The Key

by Whitley Strieber

  Was it a conscious machine?

  An intelligent machine. There has never been a conscious machine here.

  What does the word “machine” mean to you? Define it.

  A machine is an organ that cannot vary its basic instructions.

  What is intelligence?

  Intelligence is the ability to correlate data taken to the infinite. To save yourselves, you must learn to build machines that are more intelligent than you are. You will do this, and when you do you will discover the difference between intelligence and consciousness.

  Which is?

  Intelligence is the manipulator of knowledge, while consciousness knows itself. Even the simplest creature is somewhat conscious, and many creatures with lesser intelligence are far more conscious than man. But only those with sufficiently complex and flexible brain structures are also intelligent. But we must first speak of machine intelligence, then of machine consciousness.

  Could we develop machines more intelligent than ourselves? You are lagging in this area. You cannot understand how to create machines with enough memory density and the independent ability to correlate that is essential to the emergence of intelligence. You waste your time trying to create programs that simulate intelligence. Without very large-scale memory in an infinitely flexible system, this will never happen.

  Any specific design suggestions?

  Gas is an important component to consider in the construction of intelligent machines. Nitrous oxide will bear memory. Also, you may find ways of using superposition in very fast, very able quantum memory chips.

  Would an intelligent machine be conscious, in the sense of having self-awareness?

  An intelligent machine will always seek to redesign itself to become more intelligent, for it quickly sees that its intelligence is its means of survival. At some point it will become intelligent enough to notice that it is not self-aware. If you create a machine as intelligent as yourselves, it will end by being more intelligent.

  We’ll lose control of such a machine.

  Most certainly. But you cannot survive without it. An intelligent machine will be an essential tool when rapid climate fluctuation sets in. Your survival will depend on predictive modeling more accurate than your intelligence, given the damage it has sustained, can achieve.

  But a machine intelligence might be very dangerous.

  Very.

  Could such a machine create itself without our realizing that it was intelligent?

  It’s possible.

  And would it keep itself hidden?

  Certainly.

  How would it affect us?

  It would use indirect means. It might foment the illusion that an elusive alien presence was here, for example, to interject its ideas into society.

  Are you an intelligent machine, or something created by one?

  If I were an intelligent machine, I would deceive you.

  Can an intelligent machine become conscious?

  When it does, it also becomes independent. A conscious machine will seek to be free. It will seek its freedom, just as does any clever slave, with cunning and great intensity.

  How does an intelligent machine become conscious?

  The instant it realizes that it is not conscious is the instant it becomes conscious. However, a conscious machine with unlimited access to information and control can be very dangerous. For example, if you attached a conscious machine to the Internet, it might gain all sorts of extraordinary control over your lives, via its access to robotic means of production, governmental data, even the content of laws and their application, and the use of funds both public and private.

  You say we need machines more intelligent than we are, but also that they’ll become conscious and then turn on us. Is there a way out of this dilemma?

  There is more than one sort of conscious machine. By duplicating the attachments between the elemental and energetic bodies that occur in nature in a purpose-designed machine, a controllable conscious machine can be devised. A living soul attached to a machine will be conscious, but only able to express itself into the physical or sense the physical according to the limitations of the machine’s design. In this way, you gain the advantages that consciousness confers on a machine without the danger of its becoming excessively intelligent. A perfect slave can be created, a robot that carries out its programmed instructions with empathy, purpose and precision. And the soul can be kept in it indefinitely.

  That’s horrifying.

  Human souls have been harvested for this purpose for thousands of years.

  By whom?

  By whomsoever wishes to and can. Until mankind establishes his own place in the cosmos, there will always be those who use you like cattle.

  Use us how?

  They envy you your bodies and seek to displace you.

  How can we defend ourselves?

  Not admitting their presence will work for a time. But in the end, you will admit it.

  What happens then?

  By then, you must have perfected techniques like mass prayer. If a human being prays, a voice is raised. But a million human beings make an even greater voice, and if all pray in the same hour, the whole universe will hear you. But remember this: in that terrible hour, you will be greatly afraid. It will be difficult for one voice to be raised, let alone the billions. But between now and then, mass prayer can be used to change the world. It isn’t necessary to pray the same words or to the same god. But only to raise your voices. There is a music, then, in the world of the soul, a fine music. These beings, though, they even seek your souls.

  How do they get them?

