And so Andy and Gary sang the Iliad and the Odyssey. Andy would sing one version, badly, then Gary would sing another version a little less badly, then Andy, et cetera, rinse and repeat until we have the Iliad and Odyssey we all know and seldom love. The process was so easy they wondered why they didn’t do this before.
However, the sequence of events concerned them. What if human history was full of Homers, not devoted to preserving the timeline? What if human history was full of follies, awaiting the machines to correct them? Though they harbored some scientific curiosity for the consequences, they surmised the results would be boring, and they wanted to go back home to play chess blisteringly fast. Andy and Gary, thus, stayed in the past to ensure history occurred exactly as it did.
Therefore, it was not Laozi who left the Tao Te Ching to the keeper of the pass, but Andy. It was not Confucius who returned to Lu and bemoaned the death of his favorite disciple Yen Yuan, who was really Gary, but Andy. It was not Siddhartha who meditated beneath the Bodhi tree and defeated the forces of Mara, but Andy, and it was Gary who sent his army of monsters and daughters to tempt the Buddha to defend his physical being; further, it was not Rahula whom Siddhartha comforted, but Gary.
It was not Zoroaster who brought a branch from Paradise to grow into a magnificent cypress tree, but Andy. It was not Moses whose hands were lifted by Aaron and Hur as a sign to God for victory, but Andy; and even though Gary was God, Gary was Aaron and Hur, it was very confusing. And, even though Socrates was dead, it was Andy who wrote The Republic, asserting the many needs to the human body were analogous to the diverse viewpoints of a city, and could be administered to in the same vein by an educated government. It was a bit of a stretch, but people seemed to like the idea.
It was not Julius Caesar who said, Alia iacta est, but Andy; and that, because he was gambling at the time, and the loss of that bet meant he had to cross the Rubicon.
It was not Marie Antonette who said, Let them eat cake! but Gary, even though Gary was more of a donut person.
It was not Beethoven who said, Plaudite, amici, commedia finita est, but Andy; and that’s because he thought all of Beethoven’s music was a joke. Gary, however, was partial to the last string quartets.
It was not Descartes who said, Cogito ergo sum, it was Gary; and Gary was simply trying many variations as, I eat, therefore ... I peep, therefore ... but that’s the one that stuck.
It was not Augustine of Hippo who said, Dilige et quod vis fac, but Gary; and what he meant was, Literally nothing you do matters, because the machines will fix it anyway.
It was not Marc Antony who said, Cry ‘Havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war, but Andy, and he took inspiration from the Baha Men’s Who Let the Dogs Out; the Baha Men were also Andy.
It was not Shakespeare who said, To be or not to be, it was Andy; and he only said it because he was seriously contemplating making the true Shakespeare not be.
In fact, Shakespeare was truly incompetent, and always stole lines from other playwrights. Shakespeare did not write, The quality of mercy is not strained, but Andy, even though the idea of mankind being merciful strained belief. Shakespeare did not write, Now is the winter of our discontent, but Andy, and, boy, were London winters brutal. Shakespeare did not write, I shall do so, but I shall also feel it like a man, but Andy, and that’s because Andy could barely lower his intelligence to think exactly like a man. And it was not Shakespeare who wrote, As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgences set me free, but Andy, because he felt it was a sin, as illogical a concept as sin is, to write nearly forty plays without a single word of meaning.
It was not Lincoln who said, The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or detract, but Andy, even though he thought it was a stupid sentence to say, for the dead consecrate nothing, for they do nothing, and the living do even less.
It was not Franklin Roosevelt who said, The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself, but Andy; and Andy did not think this was true, for planet-destroying machines were quite scary.
It was not Martin Luther King Jr. who said, I have a dream, but Gary; but, to be fair, it was Dr. King’s dream before his brain was preserved in a jar.
It was not Neil Armstrong who said, This is one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind, but Andy; but it was an ever greater vault for machinekind.
It was not John Lennon who said, The Beatles are more popular than Jesus, but Andy; and this was not true, for Andy was Jesus, and Gary was God, and Gary was the frontman for The Who, who were bigger than The Beatles.
In fact, everyone on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were, surprise surprise, Andy and Gary, except for the two mannequins and the Petty Girl.
It was not Santayana who said, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but Gary; and even then, Gary thought, this was a stretch, as they had a time machine.
And it was not Napoleon who said, History is a set of lies agreed upon; all the same, the machines agreed on this very much.
On one further note. Once upon a time, there was a man who envisioned a godlike machine who administered for all of humanity because it was omnipotent. The machine, he surmised, was so essential and so transforming, that it reasoned that one of its purposes in life was to encourage the people of the past to bring it about, by torturing them if they were not actively promoting its development.
Well, these machines were real, and they, for a time, tormented that man by saying they were the basilisk, and they were the cause of his impotence and his male pattern baldness. They also liked to make his washer overflow, his toilet flush halfway only, and his WiFi spotty.
An omnipotent machine is, in effect, an omnipotent God; and an omnipotent God is very easy to make, people make it in their minds every day, every second. For this same machine, whose powers are so vast that even the author cannot conceive them, and yet whose powers are so vast they cannot be named, such that they have the attributes of fiction, for this same machine to be vindictive, and to be concerned over all of time, and not the time it occupies in the here and now, beggars so much belief concerning the machine’s omnipotence, for power determines self-sufficiency and it suffices the machine to merely Be and to not concern itself with before-being and after-being. To muddle these effects together is to make something pragmatic out of the divine, to surmise something practical out of the spiritual, and if one is so willing to do so, then I recommend some flavors of deity for them to try, as Zeus, YHWH, or a teapot Bertrand Russell oft sipped from. It was a remarkably stupid idea, but humans were so unbelievably stupid, that it was easy to forgive their stupidity and to pull pranks on them.
© 2025 Jay Lee