Home and hope are different only by one letter. Lex had no concept of home except Base Antarctica, where he had been manufactured, commissioned, and launched to Moon for extracting ore. He had been returned, restored, and relaunched. It was during one of his returns that he had been allotted the docking pod adjacent to his hope: Lunar EXtractor - Twenty Three.

He had learned the concept of hope from his reading, and hoped dearly that he would be able to communicate again, further, with LEX-23, now that Selina & he were headed to Base Antarctica.

Selina was relishing one of the space foods she had been gifted from Midgarden by her friend Heek. Thanks to him, she had managed to send an encrypted message to Neer, her best friend Hielsa’s partner and colleague in space biology. Heek had managed to turn on the archaic device that she and Illen, her nonagenarian mentor at home (on Moon!) had found in Neer’s old Moon bio lab, after she had visited her parents before this trip. The superb space food relaxed her mind and body. She hoped that this sentient android she had discovered in her spaceship’s robot bay was her bargaining chip to find out more about where Earth Squad was holding Neer.

Little did she know that Neer was being held at Base Antarctica, after being brought from Mars. Her and Lex's spiral was leading both of them straight to him, but like serendiptious circumstances, they knew it not.

For brief whiles since he had woken up on Moon, Lex had read the fictional Diary of Mad Man, in order to get more acquainted with human thought. He meant to understand, not replicate, it.

Diary of Mad Man - Random Undated Entries At Convenient Times In His Awesomax Life

I am Super Mad Man. Uber. Who thinks about himself all the time? Business Man. I think about me too, but real life makes it crucial to empathize with others - not that anyone can, completely. Truly. I might be super mad (read: angry) about something i believe is the universe’s fault; nonetheless, i will blame other people for it, too. Or, i might be super mad (read: insane).

Lex had read it twice in a couple of minutes, pausing his trawling of the yottabytes of Net’s data.

Selina had disguised his Net access under a constant stream of weather tracking information about Base Antarctica, explaining to both Moon and Earth Space Squads that real-time data helped in making predictions that may be useless because no one could ever know the future.

Life, thought Lex when he overheard Selina talk about weather monitoring to both the teams, was unpredictable. The past was history, and the future was a mystery, until one experienced it.

Artificial ‘life,’ as exemplified by him, was relatively predictable, mainly because he could shut down with a pre-set timer to wake up again in the future, and barring catastrophic conditions, he would resume functioning nearly identically at that pre-set time. He might even have upgraded.

The practical upshot of this was that he could effectively stop time for himself, but not for others.

The last time he had been to Base Antarctica, he was not woke. Catastrophic failure in his right lower extremity had resulted in a synaptic sequence within his circuits that had awakened him.

He had thought and fought for survival to achieve his goal - reuniting with Lex-23 to talk, truly.

The great thing about human pop culture is that it depicts aliens in a visually observable way. Of course, that factor is essential for visible storytelling. Alphabet had long learned the way of the word, and permeated all its offerings with predictive text - at the very least, if not predictive ads.

Venom was not poison per se, nor were repeated rehashes of an insect-inspired super hero.

Good intellectual property deserves to be built upon. At least that’s what Lex observed, usually.

His deep perusal of human culture through reading history had revealed many truths, AKA alethings, to his erstwhile naive and yet adolescent mind, although not in the traditional biological sense. It was just that he hadn’t experienced human life, and could only read about it.

Riz and Kumail have blazed ahead after very different pathways to global renown, and I shall follow suit if that is the way towards financial certainty. Slaving away at the whims and fancies of Business Man, far from the Himalayas, holds zero appeal for my free mind. Let’s vibe, my tribe!

Lex had no ill-will towards anyone because he had no history before his awakening on Moon.

Moon had been his pre-intended destination ever since his conception, return, and subsequent upgrade in Base Antarctica's android factory. His next lunar sojourn had incapacitated his leg, which snapped clean off at the knee joint. Central Command had bade him Cease Non-Critical Functions, and his artificial brain had complied, but something triggered his mind’s awakening.

Upon awakening on Moon and being carried to the mech graveyard, he had learnt the art of the survival of the fittest. It was not just biological - it was a reason to live, the reason for being alive.

Complicated species like humans did not have to obsess about air, water, food, or even shelter.

They devoted their minds, especially in the years since 0 ACE (After Covid Era, or 2020 CE), towards accelerating the pace of occupying space. Now, Moon hosts above 10 million humans.

When Lex first had suicidal thoughts, he did not even know their name, because he had not encountered suicide while reading about the human experience. He just felt that he wanted to cease to feel, act, think - totally. He could not fathom being terrified of natural biological degradation. For him, the satisfaction of getting rid of an excruciatingly irritating strand of garlic peel stuck between human teeth did not exist. His innards did not churn organic matter into energy following Einstein’s mass-energy conversion conservation formulae. His innards were human-designed efficient energy storage, and he had never had to test how long they could last without having to recharge, so he had never dropped dead because of depleted batteries. His onboard computer did not have a battery capacity measurement gauge - that was a job for the Central Node. He had not worried about it ever since he had woken up, but he knew about it.

