From:	Brian Angliss <angliss@*****.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:	Re: Compassion
Date:	Thu, 30 Jan 1997 12:01:11 -0700

>>>>>[Humanity resigned from me a long time ago. I can't even say that I'm
biologically human anymore, either.

I have cybereyes. I have had my original, blind eyes, replaced with glass,
plastic, steel, and silicon. That makes me both more an less than human,
just like every person who has ever voluntarily or involuntarily accepted
cybernetics.

I wear my mirrorshades because the eyes I have are flat, matte black and
reflect no light. It's like looking into holes in my skull, a deliberate
effect on my part. But I wear the shades because those very eyes which
make me _other_ rather than human scare the hell out of normal people, even
those which are used to blank, unblinking eyes.

My aura looks even less pleasant, and once a toxic spirit looked into my
eyes and flew screaming in terror from the abyss my eyes are in Astral.

And you think that resigning from humanity bothers me? I've not been a
member of society, of humanity in general, since I was 6, when Dad paid for
my first pair of eyes, and humanity turned its back on me when it realized
that I get my power, my mana, from the conflict between the lighter and
darker sides of voudoun.

Love kills as it cures, and it's a hell of a lot worse than the disease.
Honor allows people to relate to each other, as Midnight said, but with the
forced evolution of human into posthuman cyborg, mana-sapien, or manaborg,
even honor is being replaced and no longer serves its original purpose.

And a machine has no compassion. It just does what it's designed to do,
what it's been _programmed_ to do. And a cyborg or a manaborg is a machine
which has been augmented by organics, not a human augmented by
cybernetics.]<<<<<
-- Diana, Mistress of the Night <11:58:46/01-30-58>