Progress

PROGRESS

Hello. I am Progress. I would first like to thank you for coming.

I would also like to ask you to call me Prog, but since that sounds rather like a guest character on Star Trek, I’ll spare the confusion. You can instead call me Train.

This city is so much more pitiful from ground level, I’ll tell you what. From up there, and I don’t mean the sky, I just mean up, you miss out on the details. Vast expanses of green look like manicured grass, box-like buildings look absolutely manufactured, and the people… well the people all move at the same speed, which is nice because if one speeds up, the rest speed up and if one stops to tie their shoe or set down their moccachino to answer the phone, nobody knows, you can’t tell from up here. Everyone’s always moving.

Which is what I’m all about. I’m here to keep you all moving.

All of you are here today for no prophetic reason. There is nothing in your blood that you’ll be able to trace that makes you any more prepared or programmed to understand what I am about to say. Know that anyone else could be standing where you are at this moment. Know that, and count yourselves lucky.

I greet you at the start of your lives. I apologize for having chosen such a precarious meeting site: You see I needed a proper metaphor to illustrate my point. Behind me, the city limits end, and the rest of the continent begins, where there are oceans, rivers, mountains, cliffs, basins, plateaus, deserts, and corn. There are highways, freeways, skyways and railways. There are also snakes. But very few of them are poisonous.

Some of you have been in one location all of your lives: You have seen the stars rise and fall in the same sky every night since you were born. This makes me oh so sad…

Right, the point! That is not the point, your life is your own! Go only where you feel pulled to. Just like today, when for some reason or another, you have all come to this bluff, this very spot, to answer to this calling…

As I’ve said before, your lives are just beginning. You all have plans, I assume. If you don’t make them, they will make you. But I arrive before you today, not to advise you, not to lecture on the failures of the past: I have come to beg. I have come to beg you to do something you might not do so willingly.

I am begging you to create.

You have spent the majority of your lives consuming, food that you yourself did not grow, entertainment that yourself have not expended any energy in receiving. You cannot go on being a sponge. In fact the whole world is a giant sponge, soaking up more and more that the few have to offer, and now it has grown heavy.

The time has come for you to wring it out.

This is your calling, and if you should fail, all the world will know. All the children will be unable to learn, all the parents will be unable to move. We will be locked in stasis, in darkness, until you are able to relieve us, and move forward.

I am not an angel. I am not a savior, I am inevitable:

I am Electricity, Enlightenment, Train.

Go now. Create.