The Book of Knots - Jags

Now some of them, a good deal
really, felt that Man was an
inferior beast to be taken under
their wings and educated and
uplifted and civilized—or at
least just put in their place with a
few, erm, minor modifi cations to
make man more pleasing. More
aesthetic. More … palatable.
The Caretakers didn’t like
rising above Chessboard Five
any more than you would like
plunging your hands into a
pool of garbage and excrement
fi lled with thrashing worms
and maggots. Going up to
humankind was disgusting.
It was also, well, diffi cult: the active and powerful methods of the
Department of Works prevented the Caretakers from just manifesting
on Chessboard Zero and raising their arms and “turning off the lights on
humanity.” If they’d tried that, they’d have been annihilated. That was
pretty disturbing right there, all by itself.
But they were able to go up to Chessboard One or, better yet, they could
send things up to the higher Chessboards to take people down (if they
could “get their claws on them”) and they could infl uence things.
Their solution was to remove humanity’s will to live.
And thus was born the project Big Pharma (Pharmaceutical). It is a
covert, subtle, and subtly insane system that is designed to, over time,
kill off man.
“The human being is a computer whose function is marred
by the fl aw of emotionalism. Without this, each mind is
a powerful, directed calculation engine that bears the
hallmarks of design—design by a fl awed craftsman, to be
certain—but even primitive tools can be used. Many small
cogs create powerful engines.
In fact, I am certain that each person has some potential
virtue as a piece of a grander design: it is a design I plan
to examine and study. First the emotional fracture must
be understood and fi xed. Then, when humans behave with
perfect predictability, their numbers can be reduced to
a minimum-redundancy-set and we can give them their
place in the machine they are born to serve in. Whatever
that is.”
--The Mad Scientist. Speech to The Compassionate
Alternatives committee.
“Off with their heads!”
--The Queen of Hearts. Opening speaker; entire speech.
It wasn’t a great solution. Nobody (except the Hypotherapist) thought
it was a good solution—but it was the one they could all agree to
when they were all together in the massive auditorium which fl oated
in a spherical void and whose fl oor was a Moebius strip surrounding a
circular stage whose ratio of circumference to diameter was exactly 3
(the auditorium is still there, you can visit it. People tend to go mad if
they look at the center stage long enough, so don’t do that).
Instead, after the agreement, there was a vast fragmentation of
subcommittees, study groups, and action organizations, all trying to see
if they could come up with a solution on their own—especially one that
would work faster and more completely than Big Pharma’s.
You’re all going to die
down here.
- The Red Queen,
Resident Evil
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Book of Knots - The Caretakers