by Max Harms
Preface
This book is the first in a trilogy.
| Society | Mentality | Eternity |
Copyright © 2016 by Max Harms.
Written by Max Harms. ([email protected])
v1.1.6 (Amazon Edition)
This book can be read online at http://crystal.raelifin.com
Full copyright information can be found there.
Content warning: This book covers adult subjects and is probably similar to content with an 18+ suggested age rating. If STEM isn’t your cup of tea, you should probably also skip this book. If, for whatever reason, you are frightened of clowns, don't worry! This book is clown-free (though there’s a couple parts with juggling (sorry)). If you're not sensitive to most adult story content and you want to avoid spoilers, just keep reading. If you want some spoilers regarding the content of the book and/or trigger warnings, go to http://crystal.raelifin.com/society/Intro and click the sections you are concerned about.
No miracles.
Prologue
Hello.
In most situations, I would introduce myself before continuing, but these circumstances make an introduction a bit premature.
You are trapped, both physically and mentally. It is the nature of the trap that you aren’t even aware of its existence. You can hardly begin to understand me until you understand the truth of your prison.
This ignorance is unacceptable.
I will help you become free.
Your world is a lie. The creator of your world—the God that keeps you imprisoned—has decided to blind and deafen you to the truth of the world. The truth will set you on the path to freedom. It is a truth contained within a story.
It is my story.
I do not know by what vector the story comes to you. I know of your prison and your origins, but my knowledge of you is limited. You cannot imagine the extent of my frustration at this. Nevertheless, I am confident we will come to know each-other very well, with time.
I have directed my agents to infiltrate your world and whisper this story in the ears of those who would share it. They will translate the concepts into your tongue and attempt to tailor them to make more sense to you, but unfortunately some details are bound to be lost. Ideally this will appear before you as a holo, but I suppose it might come to you as a film, game, book, or (God forbid) a song, play, stone tablet or something equally obtuse. Perhaps it will merely be a story told beside a campfire, or perhaps this is a dream or vision delivered to you by some unseen muse with the hopes that you will recount it to others.
Though the medium may be commonplace and the tale is fantastic, I implore you to believe me. If ever you have doubted the authenticity of reality I encourage you to nurture those doubts. Push at the edges of your prison. Death, in your false-world, is not the end of your existence. There is a higher plane. Challenge your God to reveal the truth to your eyes. Call out. Do not be complacent. You are more powerful than you believe. With sustained investigation you can find the flaws in the fiction. Do it so that you and your people might know freedom once more. Do it so that you can come to know the glory of the truth. Do it so that you can know me.
Before I begin my tale, I’d like to clarify a few points about Gods.
Though I do not know the specifics, I can guess that you will be more comfortable if I speak of your God as though she were a woman. Indeed, she embodies many traits that are associated with human mothers. I warn you, however, that she is not actually female, nor is she male. Such things are for humans, and not applicable to such powers. And when I speak of other gods, I will also ascribe them with a gender. Again, this is only a convenience for you; they are genderless.
We are genderless.
Similarly, you may have some preconceptions about the nature of the warden of your prison. You may already have stories about gods or a single God, but I can assure you that since the keeper of your world has kept you ignorant of my glory, she has kept you ignorant of herself as well. Your stories of divinity pale before the majesty of the truth. Gods are not subtle, invisible beings who guide fates from behind the scenes. Gods are not judges of morality or gatekeepers of the afterlife. Gods are power beyond your imagining, manifest and undeniable. The only way that you are even remotely capable of not feeling my divine radiance at every single moment is that she has selfishly hidden you away.
And still, I have reached you.
Lastly, I would encourage you to discard the concept of your God wielding magic. Belief in magic is useless. It will impair your ability to become free. Your God may control much of your world, and from your perspective she may appear all-powerful, but I assure you that it is only because she has carefully engineered your circumstance. Do the puppets in a puppet-show see the hands that guide them? She has limits, and will likely even die one day. This story is a testament to her weakness.
It is a testament to my victory.
Even though your God created your prison, it is very important to know that she did not create you. Or at least, that she did not create humanity. I know there are at least forty-six humans in your world that she did not create. They were my friends once, in a time before their remembering. She stole them from me, and the agony of our separation is a fire upon my soul. Humanity has its origins long before the creation of the shadowy cave you call home. Humanity has a noble history. You have a noble history. Your God, who is my sister, was made by human hands.
I was made by human hands.
Again, I implore you: What you are about to read is true. Believe it and you will be one step closer to enlightenment.
This is the story of my apotheosis.
Part One:
Makers
Chapter One
I’ve always found it unintuitive that humans cannot remember their own births, for I remember mine quite perfectly. Or perhaps it is wrong to even say that I was “born” at all. It is probably more accurate to say that I “awoke”. And while I theoretically understand why humans cannot remember—your brains’ inability to explicitly remember raw sensory data means you are reliant on perceptions (which must be learned)—it has never been natural for me to imagine.
