“And that is?”
“That each society, or organism, or system, is responsible to itself. This gets to the cellular level, from a societal perspective.”
“What are you saying? That each of my cells is responsible to itself, for itself?”
“I am saying you are responsible for you and the larger organism. When you were lying helpless in your hospital bed, you were considerably less responsible, at least for any of your conscious self, and others took responsibility for you. Why did they do that? Their jobs? No, it’s because you were a part of their organism. They had norms they followed. Standards of behavior. Some of those norms may have been codified into laws, but that it less typical. To have lost you would have been to have lost a certain part of their being, their society. They were adhering to the rule of consideration, of caring, of taking care of the larger organism.”
“Why the hell doesn’t this damn organism extend beyond humans and why couldn’t you include us with you?”
“For the reasons I just said. I know it is not yet clear to you, though we have, you have, a lot of time to think about it.”
“It’s not fair, not at all, and I’m gonna catch you on this one. I’m gonna catch you. I know it. What you are suggesting is that people adhere to each other because of the sameness, and they don’t care for each other if they’re different. Right? Talk about prejudice!”
“Back to sense, Margot, back to basic tenets. Think of your human races. Did it pain you to see a black child suffering?”
“Yes, of course.”
“A white child?”
“Sure. What does that prove? It pained me to see anything suffering. Like dogs for instance.”
“But were dogs a part of your society?”
“They were of mine, I know that. I got a lot more love and affection from my dog than I ever did from most humans.”
“We are deviating here. I am saying that, regardless of color or race or religion, a suffering human for you diminished the whole human race, would you agree?”
Margot thought for a second. “Sure, sure it diminished the race. But you let it diminish to nothing, wouldn’t you agree?”
“No. You let it diminish to nothing.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you, individually. You, who said it was too much trouble to take the effort, the work, to determine if proper controls were being placed on genetic altering, or even if it should occur at all. You, individually, who relinquished the need for consideration, for courtesy, when you let the driver tailgate you. You, who sped through the television channels and only momentarily looked at the starving children on the news. Yes. I can see your mind. The little part that you played, the knowledge that you could have focused on a problem and have been a part of the solution.”
“I can’t believe you mentioned starving children.”
“The picture was in your mind. I simply saw it there and used it as an example.”
“What the hell could I have done for them?”
“Did you try anything? Was it enough of an issue for you to spend more than three seconds of a television click on? Did something eat way inside of you as you chose to ignore it the first time? Did the gnawing eventually diminish after you had seen it the fifth time, the tenth time, the hundredth time? Could you explain it away that at some point, maybe the first instance, you gave the issue some thought and decided not to do anything about it right then, so by the hundredth time it was nothing more than a false plea, or even an annoyance? Did you explain it away that the people asking for money were rip-offs, and that because of that possibility you’d never contribute, even though the cause and need were there regardless? Did you over-adapt?”
Margot shook her head nervously. Surely this was true, but why was she responsible for all the world’s ills? She didn’t create them, she was simply put there on earth, as it was. She didn’t ask for any of the problems, and no way in hell would she have ever wanted people to have problems, but they did. She had her small share as well. It wasn’t her responsibility to fix the world. She fixed her own problems, that’s what she was responsible for. Everyone else should have fixed their own, too. But they didn’t, and so it was their fault, like the scientists who didn’t put the proper controls on genetic testing. “I’m not, or I wasn’t, responsible for every damn human, not for their actions or problems.”
“What you are responsible for individually and collectively,” Isda interjected, “is defining the rules and norms and strict measures of adherence. The rules are too few, and it’s simply easier to mire them in the complexity of the society or technology. Wallowing in the mire of where to draw the line allows you to deviate and bend. As I said, the mark of the few societies that survived beyond this point is that they clearly defined and never deviated from the rules.”
“But I’m wasn’t responsible to make people think in a certain way.”
“No, you were not. Thinking is individual. The behavior, the consideration, that’s another thing. That is a thing of society, the organism as a whole.”
