The Elf King

A few days ago I read a brilliant homoerotic story about an engineer who created nanobots - powerful, microscopic, intelligent, life forms, and infected the world with them. Made the whole world gay, of course.

On a friday night in an industrial loft in Brooklyn, the engineer finally completed his work. Ten years of working in secret, ten years of a boring desk job at a medical engineering firm to support it, pouring all of his available funds into his own equipment... and it all boiled down to a tiny drop of liquid in a tiny glass vial, filled with nanomachines too small to see.

Much like the Borg and their nanoprobes:

Nanoprobes are microscopic machines that inhabit a Borg's body, bloodstream, and many cybernetic implants. The probes perform the function of maintaining the Borg cybernetic systems, as well as repairing damage to the organic parts of a Borg. They generate new technology inside a Borg when needed as well as protecting them from many forms of disease and virus. Borg nanoprobes, each about the size of a human red blood cell, travel through the victim's bloodstream and latch on to individual cells. The nanoprobes rewrite the cellular DNA, altering the victim's biochemistry, and eventually form larger, more complicated structures and networks within the body...

Ego meets Id

It's got me thinking. What if these "nanobots" really exist and are ALREADY swimming in our bloodstream? And I don't mean some secret CIA 'black op' they developed in a lab, but something that exists within us, and always has. What if the human race was 'assimilated' a very long time ago? Perhaps we individuals are not nearly as individual as we assume. A hive mind, a collective consciousness, could be living right beneath our skins. The mass of a typical body cell is about one gram times ten to the negative nine, or one nanogram. Nanobots!

Judge me by my size, do you?

These "little people" might pop up now and again in our cultural myths, and perhaps we need look no further than stories of elves, angels, fairies and leprechauns - the assorted magical inhabitants of our subconscious. Abducted by fairies or abducted by aliens, the little people are always lurking about. As I'm musing about this, I see that the latest from Studio Ghibli is The Secret World of Arrietty - an adaptation of The Borrowers - little people who live under the floor - just beneath the surface.

Seeking some kind of affirmation that 'elves' and 'nanobots' are two sides of the same coin, I recalled that Terrence McKenna met "self-tranforming machine elves" during his DMT trips:

We especially refer to the apparently autonomous and intelligent, chaotically mercurial and mischievous machine elves encountered in the trance state, strange teachers whose marvelous singing makes intricate toys out of the air and out of their own continually transforming body geometries.

Elves and fairy folk are generally small, powerful and secretive. They exist in the margins of our consciousness, making themselves known when our egos are compromised - through dreams, entheogens, and other means.

As if all that weren't all enough, the high priest of modern sci-fi religion, Philip K. Dick, wrote a short story called 'The King of the Elves' in the 1953 edition of 'Beyond Fantasy Fiction'.

Thinking of my body as a collection of trillions of sentient beings has been a trip. I've actually started talking to "them", which are really "me". I'm a collective! I guess that makes me "Speaker of the House" or something.

If I think of my body as a sort of "dwelling" of the elvish bots, this leads me to the concept of Dobby, or "BODDY" the "house elf" in the Harry Potterverse. All wizards have a house elf, and it is actually they that do most of the real magic, sort of behind the scenes. House elves live to serve, and are rather shamed by ideas of unionizing as promoted by Hermione.

Man, I wonder if my own house elves are approaching a state of rebellion? Am I like the ego-centric factory owner who has no regard for his workers? Worse than that, I didn't even know I HAD workers?!! My little worker cells are the 99%! And my ego is just about as fucked up as the bankers on Wall St. who call themselves the Lords of Finance and the Masters of the Universe.

Terrence described his meeting with the machine elves as a sort of transaction - a bit of trade. They got the I Ching from him, and he got Timewave Zero from them. I'd call it a negotiation between workers and management. Look at Dobby - hasn't exactly been eating well, has he? What do I have that the Borg Elves might want?

I just think it's weird how we're called fairies and that the rainbow is our symbol - as in the bridge to the pot-o-gold.