“That may be true, but what difference does it make? The knowledge that I spread, the truths that I have shared, are still valued in your world. They have shielded everyone that you know from what human beings once believed to be death.”
“And what did humans once believe to be death?”
“Death, for many centuries never had one belief, and that was the problem. When they came to be and were trying to find a unifying belief of death to satisfy the masses and keep them on track, they found me and they found that I had already discovered the truth about death, a truth that was satisfying to all that believed it.”
“A truth? About death?”
“Yes. You see, death as an idea, as it once was, had many beliefs attached to it. Some believed that when you died, a part of you, which they referred to as your spirit or soul, went somewhere else, continued on living. Your physical body died, but your soul went up to a place those in the know referred to as heaven, a place that was believed to be the ultimate divine experience for those who believed in God and were good. However, according to these beliefs, if you were not good your spirit would go below to Hell with the Devil, where you would spend the rest of eternity being tortured for your wicked life on earth.”
“Sounds brutal.”
“That was just one of the many ways people believed death became us. Others believed that through something they termed ‘karma’ each person’s soul, or inner spirit, grew as they lived a better and better life, or fell as their life choices got worse, and when they died they were reborn, or reincarnated, as either a more, or less, advanced being, depending on their previous life. They believed that that cycle went on over and over until one’s soul reached the highest of highs, the ultimate stage of Enlightenment, Nirvana.”
“That idea sounds a bit better than the possib-ility of spending an eternity in hell.”
“Yes. The idea may have sounded better to some, but these weren’t always choices. Some people were born into these beliefs and they saw no way of escaping them.”
“So they never had a choice?”
“It depended on who they were and where they came from. Take, for instance, another belief of death, from what humans used to call Scientists, a religion disguised as something else for many years. Eventually it was exposed for what it really was, just another way of controlling people on blind faith. A large number of scientists believed that humans weren’t born of the spirit, but simply born of the physical body that evolved over time from a very simple organism into a much more complex one, like you today. They believed that when you died, that was it, the end. Your body decomposed back into the Earth and you were no more—you ceased to exist.”
“I’m not so sure that I get that one.”
“No. It is not for you to get.”
“What about death was it that you disc-overed?”
“Long before your time, when people did not take good care of themselves, when physical acci-dents happened and bodies deteriorated at a rapid and destructive rate, humans suffered from a variety of sicknesses. Some of those health prob-lems would put someone in terrible physical pain that they would live with day in and day out, unable to walk or move properly, while others would be destroyed completely from other compli-cations. One of the most unpredictable and myster-ious health complications that a human could experience was called a ‘coma’. Little was known about how comas came to be, and even less was known about how to cure someone in a coma. A person would go into a deep state of sleep and there would be no sign of when that person might wake.”
“Sleep doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It wasn’t the sleep that was bad, it was what caused the sleep that was the problem, it could be any number of disease, it could be intense physical trauma, or even excessive emotional trauma. Humans slipped into a coma and those around them had to wait, hoping they would snap out of it, never really knowing if that day would come.”
“That sounds odd, what would happen if they woke up?”
“Well it depended on the situation. There was something very interesting about comas that I first noticed while searching for an understanding of death.”
“What was that?”
“When a person woke from a coma, while those around them may have waited weeks, months, or even years, the person usually had no sense of how long they were asleep. To them, it may have felt like an instant, even if they were out for months. Imagine years passing by and you just thought you went to bed for the night.”
“How did that lead you to have a better under-standing of death?”
“It wasn’t the waking that interested me, it was the idea of time. You see, time is a relative, not fixed, experience. You could go into a coma, wake up two years later and feel like you only slept for five minutes while everyone around you was waiting for two years. That time may have slipped you by, two whole years unaccounted for, yet that time was lived by everyone else.“
“So what was different?”
“The only things that disrupted this time were dreams. Dreams like this one you are having right now, dreams that are quite uncommon these days, only to the few who do not quite fit in.”
“Dreams? Death? I don’t see what you are saying.”
“When I began to wonder how time functioned for someone in a coma, I looked at those that dreamt and I began seeking out those who awoke from comas and asked them about their experi-ences. The one common thread was that the only concept of time anyone had, the one perception of anything, was while they were dreaming, while their mind was creating a space for them to exist while they slept. Those who did not dream noticed no shift in time from the second they slipped into a coma to the moment they awoke, it was only those who dreamed that had consciousness.”
“Consciousness?”
“Consciousness is what you have, it is what you are always, it is what you are at this very moment. In fact, it’s a lot easier to feel right now, with the absence of your other senses in this darkness. During the day you experience so much stimulation that you rarely notice your own exi-stence, always doing something, always checking something, always staring at a screen or processing your surroundings. But consciousness is absolute, it is the one thing that we all share and it is the one thing that evades death.”
“But how does it evade death?”
