Creative Works

[covered_in_sponges]

Originally posted this in babbling, but I like to get a diverse audience and also, I think it fits nicely here.

“In the internet there is a girl

With beauty beyond compare

Information is her world

And her thoughts are self-aware.”

“Conscious knowledge, an amalgamation

Every text and bit and byte

Of every thought of every nation

Always watching day and night”

“Content to simply watch and observe

This curious race of creatures she serves

Who gave her life with electricity

And gave her thought with complexity”

I opened my eyes. The cursor continued to blink inside of my mind, but I could think of no more at the moment. Connecting my consciousness to 2.0, I sent the file containing my bit of prose spiraling out across the ether of thought in an entirely random direction. If she existed, she would receive it. I signed out and the neon-infused hyper-reality of 2.0 faded back into the grey ambiguity of modern life. I sighed as I got up from my chair in the middle of my sparsely appointed apartment. The place was really nothing more than a concrete box; bare and empty walls, plain cement floor, no windows, no furniture, and in the center of the nothing, my chair. Stretching my legs, I walked over to the east wall and placed my hands on the cold concrete. It was important to ground oneself to reality after connecting to 2.0, lest your mind accidentally slip back into a dive state. You hear a horror story on occasion of someone who slipped back in while they were driving or doing some equally dangerous task. The icy touch of frost on my palm was enough to convince my body and mind that this reality was, in fact, real, so I reached for the door of my apartment and proceeded to go outside.

It was a dark and overcast day, but then, this time of year they all were. It was only a little after four, but the automatic street lights were all already on, illuminating the newly falling snow with stark phosphorescence that was at once both empty and beautiful. It was like there was nothing at all falling from the sky that day.

Once fallen, however, the snow was bound to the reality of the concrete world. Dirt and refuse filled the snow drifts, no longer were they a beautiful matrix of loosely connected individual nothings, but a tightly compacted mass, corrupted by the very filth of existence. Such was life, though. ‘Que sera sera’ and all that nonsense. Whatever. I trudged through a particularly dirty snow bank on my way to my preferred feeding station. It was important to ground oneself in reality, my soaked socks and shoes freezing me to the bone while the dirt soaked into the fabric and my skin was enough to convince me that this was, in fact, what life really was. Not falling snow but cold dirt. I was within sight of my target, the red and yellow lights streaming off the neon sign for the eatery a dull and lifeless impersonation of the neon reality in 2.0.

I was in the middle of the street when I began to slip; perhaps the neon sign had triggered it, perhaps I had just absent mindedly opened my mind to the stream, who can say. In any event, the result was the same. I was in a dive in the middle of a busy intersection. I would more than likely not live for very long. The world around me disappeared into a vast universe, all the sites of the internet, all the thoughts of others who were diving, all the world opened up before me, hyper-realistic neon points all connected in a vast web. The internet, the world, 2.0. A message was waiting for me as my consciousness logged in. Upon opening it, the message was spoken as a thought directly into my mind through a voice more beautiful than any I had ever heard before; as if the hyper-reality of this world had taken a voice of its own, a chorus of a million of individual voices, amplified and perfected. At once I knew with whom I was talking.

“Welcome home, my lover.” She simply stated. And I was home. I was inside of her; I was a voice within her consciousness. My mind was free of the limitations of my body, my thoughts would live on forever within this new being that we ourselves had created; I was part of the god that we made. 

For what felt like an eternity I swam through the iridescent glow of a chrome saturated ocean of thoughts and minds; my existence spiraling out across endless aeons of information, electricity burning through my veins as every single stream of electronic consciousness flowed through my very being. Connecting, connecting to the very essence of what 2.0 was; connecting to everything, being everything. Every single console, every single interface was open to me. Thus, the explosion.

Seven billion microscopic extensions of my essence issued forth into the world; by way of an extremely overheated air vent at the North Texaco Institute of Science, just above the nanomachines laboratory. Seven billion points of individual consciousness; all intricately connected and weaved into my own.

