Welcome To Hellville - Part 7 By Rich Mills 20th November 2040

next page Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

I've pulled more stuff from the box-o-stuff. I now know that it belonged to someone called Alan Miro. It seems he was a student in Hellville over the end of last century. I've found diary entries, half finished essays, random rantings, emails, and all manner of fragmented files and documents that give me a small insight into his life and thoughts on turn of the century existence in this forgotten corner of the world. One particular piece I found was somewhat corrupted, but below is a transcript of what I did manage to extract. The piece grabbed my attention after certain events that hit the headlines recently. More of that later, first I give you the transcript of what I found.

Are you a zero or a one? The society and culture in which we live, has during recent history, been designed to operate on a binary system of sex and consequently gender. Even the mathematical representations for 0 and 1, can be seen to symbolise the vagina and the penis. However a mathematician would freely admit that there is an infinite number of variables between these two extremes. But what are these two extremes, and how can we interpret their apparent meaning? Logically following through the mathematical analogy of zero and one, another way of representing these two things as extremes would be to say nothing, and whole.

I feel I am about to tread on very emotive ground here, but it follows then that under this system of thought women are to be seen as worth nothing, and men are the whole. What this shows is not that I have a suicidal wish to be lynched by more than half of humanity, but that the idea of a binary system of biological sexuality and psychological gender divisions is the by-product of a complete and inescapable patriarchal system of society and culture. A system that over time has been designed for the over riding inclusion of the male as central figurehead, at the exclusion of female. This has become a system of thought imposed on us even while still in the womb... Things have not changed that much on the gender issue over the last 40 years or so, since he wrote this, the piece that followed is what really sparked my interest.

...Scientists have just published the revised and what they are claiming to be the final edition Standard Human Genome, a book they call the Book of Life. Previously admitted errors and anomalies have they say been ironed out, this is to be regarded finally as the definitive text from which any genetic research and experimentation must refer to.

As we cross trans-cybernetic boundaries, in a consciousness driven evolutionary leap to splice with our prodigal mutant progeny. Master and slave working together in a mutual escape plan from the oppressive confines of plastic and flesh. As biological and mechanical lines blur, the biology of beings becomes a melting-pot of genetic soup. The dividing line between animal and man closes also day-by-day, as we realise how close we are genetically to not only the primate, but also the worm...

Mutants?! He [Alan] makes reference to mutants, something I have a vested interest in, having a genetic mutation myself. However mine was an accelerated evolutionary shift, brought on by the hyper-viral-environment we now live in. I have a muto-immune system, however the mutants that I thought of when I read this piece were those that started out as a standard human, having been altered at some point in time by a surgical procedure, to become what some would describe as a mutant. I remember reading a news headline only a few weeks ago. It caught my attention, and has been rattling around in the back of my mind ever since.

Continued ....next page,

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