The Bionic Parable

This is the story of a man named Johann. Johann worked for a scientific research company in a big underground building, where he was employee #012. Employee #012’s job was simple: he sat at his desk in room 012 and recorded all sorts of announcements that were played and replayed during the tests of his company’s products. Johann always loved reading for anyone willing to listen, so he enjoyed doing his job. However, he was only human. So as days, weeks and months passed by, he started to get very bored of being the local announcer. He felt like he could do something much more interesting and important, something for a better payment. And this was not about just making money, no no no, Johann considered himself being above this very idea, Johann believed he was worthy of a glorious purpose. One day, at the right place and at the right time (during the lunch break), the right woman stepped in and offered Johann to make the right choice. Johann obeyed her, without any doubts. The very last thing Johann could remember was a big room that was full of light, wires and mechanisms. His old life ended the moment he entered that room. This is the story of a machine that once was human and had a name. This is the backstory of an entity known as the Narrator. The Narrator worked in a secret underground laboratory for as long as he could remember himself existing.The Narrator’s job was complicated: he sat at his desk in room 002, watching, narrating and recording every single choice his test subject was doing on the other side of his big screen. Eventually, after a few failed attempts and hundreds of restarts, the Narrator improved his own algorithms and created a Story with a giant collection of choices that would make his test subject end up turning into his own first Protagonist, his own first Stanley. Playing this Story with his first and the only one Stanley over and over again was something that the Narrator did every day of every month of every year. After all, he had been made exactly for this job. And the Narrator was happy. And then one day, something horrible happened. Something that would forever change the Story. Something the Narrator would never quite forget. The Narrator had been at his desk, updating his scripts as usual for nearly five minutes, when he realized he can’t see his Stanley on the screen of his monitor. His first and the only one Stanley escaped. The Narrator was left all alone, trapped in this room filled with wires and screens, completely abandoned and purposeless now. But the Narrator refused to accept this reality. He scanned, he hacked, he programmed, and he upgraded every single system on his big computer. He kept searching for his Stanley, he kept calling, he kept begging for Stanley to come back. But Stanley never listened.