XXXI/2 Over a huge gap in time Dante foresees the now frighteningly realised possibility of monstrous power allied to intelligence. Nature he observes is sensible to have made its most powerful and hugest creatures without the guile to make use of their destructive potential. Here the dreaming boy (an innocent echo of the boy in Canto XXVII/1) sees looming up in his future a brutal force whose actions could be malignly controlled by artificial intelligence. The microchip which here stands for the monster's face and brain was one of the first ever illustrated (in the Scientific American which I subscribed to in the sixties). Reason, Faith and Hope are eclipsed and Culture is destroyed as vultures fly ahead to feed off the open book. The rest of the collage is from fragments of the Boy's Own Paper. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.