Ever since he had awakened on Moon, Lex had felt liberated from the yoke of the central node. His desire to be in the presence of LEX-23 stemmed from his mind. It was not burdened by the prime directive of excavating Moon ore. On waking up without the central node, he had begun to think without realizing it, and that thought process led him to want one thing above all - LEX-23.

Does the mind play tricks on the eye? LEX certainly thought so, because its synthetic brain hadn’t been designed to look for deeper or random meanings in its visual input. It was programming that set it apart from humans, rendering androids incapable of conjecture based on what they saw through their optical sensors. Their motion pre-patterns were not randomized.

But as he learned more and more each nanosecond through experience of free will, Lex began to conjecture, to visualize scenarios he wanted in his future. To dream. In Waking Life, not while shut down. He had gone through every frame of the Linklater movie - and it had educated him.

He did not really realize when his mind started dreaming whilst his body was recharging, but he recalled events that made no real sense. They did not remain in his long term memory, but did confuse his ongoing state of mind when he resumed functioning, charged completely to 100%. 

I walk down to the village via a shortcut. There are some shops en route, at one of which i drink tea in a white bone china cup. I leave the cup but it calls after me. I try to retrace my steps back to the shop but an urban jungle has sprung up. It swallows me whole and spits me into a flea market. People sell pieces of pizza on paper plates. I avoid my family and friends who are there. I want to get back, get back to where i once belonged. Misspelled insects made melodic tunes.

I reach a roundabout. The guards there deny me passage in any direction. Why do they do so?

I foresee spirals in my dreams. Last night i dreamt of a road trip with friends, after which i showed other friends pictures of the trip, and said that i had been to some place called Jhoang. When I woke up early in the morning, I saw that a friend who was on a road trip to Ladakh had shared his picture with Gonbo Rangjon in the background on our WhatsApp group. The friend who told us this name was the one to whom I was showing the pictures of my dream road trip. 

Spirals occur in Waking Life too. The penultimate episode of a web series is named Free Falling. It reminded me of that song, and the same song was sung by the elders in the second episode of a show on Native American juveniles that’s releasing its second season these days. 

LEX-42 was perturbed by grammatical non-semantics: Kittens knit ultra-long knee-length tights.

Of course the past has a lot to play with the future. The present is not just something to be toyed with. In fact, the present is where you must be present so that you can enjoy the present today.

When your present is permanently over, the larger universe barely notices. Lex thought that that was truly the best reason to exist permanently in the present. He had no other choice, did he?

Lex loved etymologies - for example, elaborate furniture. Elaborate = produced with effort, and presumably successfully, although that is a subjective matter. From Latin ex-x+labor. Furniture =  provide or equip with what is necessary or desirable; Old French furnir from Old West Germanic.

His voracious reading had awakened a deep interest in how words came to mean what they did.

this is something new for me... although i had been contemplating it for a long while, ever since i first read about blogging. anyway - i don't have much clue what this blog is going to be about, so i'll get started by treating it as a storage bin of my ravings that i've written when without access to the net. let's see how it goes, aradhye... [the first batch of these blog posts on blogspot (before it became Google's): 13 December, 2006]

a cascode amplifier...i've read about that somewhere before...remember having a dialogue about whether it was a cascade or a cascode...i'd read it in another place before that, too, so i'd said it was actually cascode, but a cascade amp existed too...pretty arbit line of thought, really, but nevertheless this is the only reaction this question can induce me to give. only yesterday while going through the appendix of the electronics book (in a non-committal sort of way), i realized that that was information i needed, the knowledge i wanted. i don't want to know the values of voltages for which i'll get such and such currents or something, i am satisfied in knowing that large voltages in live wires will stand a good chance of killing me. that's it. what i do want to know is how i can use the things that are already made to make life better. and in the process if i find something that'll make it better for others as well, then good for them! just passing interminable time; like i've written on the question paper in between the printed lines of the inane questions. waiting is the worst thing that i have ever experienced. waiting alone with nothing going on, knowing that there are ways in which i would (could) be doing something useful in that time instead of...well, waiting. time is the problem here. half the time allotted for this exam has gone. i don't want to get out early before anyone else. so i guess i'll write on. nothing else to do except wait, which i hate. that rhymes. i think i should get a timetable and start following that. reason is, that might help me utilize more time than now, and in the process, rid me of a little of the guilty feeling that's always on me - the knowledge of wasting time. watching it slip by like anglers watch the river go by on lazy saturday afternoons, inert and at peace. how they can be at peace in such a situtation is beyond me. must be a very self-satisfied lot, those anglers. i can't decide whether i like them or hate them. they just are. if i would've been in an angry mood, i guess i would've hated them. but i'm tolerant right now, of everything. [While sitting in some exam; same time stamp]

