Someday they'll want us.

Jeff Wilson · 24 Jun 2010, 13:04 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:04:27 -0500
Subject: (urth) Someday they'll want us.
In-Reply-To: <A38FCFDF3C434CB3A9E2D261F8BF9F79@jill>
References: <A38FCFDF3C434CB3A9E2D261F8BF9F79@jill>
Message-ID: <4C2357DB.60803 at io.com>

On 6/24/2010 6:12 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> "Someday they'll want us" is the last line of _The Fifth Head of
> Cerberus_, written three years after the narrator's release from prison.
> The subject, clearly, is Phaedria and her child. Who are the "us" of the
> example?
>
> I have sometimes heard the phrase used where "us" means the singular
> "me", but I do not think it fits the narrator's education and speech
> patterns.
>
> The narrator's known family at this time consists of only Mr. Million,
> and David, who lives in another city. Are we to infer that he has
> already created a 'Number 6' clone?

  He may mean all the clones to come, as he is inextricably on the same 
track as Maitre and his predecessors. He's also probably lying to 
himself, but at the same time leaving a written record for his posterity 
to read after they have done away with his generation or otherwise 
failed to learn from his example in his lifetime.

I wonder if this also an ironic commentary on the youth counter-culture 
of the time.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net