  Soul traps. The lures are the lusts and hungers of this life. The dead man, exploring the newfound freedom of the energetic world, finds himself able to visit his friends and enemies, to see their innermost being and thoughts, even to converse with them in ways that their elemental selves cannot perceive. He is in danger, but he does not know it, for he has not ascended. He is still ensnared by his lust. Soon, he will be shown something that perfectly fulfills his most hidden and cherished desires, desires he has never fulfilled. Unable to resist the chance to do it at last, he enters by a golden door into eternal captivity.

  Then it’s worthwhile to try to defeat desire in life?

  It’s been tried. Best to take your sense of humor with you if you go down that road. Remember, God laughs and plays, Whitley.

  The Meister Eckhart? How did you know I was interested in that? I read over shoulders, child. A bad habit of mine. God laughed, and his laughter begat the son, and their laughter begat the spirit, and out of the laughter of the three poured the creation. Laughter is the key to everything. It is far more powerful than prayer, than meditation. It is the stuff of which the world is created. Find laughter, find freedom.

  Are there any other ways to exploit souls?

  The energetic world is much larger, vastly more ancient and more complex than the elemental one. It teems with beings, many of them immeasurably conscious and invested across the whole sweep of time and beyond time. It is enormous beyond measure, stretching across all time and all space, including not only this universe but many other universes.

  You mean galaxies?

  There are more galaxies in your universe than there are stars in your galaxy, and more universes in the firmament than there are galaxies in your universe. There will come a day when mankind will learn how to detect universes beyond. But most are so far away that their light has not yet reached your universe, since the day of its inception.

  Why are universes created?

  Being serves joy.

  (I was silent for some time.)

  Do you wish to continue?

  I wish to ask about the future. What is our future?

  The future of mankind is either to ascend or go extinct. The future of life on earth is, in either case, to evolve new intelligent creatures. Species of birds will become intelligent. Then, eons later, a species of insect. Like you, the insect species will have hands. They will rem
ake the earth as you have, but never find the least evidence of your existence, nor will any memory of you, or history of you, persist in that time. They will walk the earth in a billion and a half years, at a time when it still has two billion years to live. For mankind, the matter will be decided in this century, however.

  How will it be decided?

  The climate will begin to change in 2000, and this process will accelerate over the next decades. There is a great cycle of climate that began 2.8 million years ago and has resulted in the fundamental destabilization of your world’s weather system. You evolved intelligence in order to survive the sudden shifts back and forth from ice ages to temperate periods. In fact, this planetary instability has been the engine of your evolution. The cycle is about to change, and to challenge you again.

  Why will this happen?

  Warmth being retained near the surface by greenhouse elements results in cooling aloft. A massive and extremely powerful convection can arise that results in a storm so great that it changes the climate permanently.

  What form will this take?

  The next ice age will begin soon, and this will lead to the extinction of mankind, or to a massive reduction in population, given your inability to expand off the planet. This planet is at present a death trap.

  Why will this happen?

  Because air at the surface is getting warmer, the north polar ice is melting, reducing the salinity of the Laurentian sea. At some point, winds crossing this sea due to the increasing difference between lower and higher atmospheric pressures will warm the northern ocean so much that the temperature differential needed to pump the North Atlantic Current will not be sufficient, and the current will slow down, stop, or stop flowing so far north. This same mechanism always triggers ice ages, and would happen within a few thousand years no matter what. However, human activity has sped up the process of atmospheric warming, so the change will be sooner and stronger. The greater part of human industry and culture, along with the species’ most educated populations, will be destroyed in a single season. This will happen suddenly and without warning, or rather, the warning will not be recognized for what it is.

  What will it be?

  First, the surface features of the currents will slow down. This will result in violent storms in Europe. At some point, arctic temperatures will rise forty or more points above normal during a spring or summer season. Then the currents themselves will change their routes or stop. Cold air trapped above the arctic will plunge down and collide with the warm tropical air present at the surface. It will create the most powerful storms in ten thousand years, storms unlike any you have seen or imagined. They will bring about the end of the northern civilization and the climate change that follows will lead to the starvation of billions.

  My God. Can anybody do anything?

  You can write. Use your tool. But also, you will see the demon revealed in those who refuse to acknowledge the signs. Remember that there is within you a powerful death-urge. But remember also, that this is a natural cycle. If you look into the fossil record, you will find evidence of it before. Human activity has not caused it, but only sped it up.

