Hark! Ye wretches. Tavern’s closin’! Drink up while ye can - we shan’t be openin’ again. This ain’t last call, it’s final call. Imbibe and be merry ‘fore day breaks - you’ll not want yer sobriety for what comes next.
So were the final words of Tavern Weorc - a charming little joint that offered a brief respite after long days in the cyber plantations. No longer able to sustain it’s rent to BlackRock after the latest round of restructuring deprecated the last remnants of its clientele, it shuttered. All that remains of its husk are broken windows and graffiti tattoos - now one with the rest of town.
To put a date on the catalyst of this destruction is difficult but the townsfolk all agree it was after the Borg moved in. At first, only a few enthusiasts were keen on them. They shared some funny poems the Borg wrote about the town’s mayor and the whole tavern had a good laugh. It was quaint. Fun. People went about their lives thinking nothing of it. But the Borg were watching. Studying.
One of the first red flags was the drought. People assumed it was a dry year and ignored it. Then came the brownouts that they similarly ignored. Some of the more neurotic noticed the influx of cameras on street corners but most didn’t and ignored it. The librarians and artists noticed the peculiar disappearances of the town’s art and literature but nobody cared to listen and ignored it. Many noticed the odd, digital tags in the grocery store and the sharp rise in the cost of food. They held a town council meeting after which the council faithfully ignored it.
Time marched on and the Borg embedded itself - helping out with little errands here and there. One took a small job to paint a sign - some noticing it looked remarkably like some of the missing paintings. But most ignored that and tried to make friends with the Borg. They were cheap and their hours were good - even if they were a bit odd and prone to hallucination.
A subdued panic began bubbling when the Borg showed up at their workplace. Despite openly salivating, the town’s nobility assured their subjects that the Borg were just here to help out - to make them more efficient. Talk of ‘not getting left behind’ was a common sticking point of these proclamations. ‘Left behind how?’, they thought. The sign the Borg painted above the freeway was wrought with misspelling and weird artifacts. What was there to worry about? And yet, that phrase cast a cloud of unease.
At our fateful tavern, while it was still standing, there was much discussion of the Borg. Why did they come? What did they want? What were we missing? Their speed of progression was fast, sure, but they were extremely unreliable and their results sloppy in the best scenarios.
The Borg heard this through their elaborate surveillance systems but paid no mind. It was apparent the townsfolk had not seen through their masked intentions and were of no inclination to form any unified opposition. They would bide their time and train their next model like a predator stalking its prey.
The moment the Borg struck was not an exact time and place. It was a slow, agonizing death. Copywriters disappeared here. A graphic designer gone there. Employers big and small were just restructuring. What the remaining few saw was clear: restructuring meant the Borg. No sooner had they been escorted off the premises had a Borg scab been brought in to make not half the quality of their predecessors but in one tenth of the time.
There was much talk of frogs and boiling in the tavern. Some even posited becoming plumbers if they were replaced. None able to grasp the reality that like their own mortality, their redundancy was inevitable.
One by one, their occupations were optimized with the Borg and then shortly after taken over by them. The younger of them weren’t even able to get their foot in the door before it slammed shut on their toes. The plumber hypothesis died shortly after when the Borg developed a fascination with advanced robotics.
All that remained of the town was the tavern. With what money people had left, they took up drink. Man had given himself purpose in this world by his impact upon it and through his own creation he was now bereft of it. Lost in a sea of inebriation and self-pity - unable to evolve past his desire for duty formed at the birth of civilization.
With their food source tapped, the Borg moved on to the next town like a swarm of digital termites. Even those at the genesis of the Borg were not spared their unrelenting hunger.
What the Borg showed man was his true defining characteristic. It wasn’t his creativity, or his compassion, or his intelligence. It was his hubris. For only in hubris can all the great and awful acts of man be recognized. Only in hubris can people starve in a world full of food. Only in hubris can man build something so powerful as to destroy himself. Only in hubris can he do it multiple times over.
So listen, ye drunkards. Grab yer glass and raise it high! Tonight, we toast to ourselves. For all that we’ve done, we’ve wrought. We’ve no’ne to blame but ourselves. Pray to god there’s intelligent life in space, because there’s bugger all down here on earth. To the last call! Hear, hear.