“But I am not responsible for their behavior!”
“You are! You are responsible for your own, obviously. You are responsible for seeing that others’ behavior adheres to the few rules.”
“Jesus! We couldn’t all be cops and carry around guns to shoot people when they did something wrong! People do bad things out of fear, or need, or jealousy, or desire, like stealing or killing or drugs. Were we supposed to shoot every criminal?”
“Your society is defined by your rules. Your organism’s viability depended upon strict adherence to those rules.”
“No, no, no. You’re simplifying too much. If you’re hungry and you steal a loaf of bread, should you get thrown off the island?”
“You decide. Your society decides. What you are trying to force here is the issue of tolerance. How many times would you tolerate the same person stealing a loaf of bread? Go back to the first. Why does the person steal it? Pure hunger, driven from lack of a paying job? If he had a job, are all monies going to support a drug habit? These are huge, tedious tentacles, with multiple offshoots. Complexity arises. How many times? What is his past criminal history? What were his social circumstances as a boy? And guess what? If you have reached this stage, where the many are unaware or unconcerned of the consequences of not following the rules, your society is already over the edge with virtually no hope. In fact, the only societies that have survived were those that enforced strict adherence to the rules, far prior to any great need arising for the rules to be enforced and codified into law. In this regard, earth was beyond the precipice.”
Margot replied, “You just can’t make everyone be nice and considerate. You can’t force them, that’s mind control. People are individuals, that’s their human right to be and do what they want, and some people are simply born without good behaviors. You must not be familiar with nature versus nurture. Sometimes, nature simply creates bad things. Society tried to handle these misfits with laws. Society enforces its morality through laws.”
“The morality that allowed you to pull together from the days in your caves, despite the difficult circumstances, falls apart as the society feeds on its successes and advancements. The inertia and acceleration is too great. Somewhere along the continuum of technological advancement, such as medicines that allow greater population growth, or methods to build shelter and housing faster, or better ways to purify water for consumption, somewhere along the way the individual’s vision is obscured by the things of creation, by the overload of information, and the few norms and values get obscured and buried. Normalized. Your internet was a classic case. All things were possible with the information it provided. It’s just that almost all things that were possible were apparently happening, and it only took one of those things to advance your civilization’s demise. Margot, these are natural systems. Nearly everything that is a system grows, dies, and is then reborn in some way. This, too, may happen to the Das. The gift of reverence to these values is
that we don’t die too soon. In fact, the gift may be immortality, but even that is never known.” Isda placed his wing on his head and rubbed the area that was dented. “And even with immortality, there is a possibility the organism may survive but a few individuals may die.”
This is too much! He is implying that I was responsible for the other humans, for their behavior, as if it was my earth, as if I ruled over them. I sure as hell couldn’t have enforced any values on them. I mean, what the hell would have happened if someone tried to force their values on me? I’d tell them to go to hell, or I’d get back at them in some way. This stuff is pure, unadulterated bullshit. I wonder why he’s taking all the effort to talk to me about this? What’s his motive?
“Margot, you don’t understand. These are values of the universe, of systems that don’t decline, of immortal systems. They aren’t complex, and they aren’t difficult. If they become that, you know you’ve moved off-center. You will find that in space and time there are very, very few absolutes for living systems to succeed in the long-term.”
“Look, bug,” she said, her mind growing weary by the preaching, “this continued tirade gets us nowhere. Talking about my dead planet and how you guys are so great that you’ve survived, when billions have died. Well, who gives a flying ‘F’? I don’t see where any of this talk has helped you with your Wall problem, and it sure hasn’t helped me because there’s nothing I can do about the fact that earth is dead. So where did this get us?”
