Colouring the Captains

Dowling, Terry. "Colouring the Captains." In Rynosseros.

The fictive audience are "Cold People" in cryogenic storage; the fictive Narrator is an AI "belltree." See for motifs of original Australians' Dreamtime and oracles bracketed with AI and "Artificial Life," general surveillance by machines, surveillance and conditioning by AI machines in what sounds like a prison-plus (called "the Madhouse"), and "the Living Towers at Fosti" as "a brave attempt to bridge the gap between architectural form and organic life" (26). Note also the fusion of AI and "organic life" in the Narrator: "They bonded me to two fading cryogenic personalities like yourselves, James and Bymer, two old Cold People whose bodies were spoiling and who had paid handsomely to have their matrices grafted out into biotectic life, their final chance ... for any kind of life[,] considering" (4). Significantly, "James had been a semiologist ...; Bymer was the colour symbologist who had once advised the Ab'O biotects on the inlay designs for the Living Towers at Fosti" (5)—where "Ab'O" is a neutral term for "Aborigines." (RDE, 27/06/94)