âyou are already rich and powerful beyond imagination, why are you doing this?â this being Everything.
"Imagine you're a Neanderthal, Charles." The jokes made themselves, given whose mouth it was coming from, but he continued, pontificating as he stood shirtless in a Captain Morgan pose atop the pile of robotic debris that loomed over his former foe, "You are surviving adequately. You have a cave for shelter. You can hunt and gather well enough with your bare hands. So, why make fire? Why invent the spear? Or the wheel? To your way of thinking, was that not the height of greed and hubris?" He gestured as he spoke, light from the hole in the ceiling above casting him in an almost beatific glow like the saint in a Renaissance painting, "You are an Ancient Egyptian king. You could be buried normally in the sands of the Sahara. But instead, you order the construction of the pyramids, the Sphinx! You are a little boy of the Mongol tribes called Temujin, who is captured by another tribe. You escape. You could be happy with this and do no more against your foes. Instead, you become a great general and found an empire, leaving a legacy that lives forever in both history and the genes of 16 million men in Asia. You are Eli Whitney, building a machine to separate cotton fiber from its seeds at a pace never before beheld---why do you do it, when human hands have done this, albeit slower and thus far less profitably, since 5500 BC?" A team of cybernetic polar bears emerge from the lab doors, walking upright and holding advanced weaponry in their dextrous digitized digits, "Why invent paint and paper, Charles, when crushed berries and cave walls were sufficing?" A flock of penguins, flying on mechanical wings that had replaced those of flesh and feathers, began to circle overhead, like vultures forming a halo above him, "Why create medicine in the form of pills and vaccines, when eating wild herbs and hoping for the best was working out "good enough" for our ancestors? Why bother with airplanes? Space travel?" Beneath the floor, rumbling could be heard. The orcas were testing out their new ability to swim through earth as they once had through water. "Why create Krakoa, even?" He lifted his arms high, displaying yet more modified wildlife---oh, no, wait, that was just the pit hair. "People like you, Charles, people who stop at "adequate" or 'good enough", who always think that where we're at is where we should stop---you always ask, why?" The howling of the unseen giant wolf-minks was like a Greek chorus emphasizing Shaw's every word. "I ask----WHY NOT?!" @prfxxor
