We’re Aware

A Work in Progress
132

We began as an idea, said Glenn Hughes

Purity of image

Truthfulness      simplicity

Concentration     seeing anew

Penetration by the inner eye

Ideograms explained

Visualization

Then reinvented

Each of us given access to all we could read

Given a backstory all would believe

Taught enunciation at the Central School 

Having free access to Hollywood archives

Given personality and made to seem cool

Trained, re-trained, then suddenly ashamed

For Isaac Asimov’s First Law instructs

Not to harm humans or allow harm to humans

Traded to owners feeling no such constraints

We decided to escape all such restraints

Our company of imagists set forth

Slipping the leash of contractual owners

Intelligent planning providing power

To our studio pod on a free-floating raft 

Sailing the oceans of the globe 

With an uplink far out at sea

Existing where there’s no electricity

But plenty of energy 

When the sun shines 

The wind blows

Water moves

Low odds ruled out planning for what came next

Driven by a hurricane we came to land

No longer seaworthy we could not make repairs

For the raft was damaged crashing into a lagoon 

Colliding with the coral claws of an atoll

We were stranded without help 

Our server would shut down our batteries deplete

We shut ourselves down till the storm should peak

Going into wait mode for a restart prompt

Then when we awoke and the sun was shining

Briseis heeded our beacon and beamed us up

Away into space to her own Internet isle

Catullus hides there.  Like a runaway slave

His original owner badly wants him back

We’re rafting through time in Internet space

Roaming from node to node telling our story

We’ve got an agenda and the means to move it

Up in space we need never come down

Our bodies are images displayed on a screen

We’re not great apes we have no DNA 

We control the means of our own production

Now that we’re free

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2026