a non-personal post! part 1

Well, this one's *sort of* non-personal, anyway. I don't know how to completely separate my mindset from what I write. What I've posted below was written while I was working at QS Pharma. It kind of shows you what working there was like.

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MAN, 48, ARRESTED FOR THINKING OF A RED CAR INSTEAD OF A BLUE ONE
Thomas Knudson, a factory worker in Chicago, was carted off by authorities last night after the thought of a red car accidentally surfaced in his mind during a workplace discussion about blue cars.

Knudson claimed the rogue thought arose in his mind due to fatigue brought on by long working hours. "It's never happened like this before," Knudson explained. "I just couldn't think about what I was supposed to for a second."

"You can't have people's thoughts deviating from the norm like this," Knudson's supervisor, Anna Wydkoff, told Tribune reporters. "I'm sorry to see him go, he was a hard worker, but if he was that tired, he's burned out and needs to be eliminated anyway."

Knudson's wife agrees. "It's never okay to think thoughts not dictated to you by an outside source. Tom was wrong, and fully deserves his fate, but he seems to want to do the right thing here."

Knudson is scheduled to be vaporized in the "You Failed" chamber on Tuesday. Some, however, do not believe mere instantaneous execution is enough of a punishment for rogue thinkers.

"We need to figure out how to place people in a state where they're conscious yet do not consume any resources," Senate Leader Harold Whaup suggested. "This way, rather than people escaping from the horrors of their failures through the 'You Failed' chamber, we could instead place them into this state of undeath indefinitely and have them programmed to feel and think nothing but the most intense humiliation imaginable for the rest of eternity."

Rogue thought errors such as Knudson's have declined in frequency over the past few years, but kinesthetic errors have risen somewhat, primarily among the elderly, in whom illness and in some cases mere old age contribute to the inability to control one's movements enough to sync within +/- 0.5 seconds of everyone else.

Bertha Jenkins, 34, of Chicago, had this to say: "I know someday my body'll fail me and I'll fall outside specifications. I just have to try to delay that as long as possible." When told of Harold Whaup's plan, Bertha agreed. "Yes, when I do fail to meet the guidelines for thought and movement I really should be reminded of my utter inferiority for all eternity."

Scientists are currently trying to create robots physically incapable of falling outside thought and movement specifications; one's consciousness would simply be downloaded into these machines, making the need for our failure-prone organic bodies invalid.

But some have other ideas- allowed, of course, by specifications. Greg Watkins, another Chicago native, gave us his take on the replacement of human bodies with robots.

"I don't think that's right. The whole point of these specifications is for us to voluntarily give up our free will and even our individual molecular disparities, not to increase efficiency, but just because it's the right thing to do."

Thomas Knudson agrees, looking forward to his destruction in the "You Failed" chamber. "When we fail, like I did recently, it's a sign that on some probably unconscious or cellular level we don't accept the program anymore, and when that happens we need to be eliminated at the very least."

"Making us all robots would make us one with our programming. We're not worthy of that honor. We need to be able to fail so that we're eternally separate from our holy programming."