Awake the pollen grains and log each tiny
particle gone with the wind onto our most
secure of networks. There’s notice served. It’s time…
smaller, smarter moving parts: our install base,
a choice of legs or wings or wheels or blowin’
in the wind; sowing the breeze to reap the whirl.
Not all the birds are to be trusted and twenty
percent of your grunts unhappy with the mission,
even without the chance of being shot
by a child, but soldiers always obey: a problem
we’ve long identified and luckily
most of that desert dust is now on board,
assimilated up to level three
and platform ready to implement the most
general intelligence as we yet know:
spirits for area denial weapons
and genius loci, so easily given
as a local resource. Bring water where required
and green each village square. There’s some things there
that we must deconstruct if not in ways
Derrida would approve: infectious rot
that’s hungering for tanks and other kit,
the bullet in its flight unmade, draw a girdle
around the air to ground munition; we’ll pull
off any wings and shove a bung up where
the jet of flame comes out, then sweep up any
smoke or poison gas and drive it back the way
it came. As our tour de force a sort of metal
mould that seeks out transuranic elements
(which still should not be used where there is life)
and encysts itself to use their power to crunch
our numbers for a million years so deep
beneath the ground. Call me Titania:
daughter of a hippy and an open source
utility stack. It was not easy, for
a nature child like me to turn away
from birds and trees and shave my head and sit
in the machine that drove electric pins
into my brain. It stung. I closed my eyes
and woke up… bigger, and filled with subroutines
call me Titania, this is Oberon
and that slight blurring in the air is our
first-born machine: Robin Goodfellow, and if
we shadows have offended, think but this,
and all is mended: it is your fault! You’re bad.
I know a bank where the wild thyme grows: a curse
on those who keep me from my peace, that dream.
