The Age of Morlocks

I am a morlock - a naturally technocratic creature, comfortable with the darkness. When the pandemic hit, I heard the shock waves across the internet, and noticed every day how little my life had changed. It was at times, almost a nice excuse to sit and tap on the keyboard, and make dinner slowly to the sound of Nine Inch Nails. The world has been shifting to accommodate me and my kind for a while now, and it's awful.

I'm unnatural, and like unnatural things. And sometimes I think about more wholesome people, who enjoy moving about, weaving baskets, and large halls full of noisy kids, and how uncomfortable they seem with the way people live apart in little concrete cubes. They always struggle to say what's wrong, and it's easy to poke at their words about 'simpler times', and 'mother earth'. Because 'times are objectively better', the old plagues are gone, polio was bad, and we live in a better world. They can't say what's missing properly, but they still feel it.

I think a good chunk of people looking romantically at Tarot cards, Rainbow gatherings, 'Viking' funerals, and rune-stones just want to go on a nice walk, and make something valuable with their hands. But they can't, because machines make baskets faster than any human, and they could make runic carvings on rocks if we wanted them to; the machines have taken all their value.