This is page 57 from Book of Pages. Jiriki is lost within the underground interface corridors of the giant Extreme Machine, where old machines lie forgotten or abandonned.
In the modern world of the Metropolis, button ought to be a verb. The vast majority of activities that are undertaken here require the pressing, pushing or prodding of at least one button. And, often, that is all.
A button is an innocuous little thing. Jiriki had imagined that the Metropolis would be infested with machines, so that the predominant articles would be things such as wheels, engines and motors. Or — to be a little more electrical — wires, switches and circuit boards. All those things are here, and it may well be an infestation. But the gutsy, machinic pieces and assemblies are relegated to the background. What predominates instead are the places where the two worlds, human and machine, touch: the keypads, consoles and buttons, touched on one side by the fingertips of human beings, on the other by the filament sensors of the altogether more awesome machines. It is a strangely delicate join.
There seems to Jiriki to be something almost disturbing about the minuscule action of pressing a button. In the Metropolis, he’s seen powerful machinery brought lurching into action by such a feeble act. It reminds him of a tale the elder monks told him once, when he was a youngster: the Last Ride of the Tiger Tickler. There was, according to fiction, a man who came upon an untended tiger cub. He took it home and raised it, and, when it was fully grown, he took to riding into town on its back. He steered the beast with a silk handkerchief: he’d lean forward and flick the tiger’s left or right ear to make it turn, or brush its nose to make it start or stop. Of course, the tiger, brought up on milk and honey lapped from a bowl held in the kind man’s hands, didn’t know any better, so he went along with it. Disregarding the tiresome details of the tale, when the Tiger Tickler mistakenly rides into town on a different tiger, who despite similar build and markings has a radically different opinion as to the rightful place of mankind (namely in, not on), everybody gets eaten up. The silk handkerchief, under the new set of circumstances, turns out to be of no use at all.
Machines are not tigers. Nonetheless, if humans are becoming solely capable of raising their fingers, it would be bad if their circumstances were to change. They used to be able to do so much more.
