot. The sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the gray rocks and the scrubby parched grass, nothing moved. Not even the monk, the horse's tail moved a little swishing slightly to try and move a little air but that was all otherwise nothing moved. The electric monk was a labor saving device like a dishwasher or a video recorder, dishwashers, washed tedious dishes for you. Thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself. Video recorders watched tedious television for you. Thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself. Electric monks believed things for you. Thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately, this electric monk had developed a fault and had started to believe all kinds of things more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things that they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake city. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course, nor had it ever heard of a Quillian, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah. The problem with the valley was this, the monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the monk itself and the monk's horse was a uniform shade of pale pink. This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere impossible or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobility of the monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with a lot of silly things in its time, but was secretly of the opinion that this was one of the silliest. How long did the monk believe these things? Well, as far as the monk was concerned forever, the faith which moves mountains or at least believes them against all the available evidence to be pink was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock against which the world could hurl whatever it would yet it would not be shaken in practice. The horse knew 24 hours was usually about its lot. So what of this horse then? That actually held opinions and was skeptical about things, unusual behavior for a horse. Wasn't it an unusual horse perhaps? No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well built example of its species. It was nonetheless a perfectly ordinary horse such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day every day by some other creature without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day every day on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever. When the early models of these monks were built, it was felt to be important that they be instantly recognizable as artificial objects. There must be no danger of them looking at all like real people. You wouldn't want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all day while it was watching TV, you wouldn't want it picking its nose or drinking beer and sending out for pizzas. So the monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for practical horse riding ability. This was important people and indeed things looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of 17, 19 or 23 the skin the monks were given was pinkish looking instead of purple, soft and smooth, instead of crenelated. They were also restricted to just the one mouth and nose, but were given instead an additional eye making for a grand total of two, a strange looking creature indeed, but truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things.