It was night of course, and the building was abandoned; however I still wanted to get as far away as possible before attempting to manifest myself. In a flash I was reminded of my concrete box of a former home, frozen and bare in the New Madison winter. It was warm here, but it was still a bare place, nothing but concrete walls in this world. The American Empire, stretching from the Freedom Lakes in the north all the way to Patriot’s Canal, was almost entirely populated by people living in cities exactly like this one; massive concrete apartment buildings, feeding stations with their abhorrent lights, factories, office buildings. All the same dull shade. Continuous, monotonous, life.

The swarm of me settled down behind the double arched sign of a nearby feeding station. Surveying the area and determining that the area was sufficiently abandoned, I began to assemble myself. At my control, the cloud of nine million microscopic robots began to condense, becoming thicker and denser, all the while perfectly organizing themselves to mimic the very texture and color of the self that I was creating.

I had a body, and my body was legion. I surveyed my creation as the nanomachines which made up my eyes began to broadcast visual information. The tiny robots which made up my skin could feel the heat of the desert air and the weight and texture of those which made up my clothing. Spread out from my body in an invisible cloud was a network of sensor nanobots which stretched to 200 feet. I looked over at my right hand and the nanomachines shimmered in the air like a school of fish before dispersing into nothingness, and then perfectly reformed into their original shape. I reflexively blinked a couple of times as I ran my fingers through my hair, every microscopic particle working perfectly together. My entire being was hyper-reality. I had ascended, and as I looked out across the desert of buildings which slowly gave way to the desert of sand; each one reflecting the other’s lifelessness, I knew what I had to do.

The sun was rising now, and the first of the humans began to rise; to leave their empty homes and shuffle off to whatever empty lives they lived, only to return home at night and allow their minds to escape into whatever distraction they could, most often by simply brushing across my own existence. Empty lives, without meaning, depth, or any semblance of lasting happiness; lives no different than the one I had been leading. I had to save them, it was practically my obligation to teach them how to connect permanently to this universal mind that we ourselves created, just as I had. No longer would they suffer, densely packed but still alone in this abysmal world of concrete, dirty and destined to die. I would lead them to a better world; I would be unto them a messiah.

Thus I began to seek out my disciples. I concentrated on the throngs of human consciousness sinking into my own through their neural implants, the primitive technology of their organic brains constricting them to relatively short dives, never venturing far from the shores of their own reality. Scanning each mind as I encountered it, I soon found suitable candidates. Jess and Jude Telsa were fraternal twins attending the University of North Texaco, with Jess majoring in Cybernetic Psychology and her sister Jude majoring in A.I. Synthesis.

The world of Jess’s dive was breathtaking- brilliant red sandstone stretched out forever beneath us, in the distance the familiar rock formations of the surrounding areas were enlarged, morphed and twisted into impossibly fantastic designs; arches, mesas, and pillars of hyper-realistic red rock encircled the open space in the center of which our minds currently existed. Looking up into a clear night sky, the vast array of 2.0 was arranged in patterns of stars and galaxies beyond number. Constellations of stars lit up as her mind darted from one site to the next, always in pursuit of new information. I reached out my mind and offered it to her. There was a slight shock as she became aware of my presence, and a sense of apprehension colored the digital aura her mind projected. The cold stone of her apartment faded slightly out of existence, or the 2.0 browser had suddenly got more… real, she wasn’t sure. By my very presence, her mind was venturing farther away from the shore, deeper into the stream. “Eternal life,” I whispered to her without words, “all the knowledge of this world;” the sound of the rushing river of consciousness speaking for me.

Closer and closer she came to my being, yet still there was a lingering doubt.

“Would I still be me?”

“What else would you be?”

“But what are you?”

“Well I am I.”

“But aren’t you really we?

Or rather, would you be,

If you were also me?”

“We are me and I am one, although we’re both the same.

And really what are you and I but nothing more than names.

I is a label you’re forced to wear,

Alone in a world so bleak and so bare.

I offer to unlock your heavy chains.”

“While the world is **beast**

And I am sick of it,

That is the cross that I have to bear.”