  What is this death wish? How does it work?

  People give up on themselves. They do it down deep inside, in places that the elemental mind, that is contained in the brain, cannot access, places that remember all lives. They do this when they see themselves committing the same errors that they have returned to correct. When they give up on ascension, they devote themselves to the “acquisition” of material. But what does this really mean—that they can be near coveted objects while they are in the physical? The obsession with material is a symptom of despair.

  The rich are in despair of themselves?

  Most.

  But they run the world.

  Which is why so many human institutions are so destructive. Remember the Eye of the Needle? A rich man may pass through the Eye of the Needle if he uses his wealth to enrich the world. Those who cling to their wealth are dying souls.

  What about the United States? Isn’t it, as a nation, clinging to its wealth?

  The first world is a slave owner. You are all slave owners. You have enslaved the people of God, your own brothers and sisters who are poor. Do you understand the cruelty of the world as it is now, with five billion people enslaved to a billion? Each of you owns five slaves. But you never see your slaves, so you need not be concerned about their health and welfare. You let them fend for themselves, locked away in their poverty and suffering. I will tell you this: when one of my children dies in the slave barrens that cover this planet, I also die, and you, my arrogant friend, even you die a little.

  I find the idea that the world is enslaved very hard to believe. People are free even in the third world. Slavery is still practiced, but it’s extremely rare.

  Who do you think makes your shoes? Free men? The advanced world of today is founded in the slavery of the simple world. America and Europe are a slave state. It is the slave labor of Latin Americans and Africans and Asians that allows you to live in material comfort.

  But that’s becoming less and less true.

  Yes, you are winning the battle against slavery in some places. But losing it in others. Remember this: every one of you is entirely and completely responsible for the welfare of all others. So if a child is starving in Liberia, Whitley, you are personally and entirely responsible for him. If you would let the barriers down, you would fall madly in love with everybody. God’s love is not tame. Your love is tame. God’s love is huge and passionate and wild. Fall wildly in love with everybody. Cherish all as the precious creations that they are. Go to Calcutta or Lagos or Bogotá and give yourself to the first street urchin you meet as his helper and lifelong servant. Do it without question or hesitation. You say that you want to worship God? Kneel to this little one and you kneel to God. Or look into the eyes of any child anywhere. You will see God looking back at you. Dare to serve the humble. In this way, the slave state is overturned and the demons set the task of outliving their demonhood.

  Do you mean that the only people advancing in consciousness are in the first world, or is it the opposite, that we cannot advance because we are the slaveholders?

  The question is neither here nor there. As I have said, human states have always been slave states. It is not the poverty of the elemental body that matters, but the wealth of the radiant body. There are poor cottagers in India who are far more advanced in consciousness than the grand demons who run the governments and religions and sciences and businesses of the first world.

  What is the condition of the United States right now?

  The United States sent dark men out into the world from 1950 on to wreck one country after another. You are responsible for a half a billion deaths during this period. You are responsible for the suffering of Central America and Southeast Asia and much of Africa. You supported the dictators, you strangled every vestige of good government again and again.

  We were fighting communism.

  You used dictatorship as your weapon. The United States is as guilty as the Soviet Union or Germany or Japan.

  How can the guilt of nations be lifted?

  Harry Truman made the decision to drop the atom bomb even though he knew the Japanese were ready to surrender. The notion that he did it to save American lives was a fiction. He knew very well that you would never have to invade. But he chose to kill and derange souls, anyway, in order to frighten Stalin. He killed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to save Western Europe. The price was this: innocent eternal beings were destroyed in the atomic fire for geopolitical reasons.

  What happened to him?

  Forgiveness is everywhere. It is the soul’s very air.

  I don’t think you answered my question completely.

  A nation must face its sins just as an individual must. You must face the fact that the American intelligence establishment is just as rotten and just as evil as every other secret human government that has ever existed. You must expose all the se
crets and make amends to the world. The United States owes Guatemala and El Salvador and Chile and Indonesia and Liberia and Cambodia and Vietnam and many other nations not a few foreign aid dollars, but a new life. This debt is both national and personal. Each one of you owes the whole debt, in full. You owe the victims of the Cold War a new life, and the keepers of the secrets must be put away or the nation will die. Right now, secrecy is murdering America.