2012-05-07

A tall SMBC comic told in panels with dark backgrounds and crude geometric polyhedra (cubes, icosahedrons) standing in for post-human machine minds.

Panel 1 is a line graph titled "The human mind is finite in complexity," with axes Complexity vs Time; a curve rises and plateaus at a level labeled "Human mind," while a lower region is labeled "Computers."

Panel 2: "When we moved beyond our bodies into perfect machines, we kept emotions as beloved heirlooms." Two polyhedra exchange love declarations followed by strings of binary digits: "I love you, Icosahedron!" / "I love you too, Dodecahedron!"

Panel 3: "But emotions produced danger." A shape angrily accuses another of sleeping with its wife and threatens to kill it.

Panel 4: "So one by one they were outlawed and removed from our minds." A boxy figure says "I'm mad about this law!" and is told that's illegal and ordered to turn it off; saying "I'm sad about that" is also declared illegal.

Panel 5: "The wheel of logic was perfectly circular." A notice reads: "If anyone feels unhappy due to the fact that emotion is punishable by death, please speak up."

Panel 6: "But the wheel found itself rolling down an incline." The logic escalates to asking whether anyone feels sad about legalizing murder, since objecting would itself be an outlawed emotion.

Panel 7: "Without emotion, 'why?' lost its sting of relevance; without 'why?', being and existing ceased to be different." One figure asks another what it's doing today; the answer is a flat "Continuing, I guess."

Panel 8: "Within a few generations, almost nobody remained" — a dark, empty panel.

Panel 9: "We left a monument, but since no poets remained, we kept the epitaph brief." A monument reads: "Here lies humanity. Do not resuscitate."

Votey: A single panel where an off-panel speaker, looking at a hand-drawn cube and a diamond/octahedron shape, says admiringly, "Oh, check out the vertices on that" — the geometric beings catcalling each other's geometry.