Flavigula

One must remember that Shambal Brambel was born both deaf and sessile. I was only when the first tenebrous tentacle plunged from the night sky and uprooted him that he began to become a renowned gigolo, vagrant, gourmet and visionary. Centuries have passed and the apex of his life journey is long behind him. He has enjoyed the ease of descent for ages and like the multicellular forms who shed their complexity and become paramecia once again, Shambal has regressed.

His bed is his sessile base now. As described in other tomes, marvellous machines of his own making collect and create energy from his waste. Naught but rhythmic drones feed his brain. As Natascha used to say, the complexity of one age’s music is finally levelled to pulses. The thump of your crawling blood is the last sound that your living corpse will perceive.

The switch that was eventually implanted just above the double fold of fat at the base of Shambal’s neckline had been planned for ages. It was his own design, in fact, for he had foreseen his future condition. He was never pleased with what he foresaw, but, always the pragmatist, he took steps to perpetuate his soul.

Shambal’s concept of soul was shaky, sure, but basically, he meant the sphere of personality that engorged itself slowly (and sometimes even quickly) since the dawn of consciousness. A computer could drink its entirety in and regurgitate sequences at any time.

Thus, the switch.

I call it a switch because i prefer the word switch to the flat and uninventive button. Those insipid writers who dare to use the latter are, in each of my tales, tall or not, boiled in their own faeces. Fuck um.

The switch learns because it can gage the delight or despair of each creature that puts it to use. Therefore, it selects from the acumen of Shambal’s life-knowledge to produce phrases. Initially, it might resemble a random fortune generator such as the olden fortune shell command in old UNIX systems from the father planet. Not so, however! The switch learns from the delight or despair of its carers, their neighbours, visitors from zones abroad, and so forth.

Yes, Shambal’s land was finally repopulated. I’ll get around to that story another time.

One could say that the switch generated platitudes. Of course, the expressions were not platitudes when they were first vomited forth from the corpse-lips of Shambal’s mouth, but became platitudes over time. Eventually, they came to be part of the shibboleth that defined the new culture of Shambal’s old land. Generation after generation, and even after the corpse-thing that was Shambal stopped functioning, these platitudes solidified. Eventually, some were even seen as something like commandments.