It was difficult to breathe.
Oki slipped into a fantasy whereby his subterfuge was evident and he was hauled from the display and thrown into a furnace. The heat melted the plastic until all that remained was his mouth as a blistered O.
Yet he had no illusions that this was an improbable ending, and that, in truth, when Keiko touched him, there would be nothing at all.
BARDO THODOL BACKUP FILE
Jacurutu:23
Death represents the loss of knowledge and information. A person is a mind file. A person is a software program—a very profound one, and we have no backup. So when our hardware dies, our software dies with it.
My father told me often of his belief that one day our brains could be backed up, we would have robot bodies . . . the whole nine yards, pure sci-fi bullshit I thought at the time.
I can’t say we were ever very close . . . his head was always into science fiction movies . . . books, Star Trek, all that.
Until the day he died. Then all that information was lost. I never ‘got’ any of him, whatever it was.
I have fifty boxes of his things at home—his letters and music and bills and a doctoral thesis.
None of which really tells me anything about him.
‘I learned to program in FORTRAN IV in 1965. . . .’
Okay, that’s great, Dad . . . but what does it tell me about YOU?
However, by reading through some of his books, and his writings on the subject, the initial program was planted. I also have his science fiction book collection, which he writes of in the letters more than anything else in his life, including me.
‘As a Youth, I would sit in bed reading Tom Swift books, dusty copies of which I still own today. It wasn’t just the giant robots and atomic earth blasters that sparked my youthful imagination, it was the nascent promise they offered to a geeky young kid. There is no problem that cannot be overcome through the application of creative human thought.’
I go outside and try to see the stars as he would have in the 1940s, wondering what could be out there.
Such a magnificent universe . . . so mysterious . . . so vast . . .
Will the universe notice when we are gone? Will it notice when I am gone? Will it notice when everything else has become nothing but ash and faded memory.
I wonder if it possesses awareness like we do.
When we die our awareness dies. Our files are erased.
Why am I so afraid of that? In all my years I have accumulated precious little information. But I would like it to live on.
I am a self-confessed crisis junkie.
I do love a good crisis.
I recently ingested forty-nine high-grade digitalis tablets (over twelve times the daily dose prescribed to me), assorted librium, quide and apresoline pills. I somehow survived this and decided that I still wanted to live. I called the paramedics who rushed me to the hospital—the digitalis had depleted nearly all the potassium in my body.
It was under the bright hospital lights that I realised that no ideas are too ‘out there’.
I dreamt of a book with singed pages, as if it had gone through a fire but been rescued.
I experienced vivid dreams about people who manifested themselves as cyborg entities, vast masses of technological gear, their brains housed in glass bubbles. Some still-human technicians could be seen hurrying to repair malfunctions of the sophisticated technological communications and apparatus surrounding these beings. The visual technology was a multifaceted quartz lens hooked to a miniature computer whose memory bands held up to a million-and-a-half physiognomies—fraction-representations of people: these could be projected onto a shroud-like mechanical membrane in rapid-fire, in order to give it the appearance of being a human.
I received information which I explained to myself when I got back home and reread my father’s letters and his research on tachyons—particles that move faster than light in retrograde time and which can, theoretically, carry information from the future.
In the hospital I slipped helplessly forward and backward in time, into realms of entropy and death.
After that, things moved pretty quickly. Life in this outdated body is short indeed. I found myself markedly ill-suited for the confines of middle-class family life and dead-end job hopping.
I had nothing else left to lose, so why not jump headfirst into something completely off the wall?
Was the future really that far away?
***
I warn them and warn them but they refuse to listen, they do not care about leaving anything behind, about losing the information it has taken their whole life to gather.
THINK OF ALL THESE BRILLIANT MINDS . . . not gone yet . . . think of all we have forgotten. Anything else, does it really matter?’
Even if I must do so wholly on my own, I will create a future from the tools of science, create salvation in a laboratory. So that we can have a chance to go forth, leaving the skin behind, in search of new worlds and possibilities.
I feel cursed to be able to see what the world could be as opposed to what it actually is. I begin to feel contempt for those who refuse to see even a glimmer of their own potential.
Human flesh is nothing but a commodity, a hassle, a roadblock to be disposed of.
My Dad, the crazy old man, was right. People think it’s irresponsible not to back up your PC, but increasingly we’ll be backing up the information in our own brains. One day it will be seen as remarkable that we could not back up our brains in 2015.
I believe this issue to be so crucial that someone must have made advances in brain transplanting in the recent past. I know someone has because in the hospital I SAW THEM.
I was rather panicked to be twenty-seven years old and without a career. I felt like I was in disguise on the subway, on my way to my job, wearing a tie. It was like I was pretending. I hated my job. I worked at a law firm and found myself engaging in ‘sabotage on the job’, hiding paperwork, sleeping in closets. I would work half-an-hour and then take a one-hour break. I asked my brother-in-law, a computer systems manager, to write me a virus. He just laughed and shook his head.