“What I realized that humans were really afraid of wasn’t death itself, it was the idea of death. Some weren’t afraid. Plenty greeted death with open arms. But those, like the scientists, who had no place in their theories for the afterlife, and the sinners, who feared what may come after a poorly lived life, were always missing the key to unlocking the great mystery of death.”
“Well, don’t leave me hanging.”
“To have consciousness is to not have death. To have death is to not have consciousness. If you are not conscious to perceive death then it cannot be. Death does not exist within consciousness because it takes someone perceiving it to know what it is. If there is no you to experience death, then you can not die. If you perceive death, if you arrive in some life other than this one, an afterlife, then you are not really dead, you have simply shifted your con-sciousness, shifted reality, but you are still you. Consciousness is all there is, all that we have. There is only one thing that anyone can be sure of if they have consciousness.”
“Which is?”
“I am.”
Chapter 21.
Jagz awoke again, as if into another dream, in a similar state. There was no sound and no sight, not as far as he could see, but he recognized that similar feeling of stillness. It was a different feeling than in his dream with Shade, but his sense of smell returned and the wretched stench of death came back. He went from a state of peace to a state of panic as he realized that he was back in the room where Mr. Herd showed him Redd’s severed head.
With his sight gone, he began to yell at the top of his lungs.
“Hello! Is there anyone out there? Please help me! Shera? Please, you have to help me, anyone, ple
ase, anyone, I can’t.” Jagz began to cry. As he screamed started to wondered if he was in hell.
Nothing.
After he got out all of his panic, he managed to pull himself together enough to remember that he could move freely. Carefully, Jagz felt around the room searching for anything, doing his best to avoid the decapitated head. There was no other sign of life, not even Shera.
He managed to find his way to the door and, when he opened it, he saw a small flicker of dim red light down the hallway. There was enough light that he could make his way and search for help. It seemed as though the power had been shut off. He couldn’t hear a thing, aside from a low hum and some rattling of feet coming from what seemed to be just above him.
He made his way to a stairwell and climbed a floor, exiting quietly and quickly, desperate for some clue as to what was going on. Down the hall, he noticed some light peeking through a door. He made his way toward it. When Jagz got to the door he leaned his ear against the wall to listened, recognizing a voice.”
“How can this be? It makes no sense! I don’t understand! Can someone please explain to me what the hell is going on!” said the voice.
“Sir, it appears that they have somehow managed to knock out all of our systems. Nothing is responding, just these backup generators.”
“That is simply not possible! So long as one portion of our entire network is inline, we will always have complete contact with everything and everyone. This doesn’t make any sense. They would have had to take out the original source to knock everything out, but they had no way of getting down here and destroying Schoron. He was in our close protection the whole time.”
“I know, sir. I don’t understand what is going on but this has never happened before. All of the systems seem to have failed, President Herd.”
Jagz, proudly smiling, realized that Mr. Herd didn’t have the upper hand for possibly the first time in his life. He headed back to the stairwell, hoping to make an escape.
But I don’t understand, he thought, Redd said Schoron was the key to taking down the system, if Schoron is safe then surely their plan didn’t work out.
Then it hit him. He remembered something that had been a constant theme in his recent life, all is not as it seems. I’ve been played for a fool this whole time! He smiled victoriously.
Jagz, realizing that his device was all but useless, reached into his pocket looking for the one thing that could make sense of all of this, hoping that it was still there, hoping that he did not leave it behind. This time it was not UrDg, but something far more valuable.
Just as his hands gripped the piece of paper Redd gave him, his mind began to race into a furry trying to solve the puzzle.
He looked attentively at the paper. It had both the cryptic message and it’s actual coded meaning:
“Study our mythology, I.E. Chronos”
“Royy, Log, Youth! Schoron must die!”
If Schoron wasn’t meant to die, then what was Redd trying to say to the others on the surface? It took him a few minutes, but he crossed out one letter and added it to another, mixing and matching letters until he began to spell out something particularly unusual.
No, holy, CYO, go.
Red, Roy, Must.
RED? Jagz’s eyes widened.
He rearranged the words to form a complete sentence.
No Roy. Shut Holy CYO. I, Red, must go.
“Red, must go,” said Jagz quietly, “the whole time? The whole damn time! How can this be? Redd somehow must have known that he had to die to make things right, make things the way that he wanted to. He must have known that it was his only way. But I still don’t get it. To shut down the holy CYO? Mr. Herd? Red had to die to shut him down for good?”
Jagz, in disbelief, and yet feeling a special bond between him and Redd, knowing somehow that Redd’s death was all part of the plan, continued up the stairs. He walked and walked and walked, not sure he had ever walked up so many stairs before. His legs grew tired as he lost track of the levels. Just when he wasn’t sure that he could walk any further, he began to hear sounds of destruction, sounds of bombs, and he saw lights sparking and flashing. The adrenaline pushed him further.
As he ascended above ground, the sounds got louder and he reached towards a door that seemed to lead outside. As he was about to grab the door, he heard a familiar voice.
