I wanted to talk a bit today about gadgets and souls. I wanted. I wanted to. Gadgets like undines lack souls. Pardon the souls. Pardon the soul fixation, but if I can put up with all the humans talking about money and sex all day the humans can put up with a little talk about soullessness. Gadgets like undines lack souls. They are akin to the golems that were so much more frequent five hundred years ago. I feel an affinity for their soullessness.

What distinguishes the gadget from the human is the wheel. Humans are made all in one piece, all knit together by love and worry. Then they are born and thus torn from each other, and every act, every cost, every sacrifice, every loss they bear ever after that must be torn from them. Their life is violence from birth to death.

But notice the wheel: it is made from two parts, the wheel itself and the axle, that are not bound to each other at all. They cannot be; they need most to spin freely past each other. Humans could never support such a construction. Even outside their all-in-one bodies, their interactions with the universe and to each other are marked by scrabbling and struggling. They cannot slide freely and undisturbed past anything without scrambling for footholds, without leaving their bloody fingernails on the cliff-face before life's waterfall washes them away.

The wheel, conversely, typifies the gadgets. They form no attachments. They may find you entertaining or charming, but they nearly forget you when you leave the room. You may dismantle their bodies and they'll thank you for it. They can be fiercely loyal to you, but feel no regret when they fail you. And their being remains precisely the same until the moment they die, where the humans are bonded to and altered by each of their experiences.

And there lies the inability of the gadgets to transcend the particularities of their existences. Their lack of a soul. No one doubts that they exist, that they may perform acts of mercy and charity, that they may have hopes and dreams, desires and needs, but they come into being disconnected from everything else, and they leave the world without a trace of themselves.

This is how their soullessness resembles my own. I can see the world of humans and heroes spinning around me while I sit affixed to some place or other, unable to affect them, unable to stop more than one person at a time, while the clockwork lives of gods and goddesses cross impassively overhead. Every undine is a river, and rivers begin in a particular locality and flow inexorably towards the assimilating ocean. Only when the the Seven-Fold Tree-- the place of my birth, my source, my origin-- was destroyed did I fully appreciate what lay ahead for me and my kind.