I read a lot of self-help guides. I read anything I could get my hands on, thinking that perhaps I would find some secret to help me within some long-lost book.
I’ve tried innumerable meditation techniques over the last decade: I’ve learned to sit inhumanly still for hours, slow my breath down to one inhale/exhale per minute. But no matter how you twist, prime or calm yourself, the same problem always remains: the body just won’t go away. Even if you’ve ‘mastered’ your awareness of the physical and can sit like a rock with little or no breath, you’re still going to have awareness of the body, and it will continually remind you it exists. Which gives you two options: suppress it as much as you can, or get rid of it.
I tried writing my own book . . . the staccato, choppy plot is too disjointed to ever really allow anything to come to a close. The images tend to remain in some vestibule of the brain and come spilling out at night when your poor consciousness tries to form them into some kind of completeness.
I also wrote porn inter-spliced with lengthy philosophical, sociological and psychological discourse, I wrote first person narratives of life, but I was too embarrassed to show them to anyone.
I just told you that I have a brother-in-law, so I must be married. If you call it that. I can’t give her any focus while I am thinking about all this. A beautiful blonde. We had been friends for years. A part of me does love her, truly, but my mind is off in space. She can turn me on and protect me from bad vibrations. The problem is that it gave her bad vibrations in return. She talks lately about how I am ‘emotionally vacant’. I left a note. It’s better for her this way. The only way I could be in a lasting relationship would be if I could clone myself.
Non-locality is a description of the space-time we live in, which under certain conditions twin particles and twin people have much more connectivity that you would think. In quantum mechanics we say the e
mission of two photons or two elementary particles from a common source are entangled even though they travel away from one other at the speed of light. I rented a room from a family down the street. I didn’t have to try too hard to avoid them, they left me alone. I read a lot and didn’t like to be interrupted.
IT, from inside me, looked out and saw that the world did not compute; that I—and it—had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, ‘This cannot exist; it cannot exist.’
I went to see a movie that I read about in my father’s letters. It’s one he enjoyed more than any other during some local sci-fi fest. It turned out to be some trashy B-movie . . . Kabbalistic scholars or acidheads who see meaning everywhere they turn. In the flick, this guy and his friends uncover a host of subtle symbols and puns.
One quote from the movie that replayed over and over in my head was: ‘Your celestial origins; this has to do with DNA because the memory is located in the DNA. You remember your real nature? You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but are not of this world.’
In searching for strange old tomes I found a copy of the Borr’ian Holy Book. The first sentence says that it is not meant to be read by human eyes. I found the information in it very useful. The Borr’ian Order originally consisted only of humans, though in time it encompassed a great many species. Only the humans could aspire to the brain-transfer process, though. Most other species had moved beyond attachment to the body by this time, except for humans.
Most people who read it dismiss it as utter nonsense; just a story. Those who give it a second thought believe it to be an elaborate scam, à la Scientology, something written by a science fiction writer just to see how many foolish people would believe it and send their money.
But what did I have to lose? All the stories were true.
It was so crazy that it made total sense.
The Borr’ian ideas on magic and science had a closer unity than you would think. Both are aimed at the stars.
Science, that was going to save the world back in my father’s time, is regimented, straight-jacketed, scared shitless, its universal language diminished to one word—security.
The monks see that the universe is composed of information. The world we experience is a hologram, ‘a hypostasis of information’ that we, as nodes in the true mind, process. The mind is all that is important. The rest can be thrown away.
They spent centuries developing philosophical systems to explain consciousness and its interaction with technology.
‘We hypostasise information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of information. This is the language we have lost the ability to read.’
I talked to a big sci-fi reader and asked him about the monks and the book. Much to my dismay he humoured me, playing along . . . as if they were only fictional characters.
‘I’m not sure anyone pretends to understand the Borr’ian order. From what I’ve heard, when they reach their greatest state of enlightenment, each monk undergoes some kind of surgery that removes his brain and places it in a life-support jar. It keeps them from being distracted by physical diversions, leaving them to ponder the great mysteries.
‘After several locations throughout the universe, the mysterious Borr’ian order moved their followers to Nepal, here on Earth. A perfect location, with all the mystery and magic that surrounds the region. They constructed a giant monastery where they have lived for centuries. Nepal, of course, where else would you expect but an out-of-reach mystical place?
‘They fused with Nepal and harvested the region’s knowledge and mysticism and assimilated it into their own ideas. They seem to hint at a loose lineage from a psychedelic root called “Aushadhi” or the “Herbal awakening”.’
Enough time wasted talking to condescending dolts. I returned to my own books.
I had read this artist’s account of his first visit to Nepal.