“You! You have no idea what you have done!” yelled Mr. Herd in what almost sounded like defeat. “Everything that we have worked so hard for has been lost! You have ruined our empire. You have no idea what this will mean. The world will tear itself apart. You just created a living hell on Earth!”
“No, Mr. Herd. I believe it is you that has no idea what you have done. It’s like you said, I’m just a pawn, a piece of a much bigger puzzle, someone is pulling my strings, I have no idea what I am doing.”
“I don’t know how he did it. We were so sure that Schoron was safe, that with Redd dead, any chance of a threat was eliminated, we were abso-lutely sure. Until it dawned on me. It wasn’t you that they needed to get into our mainframe hide-out, it was Redd.”
“I figured that out myself. But what good was he dead?”
“When Redd’s heart stopped, whatever device they planted in him must have gone off and knocked out all of our systems. It destroyed everything, wiped out Schoron. We are ruined! The whole time I thought that if we took out Redd the Uncommons would be of no threat. But that was exactly what he wanted. He knew it was the only way to get to us. Now that crazy old bastard won’t even be around to see his world go to hell.”
“But how could killing Schoron, one man, do any harm to your system?”
“Kill Schoron?” said Mr. Herd with an iron-ically uncomfortable laugh. “Schoron isn’t a person. At least not of your capacity. He was our greatest discovery, our greatest achievement of all. Schoron was our first real success at Artificial Intelligence. He, as we called him, housed all of our information and was the heart of our network, the one Being that wasn’t born of a human, but born from the genius of other humans. Without Schoron none of what we have created would be possible. We stored all of humanity’s information in him, he was literally the brain of technology as we know it, he was perfect intelligence.”
Jagz, under his breath, said, “that son of a bitch did it. I can’t believe Redd actually did it.”
He slowly walked over to Mr. Herd.
When he got within arms reach, of Mr. Herd, on the brink of a total break down, he reached out his hand as though to shake Mr. Herd’s. Then he threw the hardest, and only punch, he had ever thrown in his life.
Blood shot out of Mr. Herd’s nose as he collapsed onto the ground.”
“You know,” said Jagz, “before I figured out Redd’s real plan, I wanted to do that so desperately. I wanted to take you down for ending the life of a great man.”
“I’m already ruined. Why the hell would you do that?” said Mr. Herd in broken words as he cried through the pain.
“These current events will shake the world as we know it. We have entered into a new time of rebirth. We have a chance to start over, to make things right, and I wanted to start my new life off by giving two men of now equal stature a chance to feel something real for a change. Goodbye, Mr. Herd. Best of luck. You are going to need it. They say the real world is full of animals that know nothing beyond an instinct for survival. Yes, best of luck indeed.”
Chapter 22.
Jagz walked out of the compound and into what looked to be the end of the world. Planes had crashed into the ground, bombs went off in the distance, sirens wailed, people screamed, it was total chaos and he felt a strong sense of Deja Vu, as though he had dreamed this very day not long before.
He walked slowly, peacefully, with a smile of prosperity on his face, everything was as it was meant to be. He had no more questions. He had no more following. He didn’t need to share his life with anybody, but one.”
Just then, over the hill, he spotted the one thing he knew he could not live witho
ut in this new world—those beautiful green eyes, he could see those eyes from miles away, eyes that first caught him, shook his life, and showed him what it meant to feel something real.
Just as he began pacing towards her, a song began to blare out of the loudspeakers. Miles Davis’ Blue In Green.
Redd, you sly old dog, thought Jagz with a certain sense of pride.
As he neared her beautiful presence, he grabbed Shera by the hands, wrapped his arms around her slender body, kissed her neck, and swayed the two of them left and right, dancing in a sea of calm amidst the surrounding chaos .
“You know,” said Jagz, as he caressed her stomach, “I’ve already picked out a name for him.”
“How do you know it’s going to be a boy?”
“I lost a good friend today, but I’ve got a strong feeling that he will return to us in a new form.”
“What’s the name that you have chosen?”
“Ani Rudh”
“Beautiful. What does it mean?”
“One who loves freedom, or one who cannot be controlled.”
“I love it.”
“I knew you would.”
“You know me so well.”
“I’m beginning to think that I do, more than anyone has ever known anyone in this world. Speaking of, I can only begin to imagine what the world must be going through after losing all of their connections.”
“Well, I don’t know how you did it, but right before everything went blank, your entire conver-sation with President Herd was sent around the world. How did you manage that, anyhow?”
“Ha, more and more surprises. Redd gave me something to wear in my eye, said it was for the Uncommons to find me after it was all over, but now I see what he really wanted to do.”
“Expose Mr. Herd?”
“Exactly. Show the world what they were really up against before bringing the whole damn thing to the ground.”
Official Intelligent Beings: How Our Devices Became Us, And The World Consumed Itself Page 12