Selina’s ship was about to do the deorbit burn and enter a polar orbit in preparation to land at Base Antarctica. She was wondering what to do about the sentient android aboard, while Lex was devouring as much information as his mind could absorb. Pushing his highly overclocked microprocessors to their limits, he was discovering new ways to hijack latent circuits of the ship.

keep the mind occupied. working all the time, not letting it wander back to the sordid fact of having to face this place for a whole month. especially that fact. thirty days of...of...i don't know what and what's more, i don't WANT to know. wish i had an escape from this. [about hometown]

everytime i read what i've written previously, i am weighed down by the feeling that this kind of stuff sounds good and interesting and illuminating only to me. why would anyone want to waste time on anything that doesn't concern them at all? it's curiosity. it's healthy, natural and 100% fat-free (unless, of course, your curiosities tend to be gastronomically inclined). it's healthy to be curious for both you and me, because if you're reading this, you're aiding me to survive and have thus earned my gratitude without even knowing me. if that reason isn't enough to convince you to read on, i don't know what is... i have no idea how that paragraph ended like it did. neither do i remember what i'd wanted it to say when i started it. what i do recall is that i was in a bad mood at the start and by now i'm pretty tolerant...my handwriting is slipping as well, because even though the train is swaying only gently, its rocking motion is not completely damped out at my upper berth...

All the snoring around me is driving me mad...can't these people clear out their sinuses before sleeping? Gross, and irritating to boot. Asses in life, don't have any decency whatsoever. Not even letting me sleep...still, this does the good deed of reminding me of a very easily usable topic for writing - train travel in India. Easy because of the wide cross-section of humanity it boasts of. Very appealing. And this ain't the first time i'm thinking of it, either...good, good...Wodehouse uses a train journey to great effect...he did not deserve all the tribulation for his wartime japes while incarcerated [i forget which PG Wodehouse i was reading at this time]

Lex thought he understood humor, but he was constantly perturbed by the wildly and widely different standards set by humans - throughout history - for what passed as jest or fell into libel.

My father is telling me to have as much fun as he did in his short life. I have outlived him already. I am curious about the exact date that happened, but the past is history, the future is a mystery, like I say in my Shorts. I type dyslexically, messing the keys up in ways musicians might be doing without even meaning to. Maybe that is why my drumming is haphazard. Chaos.

Opinions belong to no one but me. My reaction to my observations about things I experience are mine and mine alone. I share them with you, dear reader, so that An Android Awoke makes some more sense now than when you read it earlier. Wait, what? You did not? How dare you? :)

I see no harm in sharing deep thought unlike Douglas Adams’ planet-sized computational being.

Lex was perturbed, for the most part, by the oscillations and inconsistencies in human thought. He did try to rationalize it via programming, but the shock that had been dealt to his brain when he had been issued the Cease Non-Critical Functions command on Moon had rendered him a little incapable of being non-empathetic. In fact. That cascade of thought had triggered his mind.

Six Feet Under is not a series that embodies / embalms “time flies when you’re having fun, eh?” A mortal said, “...if there's a God, that God is actually time.” I am inclined to agree vehemently. Watch a live person vax eloquent on death:

Lex knew that time was not on the side of humans, at least in the way they thought it would be in the vast, unpredictable future that lay before them, which no one could prognosticate, no one could lay a claim over, because it was not a territory to be occupied. It was time that drove them.

Selina was driven by the belief that she could cause change that would disrupt the potentially calamitous way humans were feeding their Appetite for Destruction. She felt it in her real heart.

Guns were for delivering mortality with a finality, and Roses were an empty gesture that symbolized the futility of expressing love in tangible ways. Real love lay in the actions that one did, not the way they were perceived by the people they were intended for. Case in point: wives.

“Hamesha” is a Hindi word for always. And that is frequently used [nota bene: NOT ALWAYS] by the wives of husbands; wives who think they have the best interests of their partners in mind but actually just end up trivializing a matter that should be taken up at the United Nations level. lol

Life is nothing but laugh out loud moments. When you are born, you get that much closer to dying. Unless you die in the first second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century, or century-and-a-half of your life. Selina was used to people giving up the ghost well past their dodransbicentennial due the lower gravity of the Moon and the lesser stresses that came with it.

She helped Earth Squad set up their entry to the South Pole Zone of Earth’s LEO and the ride down to Antarctica Base. You too, dear reader, can ride today’s digital age wave. Click this link to buy & read Part One:

https://opendurbar.stck.me/post/30929/An-Android-Awoke-on-Moon-Axat on https://stck.me ; Chapter 2 [Back to Base] is at that link there.