Official Intelligent Beings: How Our Devices Became Us, And The World Consumed Itself
Page 13
“Well, at least we have this wonderful music. What more do you really need?”
“I love this song,” he whispered.
“You know they say Jazz is dead?”
“Yeah, that might very well be true, but what the hell do they know?”
Afterword.
Up until writing Official Intelligent Beings I had never written a work of fiction before and I’m not really sure what drew me to write this one.
It was not much more than a month ago that I began writing Official Intelligent Beings, previously titled Jazz is Dead, and now, as I put the finishing touches on the book, I write to you from a small and peaceful apartment in Costa Rica.
These past two weeks in the jungle of Costa Rica have been some of the most intensely amazing days of my life. Making friends, dancing, playing music, sleeping in bug infested tents, doing some-thing called The Naked Truth, blindfolding and feeding people, vibrational healing, and talking with great minds about the current state of the world, while making predictions for the future.
The recent days that I have spent without much connection to the outside world and with little to no internet have been very eye opening. They may have reminded me just how dependent and addicted I have become to my devices, but they have also reminded me of just how freeing it feels to be disconnected and simply present with my own thoughts.
I have made other attempts at writing fiction before, a few short stories here and there, hundreds of notes over the years of half baked ideas that I thought were great at the time, but when I started writing Official Intelligent Beings I knew something was different.
From the moment I began typing, it was almost as if the story wrote itself, pulling from some unseen force the dialogue, the setting, the plot and the action, that you have just ingested. And while it took me many long hours of rereading and rewriting, I enjoyed every second of it.
The real challenge came not so much from writing the actual story but learning how to write a story and how to format a book. Once I realized that this was a passion project that I would be publishing myself, I did what I always do when I want to learn something new— I watch every video and read every article I can find online about the subject.
Official Intelligent Beings may have been, in part, my nod to some of my favorite books; 1984, Brave New World, Sirens of Titan, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, Siddhartha, books that have forever changed my life, but I wanted to share my own view of a possible future, mixed in with a very real present, and see what might come from that.
While I have yet to start, I have full plans of writing a follow up to Official Intelligent Beings. I want to continue the story, offering a possible outcome, and maybe even a bit of a solution, to the usually dark and open ended endings of most dystopian futuristic novels.
I want to give Jagz a chance to push the story forward, into another dimension, not just end on the whole civilization comes crashing down scenario, no, I want to find out what happens next, don't you?