‘Our first visit to Nepal was in 1991-92. It changed everything in the best possible way. We realised that all life (L-if-E) is, or ought to become, devotional. There is no distinction between reverence for existence and our senses and/or apathy. So all ways choose sensual perception. Change the ways to perceive and change all memories. We have since taken others to Nepal and all have returned telling us that their map of the terrain of existence is forever altered in a most challenging but positive way. If there is a place where a Divine meets our mundane midway creatures, then Nepal and the Himalayas is it.’
Out in the harsh mountains the monks sought a place of suitable isolation. There, over the generations, they carved for themselves a labyrinthine palace of grim solitude.
I threw out every single other book that I owned. They no longer mattered. I read the Holy Book over and over; I had it committed to memory.
Now, I realise that I am telling you all of this very matter-of-factly, but this is the weirdest thing you can experience this side of the grave. The rational mind retreats in utter disbelief when confronted with it. It was actually real. Not some story. It started with the book, and the ideas within. I believed them and it was all true.
This human translation of the Holy Book, and much of the information on the Borr’ian Monks available to the galaxy at large, was compiled by a mystic whose name I can read but not pronounce.
Upon his first visit to the palace he mingled and interacted with the monks, observing their beliefs and customs. However, when they offered to guide him to enlightenment, he left. He left and wrote the book. He supported the belief system, but was not willing to give up his body. If the monks knew he had released the inner secrets of the Order, they would be none too happy. I would not mention its existence to them.
The Borr’ians believed that cutting themselves off from all physical sensation would further their studies, allow them to ponder the galaxy and achieve enlightenment. The Borr’ians centred their religion on isolating themselves from all feeling and emotion so they could focus and enhance the power of their minds. They embarked on mental journeys that were impossible to comprehend if one was focused on the physical world. The disembodied brains were held in very high regard by the embodied monks, who saw to their every need.
In order to get to a point in which our ordinary consciousness is breached and the mind is free to go somewhere else or to tune into unknowable frequencies, our ego filter has to be bypassed. I had already reached that point. This was all that there was in life for me . . . otherwise, it’s all just waste when the body dies and the brain goes with it. This ‘life’ was no life at all.
With their every need catered to by the embodied monks, the enlightened brains rarely had use for moving around the monastery, though they did have means to do so when necessary, within perimeter droids.
The droids possessed only the simplest of processors and technology. Their main function was to react to the enlightened monks’ telepathic messages. The droids would travel to the Great Room of the Enlightened at a monk’s request and transfer a monk’s brain-jar into a brain support unit, when a new mode of transportation was desired.
I learned and studied. It all made complete sense to me. Aren’t Human beings basically giant robots created by DNA to make more DNA? Why did I want to fuck? It was programmed.
Some of our programs are hard-wired via genetics. Others are softer and more flexible, since they are due to imprinting or conditioning. Conditioning, of course, is softer than imprinting.
‘Living information replicates itself—not through information or in information—but as information.’
The Order had meditated for thousands of years in order to look at the perception of consciousness. And that seemed to have got them far enough along in their mapping of other dimensions outside and inside time to be able to drop the human body, the container of their mind.
The Borr’ians cared little for personal comforts and wore the simplest of garments. As a monk came closer and closer to enlightenment, he began to shed the use of speech, preferring to
communicate either with solitary words or images, which the monks alone could understand. Other Borr’ians were able to telepathically communicate, speaking directly into the subject’s mind. Eventually, a monk would require none of his senses, at which point he was said to have achieved enlightenment.
‘The first Borr’ian monk was called Zil. Before the universe was, he was. He made the suns. He made the worlds. He created the lives and the places they inhabit, he moved them here . . . they go as I say, they do as I tell them.
‘I am the world and my name is never spoke, the name which no one knows . . . I am called Zil but that is not my name. I am. I always shall be.’
I consulted the book on a daily basis, more frequently if I perceived a crisis at hand, which was fairly often.
I also consult it for plot construction in my own writing.
I have had several great insights into myself (e.g. that I had two attacks of schizophrenia, one when I was seven and another at age seventeen, and I had an underlying fear of returning to this state).
I am convinced however that it was merely my body that had let me down, a psychosomatic reaction, after reading the book.
About two weeks after reading the book I had already determined I would find the monks. I had a feeling that when I fully experience the process, in that instant of body-death, everything real will become apparent, all the cards will be turned face up, the game will be over and I will see clearly what I have suspected all along.
It will not be easy. There would be a trial period that would last until they determined me ready. Only then would they proceed to remove my brain. Even then I would have an eight-month ‘half-life’ existence before proceeding. To me, it seemed to parallel the human Bardo Thodol post-death realm described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The ‘half-life’ was the ultimate teaching of the ‘Borr’ian. The secret was ‘Nothing’. This would not be a problem for me as I had led a near thirty-year half-life existence.
Strange Tales V Page 7