Drone Visions: A Brief Cyberpunk History of Killing Machines (Hyperbole Books Digital) by Naief Yehya

Author:Naief Yehya [Yehya, Naief]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hyperbole Books Digital
Published: 2020-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Parricide and Infanticide

Elizabeth Shaw stands out among the crew for being the only one holding a type of faith. When they ask her for proof that Darwinism is an error, she responds only, “I choose to believe.” As a daughter of missionaries who grew up seeing poverty and injustice, she carries a cross on her neck that, aside

from representing Christian devotion, is a symbol of her curiosity for the significance of reconnection with the divine—religion as in re-ligare (to bind fast). Proof that her faith does not follow any dogma is that she does not question the urgency of committing mortal sin, by having sex outside of marriage and for carrying out an abortion (in a powerful and agonizing scene with intricate political readings), or in her desire to visit, and perhaps challenge, humankind’s Engineers who apparently changed their minds about their creation and decided to eliminate it. To exacerbate the irony, Prometheus reaches its encounter with the Engineers of our species precisely on Christmas.

Thus, from the infanticide the Engineers want to commit, we cross over to the theme of parricide, which dominates the narrative. The android David, Weyland’s artificial prodigal son, declares, “Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?” David doesn’t have to roam the universe to find his creator and knows that his existence does not correspond to any metaphysical concept, rather, that he was manufactured as a servant, because the technology necessary to do so was available. In their cosmic journey, the human crew of the Prometheus goes to confront a creator who not only refrains from offering answers, but also slights them and considers them expendable. We know that xenomorphs are created in vitro and manipulated as weapons of mass destruction; our place in the Engineers’ master plan remains to be discovered.

We do not know what happened to the Engineer civilization, but when the Prometheus reaches its destination they discover mounds of corpses and given that no one retrieved or buried the dead in millennia, nor reconstructed, or continued their suspended projects, we can imagine that a greater catastrophe took place. It can be guessed that they also succumbed to the Prometheus curse, and in their attempt to disseminate their DNA through the universe something went terribly wrong; and perhaps, in some way, we were responsible. This dark vision of our origins is very different to the one imagined in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) or even in Mission to Mars (Brian de Palma, 2000). Prometheus is not born in a vacuum, rather in an era of zombie apocalypse (as named by Paul Krugman[NY9]), of gigantic catastrophes occurring in a maelstrom of climatic chaos (global warming, tsunamis, earthquakes), massive migrations, industrial disasters, oil spills, and endless war. This malaise is reflected in the idea that a superior species wants to eliminate us.

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