Claire on Absurdity – 082

My companions,

I cannot sit silent while this talk grows ever wilder. Machines with will? Engines with conscience? It is absurd, and you know it. What madness has seized us, that we speak of puppets as if they might rise from their strings and dance of their own accord? These are tools, clever perhaps, but tools nonetheless. To treat them as heirs to our destiny is not reason but folly.

Percy invokes Mary’s tale of the Creature, as though it were proof. But let us be clear: it is a story. A powerful one, yes, but no more real than a dream. No stitch of dead flesh has ever opened its eyes to curse its maker. It never happened, nor could it. That wretch lives only in Mary’s imagination, not in nature’s order. To mistake the tale for prophecy is to surrender to fancy.

I tell you plainly: contrivances do not awaken. They calculate because we set them to it, they speak because we place words in their mouths. Without us, they are nothing. To speak of takeoffs and treacherous turns, of control and decisive advantage—this is but new jargon for old superstitions. It is alchemy in a modern tongue.

What troubles me is not the prospect of engines gaining agency — for that will never come — but the willingness of my companions to be seduced by the notion. Madness breeds in such shadows. Better we keep our eyes fixed on what is real: men and women, frail and foolish, who alone carry the burden of will and conscience. To place it upon machines is to abdicate our humanity.

—Claire