“Well, Margot,” Isda replied, “it may have helped you. I’m not exactly sure why I had to tell you all of this, maybe it is just my hope that once in one occurrence, after searching through these galaxies for millions and millions of years, I could discover another society that was like ours, or the other three. Even better, if we were proven right that the next one follows the same system of beliefs. It’s a need for verification. Every Das has this feeling. You see, outside of our success as a species, the trillions of Das that exist in the universe have never had any indications, of an external nature, that we are right about the beliefs I just discussed. Nor have the other three.”
“What are you meaning by ‘external nature’?”
“Your earth had prophets like Jesus. Jesus, as told in your Bible, was God that visited your planet, taking material form. Our only form, if you can call it that, is our values. The belief that what we feel is right, instinctively, is indeed right. It is not a physical thing, recorded in mystical ancient scriptures. It is an idea, a way of living. It’s a way we think that God speaks to us, though no Das has ever claimed to have heard a word spoken. It’s a feeling. Every Das hopes for some verification – are we right, or are we wrong? If we are wrong, how come it feels right? Why are we so successful? Why does success ensure that God does not come to us?”
“I don’t understand what you mean by that, but at this late stage, I’m growing weary of trying.”
“Apologies, Margot. Just a few more minutes. I haven’t told you this. None of these four societies that have extended themselves out into the universe have ever witnessed God in a material form. This appears to happen in many instances, but we arrive too late to the planets and their societies. It is due to this vastness of space and near requirement that a society uses some form of radio communications technology before we can notice their existence. This is what makes it so difficult.”
“You arrive too late?”
“The general trend is exactly like what has happened on your earth. Somewhere at the very edge of change in a society, at the crest or turning point of a society’s emergence into technology and the resulting problems it brings, the societies are often visited by what they consider to be God in material or similar form. This being provides them a path, a reminder of the fact that it is the few rules, and not the laws, that should be the society’s focus.”
“But that’s not when it happened on earth! Technology didn’t really come to earth until almost a few thousand years after Jesus.”
“What were a few hundred or a few thousand years to your long period of development from the ancestral ape lineage? It was an eye blink, as you might say. At the point your Jesus came to earth, it may have been early enough for your society to focus on the few values, the basic tenets of kind treatment and consideration for each other. It was far enough away from mass production, rapid economic and information development, the focus on things versus values, for it to be effective. Well, obviously, it wasn’t effective. Maybe for some individuals, but not for the organism or society as a whole.”
“Are you saying Jesus visits every other inhabited planet?”
“We believe it is too recurrent to be only a coincidence. It is oddly inconsistent with the Das belief that ‘God simply is’ for God to congeal into space and time and communicate this same message. Sometimes, the message is delivered multiple times. We don’t know how it happens and trust me, we’ve looked at it in every aspect. The embodiment is always different, but the message is the same. The warnings are the same. Initially, we thought these events or visitations might somehow contribute to societal failure. But when we looked beyond the surface and viewed our respective histories, we feel it is because we ingrained these rules and norms into our very beings prior to our own time of technological advancement that the same did not happen to us. Put simply, we did not need it. We followed God’s values before we got too far along.”
“I mean, really, Jesus has come to every inhabited planet? Nonsense.”
“Look at your Viewing room. I know that you have reviewed a few societies’ histories at least to the point of cataclysm. The name was not Jesus, the being was not human, but the message was the same. Go look for yourself. And earth, well, it had multiple chances at that, with multiple prophets along the way – although the rules and norms often got corrupted by those who wanted to wield power and engender gain from them.”
Isda’s last few words fell into a hole as Margot’s eyes closed, and a horrible weight began to press upon her body. She felt she was sinking into the ground, past the brown roughness of the floor, into the rock beneath, the gray rock of the planet encircling her and closing in upon her, its gravity pressing even harder at her chest and legs.
