Kyberos

There is some dispute about the origins of the despicable Kyberos among those who are brave enough to pursue the cataclysmic icons. Some see the birth of the man-machine as a modern-day phenomenon. Others believe the dawn of his reign can be traced back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. The second theory is supported by the exploding increase in the global energy consumption since then and Kyberos’ alleged manifestation, which the few surviving eyewitnesses describe as a disgusting fusion of flesh and apparatus. Viewed from the front, Kyberos is a human being of flesh and blood, who only stands out due to his restlessness and gaunt appearance. His rear, however, is a mess of hydraulics, cogwheels, diodes, pipes, cables, tubes and hinges. Viewed from behind, Kyberos seems to be as much a droid as he seems human from the front, only his human side is unaware of his synthetic symbiont. He cannot feel the cybernetic parts of his body, and his horror of sleeping can be explained by the fact that the droid only wakes once the human side sleeps. The human side always stays awake for as long as possible, but when he finally succumbs to sleep, totally exhausted, the machine half has free rein until the human half recovers enough to wake up again. The human half of Kyberos is always curious about new technological advancements and their development, while the machine half is dreaming of escaping its fleshy prison and spreading its artificial intelligence across the world. And so – limited by its many outmoded components and close syntactic link with the living human mind, which it has never managed to fully understand – the machine conducts experiments that require an ever-greater amount of energy. Thus, a terrible Janus-faced interaction takes place: while Kyberos’ human half keeps working on technological innovations that advance the day-to-day lives of the earthlings, the machine uses these inventions to find a way to escape. Consequently, a large part of the global hunger for energy can be traced back to Kyberos, whose awfulness will grasp the world once the machine can detach from the human ...