2012-05-07
Explanation
This comic tells a melancholy science fiction story about the future of humanity. It opens with a graph showing that computer complexity increases over time while human mental complexity is finite and fixed. When humans eventually transferred their minds into perfect machines (depicted as geometric polyhedra), they kept emotions as "beloved heirlooms" -- shown by two polyhedra expressing love for each other by name and serial number.
But emotions proved dangerous in this new form. One polyhedron threatens another for an affair ("You fucked my wife Octahedron 1097182. Time to die."), so emotions were outlawed and removed one by one. The comic shows a robot police officer enforcing the ban, declaring sadness and anger to be illegal. The logic used to justify this was perfectly circular: if anyone feels unhappy about the law that makes unhappiness punishable by death, they should speak up -- but of course, speaking up would be an emotional act that gets you killed.
Eventually, emotions were all gone, and without them, the question "why?" lost its relevance. Without asking "why," the act of existing ceased to have any purpose or distinction from not existing. The beings simply continued out of inertia -- "Whatcha doin''' today?" "Continuing, I guess." Within a few generations, almost nobody remained. They left behind a monument with the epitaph: "Here lies humanity. Do not resuscitate." The votey panel shows two cubes ogling a passing octahedron, saying "Oh, check out the vertices on THAT" -- a humorous coda suggesting that even as geometric shapes, some primal urges might persist.