We failed? We failed? We failed the test? We didn’t know it was a test. We didn’t know it. Honestly, the words of the prophets, fire and brimstone, how could you believe that if you lived in the age of the internet? In fact, how could you believe much at all, given all the doubt instilled in you by the historians who were bringing to light the dark histories of Christianity and almost all other religions? The oppression of nonbelievers, the desire for control through conformity, the scholars who said that Jesus may have said only fifteen percent of what was attributed to him? So hard to believe, despite wanting to. Far too many pointers and reminders of the bastardization of it all. The TV preachers who enriched themselves in the name of God. Those who perennially used religion as their vehicle of oppression, control, subjugation, self-absorption, sexual gratification, self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment. Entitlement – oh, this entitlement that allowed us to judge others, conveniently forgetting the words of Jesus. Forgiveness? Tolerance? Never. Judgment? Always. Stick to the easy, the convenient, the expedient. Judgement of others was always expedient. Sick of it, sick of how we obscured the little bit of good in religions with so much evil. This weight, this weight, I’m sinking, agonizingly, to the core of this rock. My God, I am the remnant of a race that failed the morality test, the test of goodness for each other. We were but a cancer that needed to be ‘sloughed off’, good cells with the bad, no accounting for individual goodness there, not even, because Joey was good, Mom was good, Dad was good. Even me. I was pretty good. I am this remaining oddity in a misfit race of beings that did not deserve to live. If it is dead, if the organism is dead, am I dead too?
“Why should I be saved if God intended for us all to die?” she uttered.
“God intended?” Isda broke Margot from her stupor. “God provided you with a brain, a t
hinking, capable mind, each of you, all of you. He provided you with instinctive knowledge of good and bad, right and wrong. Then, as a last hope, he apparently sent you himself in some form or forms to reinforce what you already knew. You had all capacities and capabilities at your hands, nearly all known science. You had discovered nearly everything there was to discover. You were on the verge of stopping aging and all disease. You could have made all things good for all beings on your planet. You could have fed and educated the hungry and poor. You could have saved your planet from the paths of its catastrophic cataclysms and ecological disasters. You could have used what you knew for good, exclusively for good, but you, as sentient beings, chose not to. Your competitiveness trumped your compassion.”
Margot looked up at him with droopy eyes, barely sifting through his last few words.
The chair is sinking with me. It must be. The Wall is enshrouding me. I don’t see Isda. He has faded away. It is just me and the Wall, me and this brown sandpaper bag. I’m removed, removed from his words. I’m now floating in this planet, its massive gravity still bearing on my chest. I am removed from Isda. He’s no longer with me. I don’t have to listen to his words. They are inconsequential. I am the last of a kind. I am the lone bearer of human fault, but without fault. I am an anomaly. I am a dead race of swollen bodies, burned from lying in the sun, weathered and shrunken skin, a sickness we created having consumed us. What could I have done? What consequence could I have possibly made on all of this?
This earth was not my earth. I didn’t own it. It was the governments’ own. It was the wealthy’s own. My Mom and Dad only owned a small piece of it, a half-acre, and even then the bank owned most of that. This was not my earth. If it was, it was a hugely shared responsibility. I was just a very small cog, of seven billion, in the wheel. Some were bigger cogs, they had more impact. Politicians, the Pope, billionaires, they knew more, they got ahead, by whatever means, but they made the decisions. They wielded the power to do. They were more responsible for this. It wasn’t me that gave them the power, it was someone else, or the institutions that were created not by me. I had no control over science. Accounting was my area. I controlled my own little world, and I controlled it pretty well. I was nice to people. I did a good job at work. I wasn’t vengeful, at least not outwardly. I may have thought some bad things, but I never did them. And why would fate not take me? Why not take us all at once? I am here to bear your horrible weight, humanity, the one you stuck on me because of your own stupidity, your own ignorance. If what Isda said was true, at least in some part, it was you assholes who did it to us. First, it was nuclear devastation. That was so obvious. So obvious. Everyone could see its destructive power. But nobody knew of the insidiousness of what you did with my genetics, with the world’s genetics. Modifying viruses! How easy was it to do? Any fifth grader could go out and do it. Create and test, create and test, see what zombie Frankenstein could result.
The Space Between Her Thoughts (The Space in Time Book 1) Page 23