Saturday, November 18, 2006

On Robots and Fairies


As we watched on television, a scanner took 200,000 individual measurements of the human body. The results were sent to robots which cut and sewed cloth into a perfectly fitted suit. I turned to P4 and said “We are living in the robot future, you know” but she looked unimpressed, she is used to a world of robots.

“When I was a kid, there was no electricity”, I said, “at night we’d sit on the front porch and watch mushrooms grow. We each had our favourite and we’d watch it grow”.

“Did it grow fast?” she asked

“No. You couldn’t really see it doing anything. It was pretty boring”. I sensed I was losing her so I added “and ALSO back then we didn’t have feet. We had to drag ourselves around and there were special tracks by the road and we dragged ourselves around in the dirt.”

“How did you grow feet then?” her voice was tinged with the cynicism she got for her birthday and I could just glimpse a fully formed young lady waiting under the freckled surface.

“I was given feet by a passing gypsy. She was heading to Los Vegas to be a show-gypsy”

“Hmm” P4 was unimpressed, “Did you know Los Vegas has the world’s biggest Fairy Village?” I admitted I did not and she said “Well it does, I know everything about fairies.”

This is probably true so I promised to consult with her on any fairy-related projects in future and we turned back to the TV to find out what else the Scientists are making these days.

2 comments:

Amanda said...

can you ask your expert if there is a lot to know about fairies? I thought is was a pretty limited area. you know, small, fly around, don't do very much.

SkookumJoe said...

you are forgetting the Tooth Corps