The Mechanical Drone (At a Loss for Bees)

Some of you may have read an article in the New York Times a few months ago, which talked about a farming crisis on the West Coast. Not the prolonged freezes in January which killed off about half of Southern California's orange and avocado crops, but a different problem altogether: disappearing bees. My friend Eli, on hearing the news, said "well, I don't like bees, so all the better." The problem, as the article pointed out, was that bees are used in commercial farming: they pollinate crops. In California, for example, hives are brought to the almond fields at the beginning of the season, and the bees are set free to go about their work on the budding almond trees (I always imagine Van Gogh's painting when I picture this scenario). Almonds are currently California's number one cash crop, and they quite simply won't grow if there aren't bees around to pollinate them.

But suddenly, the bees were disappearing. They were leaving their hives and not returning, and no one knew where they had gone. Bees are notorious for their finely turned navigation skills, as well as their ability to know the exact location of a ripe flower miles from their hive, and yet the bees weren't returning home. It was completely inexplicable, and people were terrified, because without the bees, we might not have any food (not to mention the loss of income from major domestic cash crops).

It's been a mystery for the past few months, but it seems like we might have the found answers: it's our cell phones. It's the radiation. Bad enough they're killing off our brains, now they're going for our food supply as well.

Jason (Surplus) is the one who gives me the news.

"We found out what's killing the bees", he says, and then tells me about the telephones.

"So what do we do?" I ask.

"I guess we learn to go without food."

It'd be easy for either of us to say that the more common sense answer is to go without our cell phones, but we're talking on them while we're having this conversation.

"Maybe we can build little mechanical, nano bees," I suggest, suddenly inspired. "They can do the pollinating for us. Maybe it can become our new project: as each species goes extinct due to human impact, we can make a machine animal to replace it. We can program it to have the same instincts, the same weaknesses, the same behavior, and then we can set it free in the wild, which of course by this point will be the mechanical wild, mechanical forests and reproduced tundra, entire acreages of manufactured streams and trees and mountains and wilderness."

I go on, imagining an eventuality in which we create an entire machine world, including machine people who take over when we ourselves die off.

"And then these machines will begin experimenting with organic life forms. They'll dream of beings and places that are real, that live and breath on their own, that are made up of natural elements, organic muscle and flesh and bones and oxygen and blood and sweat and sex and desire and fear and sadness and love and ecstasy and intensity and revelations and the smell of God coursing through their veins, their very existence, and the machines will want this and be obsessed with it and they'll build it and soon the real world will take over again, an entire earth bound cosmos of the natural and organic will take root and become dominant, and the machines will die out and their world will crumble and all will be real again, as if for the first time.

"At which point we'll probably start making machines again.

"Who knows, maybe it's already happened, maybe it happens over and over again, the rise and fall of man and machine, and we're just in the latest version of it, we're just in the middle of this long, ongoing, predictable saga."

"Yeah," says Jason. "Still, it's a shame about the bees."

For more about the bees/cell phone connection, check out this article in The Independent. It's British, which means it's a bit dry, but full of information.

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