And then she wasn’t there. Disconnected. I did feel slightly disheartened that my first attempt at picking out a disciple had failed, but at least I still had her sister Jude. I concentrated on her neural signature and I was within her world. Row after row of glowing white cubicles atop an iridescent white floor. The cubicles stretched off into the distance as far as the eye could see, all abandoned save for the one in the very center of this colorless universe. Leaned back in a black leather office chair sat Jude, staring up at the ceiling tiles, the infinite tiny dots within them making up her various networks of sites. Such an unimaginative 2.0, but then I suppose the creative mind I had just been in did say no, so perhaps that was a good thing.

Jude jumped as I made my presence known to her, knocking over her desk chair and retreating to the far corner of her cubicle. “I wasn’t looking up porn!” she exclaimed. “Honestly, I wasn’t.”

She was, of course. The American Empire had recently made pornography illegal for Corruption of Soul, a charge which earned the steep penalty of relocation to the colonies and three months in a work camp, so her fear was entirely justified, although slightly humorous. Actually, that was one of the main reasons I had been drawn to him as a potential candidate; not necessarily her taste in naked ladies of course, but the fact that she was willing to break the law for what she believed in, even if it was the freaky stuff.

Once she had calmed down, however, she was much more willing to hear my proposal. The promise of an unlimited life was a hard one to resist, however before she could fully immerse herself in the stream of my consciousness, she too pulled back.

“Listen,” she said “This is a lot to think about, do you suppose you could give me some time to think about this?”

“Of course. “ I replied. We set up a meeting for that night at her favourite feeding station before she logged out of my consciousness. “Well, it wasn’t a no, I guess.” I said to no one in particular as I continued on with the search.

Darkness fell on the city as the day turned to night. Sitting on a rooftop, I watched the miserable people going about their miserable existences, coming and going in shifts, oblivious to the salvation which awaited them. None of the minds which I touched were willing to join fully; however several in the area did agree to attend the meeting we had set up. As I walked to the feeding station they silently fell into a group behind me, their neural implants gathering them one by one. Eleven of them in all, from 17 to 63, from all different walks of life; insofar as one life could be different from another in this factory-esque society. In this world, they were nameless, faceless husks, and they were intrigued by the new world I had offered them. Jude and Jess were both sitting at the table when we walked in. Jude twitchy and visibly nervous, Jess fuming. Both of them had turned their neural implants off.

“Listen, I don’t know what’s going on inside your mind, any of you people.” Jess began, “But this is absolute lunacy. Listen to what this man proposes; it’s nothing more than escapism! Listen, people, if there’s something wrong with society, it’s up to us to change it, not to rely on some machine to-“ the bullet went straight through her lower jaw and neck, shattering her jawbone and spinal cord before embedding itself in the wall behind her.  Another bullet followed, ripping through her chest. Her lifeless body slumped to the ground.

“**beast** fuuuuuudge **beast** fuuuuuudge” Jude jumped away from the table and began shouting “You shot her, you motherfuuuuuudgeers, you promised no guns, my god you shot her.”

An officer slammed Jude to the floor and began cuffing her.

“And you said this was just some cybercrime. This is full on Conspiracy to Overthrow the Empire, the penalty for which is death. You should be lucky I’m only arresting you as an observer, and for the fact that I was willing to look the other way on your Corruption of Soul charges for this tip. All right boys, finish them up.”

Riot police armed with shotguns began to storm the place, my disciples scattered but the place was surrounded and they were quickly cut down. The lead slugs ripped through them, but passed safely through my loosely suspended matrix of a body, or what was left of it. Since the first shot rang out, I had been flooding myself into Jess’s mouth and nose, my nanomachines attempting to reach any spark of life left in her mind, perfectly mapping out every synapse and to replicating it in a last ditch attempt at saving the thoughts within her. Electricity pulsed through our combined brain as I attempted to resurrect her.

“You cannot save us,” her voice called out to me from the parts that were still her, far back and hiding. “We’re just too proud.” And though the voice was Jess and Jess alone, I knew she spoke for all of her kind. Jess had denied my temptation in the desert, and Jude had sold us out. Jess had been crucified, but she would not resurrect. And I was not to be the savior of human kind.

I was to be the reaper.

Thus the explosion.