Battalion

And as the eons mutated animal life prayed just as much as human, and the nature of their metabolisms changed, through frost and ice and sweltering humidity, century after century, millennia after millennia. 

Prayers answered through the varying intensity of light beams generated by the sun, and slowly transmitted across the ages with enduring patience and diverse agility. 

The cultivation of the beams invoked meticulous intricate bearings, with the dreams of manifold species taken into environmental account, like building tens of thousands of positronic brains simultaneously side by side, it took dexterity and innovation, to gradually bring about sundry newfound characteristics. 

As dinosaurs decreased in size certain plants began to eat bugs, while insects themselves developed wings and antennae, and human beings embraced rational discourse. 

But it wasn't only giant lizards who desired flight certain rodents did so as well, and the omniscient compassionate sundwellers answered their call with brilliant light.

Thus, the wise, courageous, temperate, and just mice, as accidentally envisioned by Plato, were granted wings upon reincarnation, and with flight, composed themselves honourably. 

Bats having arisen to rid the night sky of so many pests that feast upon us.

Until it became apparent humans couldn't care less.

And they developed foul diseases of their own. 

*Um, so the sun gods answered animal prayers and transformed virtuous mice into bats, who then tried to help us by eating bugs, but then turned virulent when we overlooked them?

**So the story goes son.

*I might be getting too old for this!

**Some say, never say die!

*It is peculiar that bats resemble mice, and why should some mice have wings while others don't, but evolutionary intensity built into sunlight, isn't that a bit of a stretch?

**It does solve several problems but is somewhat difficult to monitor, beyond the masternarrative, I suppose it does sound rather silly, even if it unites science and religion. 

*Look, Scruffy's growing wings after praying for millennia to be like birds!

**And I'm growing gills so I can breathe underwater!

*Fresh water and salt water?

**I imagine so son, I imagine so. 

Surrogates

Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates reminds me of James Cameron's The Terminator insofar as they are both science-fiction films which express a paranoid attitude regarding post-modern technological developments. In The Terminator, we're exposed to a world where machines rule and the natural path has been thoroughly eroded (note that as it has become increasingly obvious that we are necessarily linked to technological advancements, the Terminator series has adjusted and in Terminator Salvation we meet a humanistic machine/human hybrid). In Surrogates, we're exposed to a world where the majority of people have purchased beautiful remotely-controlled androids (surrogates) to live out their lives for them; or, a world where people live out their lives on the internet after creating multiple ideal identities. Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) has a surrogate but longs to have person to person conversations with his wife (Rosamund Pike as Maggie Greer) who criticizes him consequently. Eventually, Dr. Lionel Canter (James Cromwell) (creator of the surrogates) seeks revenge after his son is murdered by a weapon which destroys surrogates but also bypasses their safety mechanisms and kills their operators. He's also rather upset after having been pushed out of VSI, the company he founded to market, develop, and promote the surrogate lifestyle. He finds a way to use the weapon to destroy every surrogate and their operators, and, after the worst antagonist/protagonist encounter I've ever seen, attempts to do so. Fortunately, Tom Greer is there to prevent the weapon from annihilating humanity, but, eager for a conversation with his wife, he still uses it to destroy all the surrogates, taking us back to a simpler time (i.e., before the internet) (the John Carpenter ending). Thus, the distraught individual makes a personal choice that collectively disrupts the foundations of his culture, a culture that had practically eliminated violence, crime, racism, and so on. I find it hard to believe that anyone could be nostalgic for that way of life and had a tough time digesting the ending. The internet presents a lot of opportunities and an abundance of information and I'd rather partake in its virtual reality than any of its preceding fantasies. I suppose Surrogates is saying that things are moving to quickly and we should slow down and reevaluate the ways in which the internet is permeating every social/cultural/political/economic/ . . . sphere, and the ways in which it is changing traditional methods of human interaction. This makes sense: I don't want to go camping with a laptop. But socializing on the internet isn't some grand disruption of the traditional order of things that threatens the ways in which we interact with one another. In fact, it broadens the social domain and provides us with another means through which we can communicate on a progressive social scale, while still continuing to have face to face conversations.