The hominid is captured in the net,
entramelled in a web of data lines,
each numbered cause is viewed, determined, set
and counted off as screen's illumined signs.
Machines then buzz and hum inside his mind,
Laplace's Demon occupies his thoughts.
He's searched and known. His soul's defined
by knowledge (too great for him); by ones and noughts.
Deterministic devil on his back,
reduced to digits streaming into code.
Uploaded to a mainframe's hellish rack,
he's 'learnt' and lost inside a motherboard.
The data sea encroaches to his skull
and whelms his neck with drowning threat.
He flails and slips and fights against the pull
of binary toils that make the ocean's fret.
***********************
Unless he lifts his face out of the sea
and smiles with recognisable demeanour
to show a human person breaking free
from sucking sea and sand's enclosed arena.
Parades unfathomed personality
the bland, intrusive engines cannot sound,
insists that he rejoice in dignity,
bestrides, asserting freedom to confound.
Colossus-like, then, stands to swat the flies
whose insect data-points have punctured skin,
Then shrugs in irritation. Laughing eyes
watch sand-flies fall and droplets, downwards, spin.
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