Bizarre Thought For The Week

You know that intense joy you get when you really scratch some place that itches. Its primal. Animal. A pleasure reserved for the lizard brain inside of your higher mind. Its also the reason the Matrix would never work.

Humans are way more complex creatures than car batteries, but at a biological level we don't need to be. Growing up without any form of visual, social, or other stimuli, we would simply be electricity producing car batteries - just like the machines need us to be. So, quite frankly, there would be absolutely no reason for the Matrix to exist.

Think about it. When you are born, you are quite content to simply exist. You eat, poop, drink, poop, and breathe. Period. And that makes you happy. Take a machine that mines human bodies for the parts necessary to farm human beings, incubates them in giant tubes, and then grows them on the vine. The minds inside these giant car batteries would need no outside stimulation to exist. They wouldn't need a Matrix. They would be rudimentary, at best. Lizard brain would the highest unstimulated cognizance necessary.

Further, if some human culture survived outside of the Matrix, it would presumably continue to evolve. Its language would change. Its culture would change. Everything about it would be remarkably different than what would exist in a Matrix world that was tied to one period of human existence of several hundred years before. If humans popped out of the Matrix suddenly, as they did in the movie, they would be hopelessly unable to communicate with the human beings of Zion. It would be like a Shakespearian character suddenly being awakened in 21st Century America. Not only would they have a hard time simply grasping the language, but everything else would seem bizarre and magical as well.

My mind has been drawn to these bizarre thoughts more and more lately because of the potentially complex world in which I set my newest novel. On the one hand, the world could be infinitely more dense and complex than anything in the Matrix. On the other hand, nobody would ever want to read any of that - so who cares? Giant robot arms plucking baby pods out of long fields of incubator vines is pretty cool visually and helps sell tickets, even if it doesn't make any damn sense. The Matrix is, after all, a story and sometimes even true stories don't really many any damn sense - like Peruvian gangsters killing fat people for their fatty tissues to sell to cosmetic firms which sounds like a hybrid Stephen King, Robin Cook, and Lionsgate Film. Besides I have a way around it... I just make my hero less intelligent than his author - so he never questions anything that I choose to tell him. He can't tell you how his world works, because he doesn't know. And isn't that a trait that we all share?