Bewildering Stories

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Ekos the Robot: A Tragic Epic of Time and the Mind

by The Invincible Spud

Said Ekos the Robot, "I don't care where you're from, but the value of pi is equal to none. The truth I do see is up in a tree, and now I must fall down! Therefore, kneel on your knee." The horror of all this disgusted the clam; the void of eternity opened again; the time went past quickly and confused itself thrice; the oceans of slime enveloped the den.

Time came again; again and again. And time left itself within powers and exponents, factorials sublime. The truth came between them, confused as could be, and Ekos the Robot started all over again.

"I said, 'Kneel on your knee!'" said Ekos happily, but frowned with a smile as sad as could be.

The echoes surrounded them, grew fatter as the stream of unconscious energy echoed through the cosmosphere. The echoes grew louder, they considered themselves to be very confused indeed, and yet they kept going, sublime as in time, confused as in space, forever and ever in search of disaster, in synergy with energy and lacking without.

The echoes came back; they were not there in the first place. They had somehow become lost in both time and space. In other words, they too, like apples in goo, had lost themselves elsewhere midday in the dog poo.

"What nonsense! I say! No way! No way!" Ekos said again and again, the words wasting away.

Indeed.

And somehow, long after Ekos decided to become confused almost as confused as confusion was confused, time came to a slow efflux, a stream colluding to a mix of energy and wax, synthetic eclipses evading escape, like piles of time warps inside of a gel.

No wonder.

The flux came back and yet again Ekos could not function properly without the axial node. Problems exponentially increasing over time! The integral of the equation (in respect to x) from zero to n as n approached infinity itself approached infinity like a tortoise leaping ahead one-tenth of what the person moves ahead every time, and so the person never reaches the tortoise. Inanities abound! Such strangenesses were to be pondered at, not to be ingested like a rotten watermelon.

But indeed, Ekos decided, time was something altogether too confusing to contemplate, and such as it was, Ekos decided to never decide again, and let the course of nature decide for it. For time was of the essence, and the essence was divine; to err is too rational to contemplate outside. "Come in, and enjoy the sunshine!" exclaimed Ekos again, with a fervour unmatched by the powers of time. "Experience the equities of clashes divine, celestial insanities multiplied over time, and other atrocities multiply and divide, and believe, and inspire, and pay the overdue fine."

Time came again, and suddenly Ekos knew that it was the antagonist to battle against, and also that the world would come to a sudden, abrupt, and ever so ghastly end if time were not defeated and conquered like the essence of wave functions collapsed in blue slime.

And so the years passed, and with each passing second, Ekos computed and calculated in vain. Time could not be conquered, its essence was integral, tied in with the secrets and functional maneuverings of chaos celestial, divine and unconquered, the powers do wait, and their radiance strikes like silence in time, and in time they shall find that the powers sublime, inspired, divine, do wait so in time, and never do find that the powers divine are themselves so inspired by the passage of time, and time passing inside.

Ekos grew old and developed a mold and the echoes came back and dispersed with a mine. The clam knew it well; it was after all dead, but its essence lived on, sustained by time. Divine echoes grew, and collapsed, and renewed, and then overflowed readily into the river of time. The mire of ire caught fire and tired of life and of strife and endeavors futile.

Such was the end, the gradual collapse, the fractal designs, the patterns sublime, all endlessly repeating microscopically fine, and then all faded away, and nothing was left, forlorn and bereft, forgotten like slime, during the passage of time, buried and miscarried in a barren grey cleft.


Copyright © 2003 by The Invincible Spud