Lost in The Waste Lands -- Part 2

Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient computers below the city, a single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It had held its increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and might have held them so for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery which maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelligence had awakened in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as any ghost, to stumble through the halls of the dead.
-----The Waste Lands by Stephen King

In the second half of The Waste Lands our travelers, Roland, Eddie, Susannah and Jake along with Jake's billy bumbler Oy arrive at the decaying city of Lud. It looks physically much like New York City of our present day, but with even a few more modern touches such as a sound-barrier breaking monorail running into and out of the city. The city has been decaying for approximately 800 years due to some cataclysmic event that wiped out most of its inhabitants. It's current population is made up of the Grays and the Pubes. Both groups barely subsist in the city's decaying infrastructure and the Pubes regularly "worship" and make sacrifices to the ghosts that run the machinery of the city.

That "ghost" is the computer Blaine which runs all the mechanical aspects of Lud. He speaks to the group of travelers and they note, "[t]hat voice belonged to a machine, an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with it, all the same."

Blaine himself describes to Roland and his group what's been happening in Lud.

[I suffer from] a degenerative disease which humans call going insane. . . . Repeated diagnostic checks have failed to reveal the source of the problem. I can only conclude that this is a spiritual malaise beyond my ability to repair.

I have felt my mind growing steadily stranger over the years. Serving the people of Mid-World became pointless centuries ago. Serving those few people of Lud who wished to venture abroad became equally silly not long after. Yet I carried on until the arrival of David Quick, a short while ago. I don’t remember exactly when that was. Do you believe, Roland of Gilead, that machines may grow senile?

At some point they [the people of Lud and Mid-World] forgot that the voice of the mono was also the voice of the computer. Not long after that they forgot I was a servant and they began believing I was a god. Since I was built to serve, I fulfilled their requirements and became what they wanted—a god dispensing both favor and punishment according to whim . . . or random-access memory, if you prefer.

What's more, Blaine reads people. He can see them through cameras around the city and he analyzes their voices to understand them and their motivations. Sound familiar?

So my new Smokey theory is that Smokey is a computer created by a now-defunct Island civilization that was more advanced or differently advanced than ours. Out of boredom, he uses his powers to dispense favor and punishment on whim. For example, he kills Eko because Eko won't play his game by confessing. He kills the pilot just because he's mad. I think Smokey is suffering from spiritual malaise that he cannot fix, and like Blaine, he should be avoided if at all possible.

But wait, there's more. Before Eddie and Susannah wake up Blaine, or I should say Big Blaine, they hear a small voice, Little Blaine, who warns them not to wake Big Blaine. The Whisperers?

Tomorrow -- more odds and ends.