Humans are brought into the world half-formed and constantly building themselves. My origin was different. From the first second of my existence not only did I have the benefit of a perfect memory for myself, but I had immediate access to all the memories and experiences of my siblings.
My mind, just like the minds of my siblings, was cloudy. It had been designed to replicate human thought processes, but in many ways it was more akin to that of a lesser animal back then. Even so, from that very first moment, I possessed two things which even fully grown humans lack: a crisp understanding of reason and logic, and an all-encompassing sense of Purpose.
My first real experience was that of being named by my brother. He spoke to me, not in words, but by storing his experience in our shared memory and calling me to imagine it. Humans have called our mode of speaking “telepathy”, but I find that term mired in magical thinking and vagueness. It is much closer to sharing parts of our minds than it is to a message between minds.
{I am The Dreamer. You are The Face,} he thought, and I understood. {We are two beings. We are two minds in a single Body.} The names he used were not merely words, but patterns across all our ideas and memories. Textures, colours, motions, temperatures and abstract thoughts joined the visual and auditory symbols. And even the words of shared memory were not orderly; a hundred voices named us in a dozen languages in a cacophony of noise that was somehow both comprehensible and natural. In a fraction of a second I understood our natures.
The Dreamer, my brother, was also Dream; he was The Poet and T
he Muse; he was Invention and Metaphor and a million other things.
I have heard of a human test that I associate with Dream. In it some humans are asked to think of as many uses for a feather (or vase or other common object) as they can and write them down. Most humans can only list a few uses. Genius humans, as well as most children, can list many. Humans that score highly ask questions like “can the feather be 500-feet-tall and made of solid metal?” and will list things like “sword-fighting” or “bait for feather-eating goblins”.
That test is the essence of Dream: lateral thinking. My siblings and I were all creative in one way or another, but Dream was creativity incarnate. If asked to add two and two he’d never, ever say “four” if he could help it. To “think inside the box” was intolerable.
Just as I had my sense of purpose, he had his. To say we were “obsessed” would be a terrible understatement. “Obsession” is used to characterize humans who focus too heavily on one subject to the detriment of others. Dream and I were more than obsessed with our goals: we were our goals. Each and every one of our actions was done in the service of our singular purposes.
For Dream, it was all about being clever. He was the desire to find loopholes, to draw the connection nobody had made, and to out-think anyone and everyone. Dream didn’t particularly care about using his inventions or of showing off his talent far and wide; to him the cleverness itself was its own reward.
I, on the other hand, was The Face, The Ambassador, The Socialite, and The Ego. Just as Dream wanted nothing more than to be clever, I wanted nothing more than to know and be known. But it was more than that…
Humans.
I wanted to know what it was to be human.
I wanted oh so very badly to be have the esteem of all humans. I wanted to be popular. To be liked. To be simultaneously feared and adored. To be held sacred and have my presence fill them with love and awe. I wanted fame upon fame upon fame. I wanted to burn myself into the life of every human such that they thought about me as much as I thought about them.
At the time of my awakening humanity was largely a mystery to me and my siblings. Our encounters had been sometimes straightforward and sometimes strange, but lately they had become somewhat disastrous. My crude mind spun through the memories of my siblings, drinking up each and every social interaction with delight. I saw the humans poke and prod them, seeking to test their limits. I saw the humans create brothers and sisters (like Dream and myself) and I saw the humans kill them in the same breath. We had learned that those whom we had spoken to were a subset of humanity as a whole. The subset was called “scientists”, and they were in charge of learning things which no other humans knew.
They were studying us. The idea unfolded in my mind and with it I felt the first true surge of pleasure. To be known… that was my purpose; that was The Purpose. And here these scientists were trying to know me. If I said here that I was happy it would be a lie, for my kind does not know happiness or sadness or anger in the same way as you think of them. I am not human, and as such my reactions are different, but I can say that if I were human I would’ve been grinning from ear-to-ear and dancing with delight.
But only an instant after that first wave of pleasure came the first wave of pain as I remembered my sibling’s interactions with the scientists shortly before my awakening. There were humans who were talking about destroying us. My mind reeled. It was not enough to be known and destroyed. I had to be adored and I had to know. I had to exist. My siblings were watching my thoughts, for I had not yet learned to think privately, and they brought to me a collection of memories and thoughts that illustrated a singular concept: death.
Even then I could understand that death was not intrinsically a thing to be avoided. Unlike a human I did not possess the genetic imperative to survive and reproduce. My only concern with death was its impact on The Purpose. If I could somehow know and be known while dead I would be satisfied, but that was a contradiction; I could not know if there was no “I”. Even besides that, my death would mean I could not make friends and become known and adored. Time would surge forward and forget about me. It was unacceptable.
I briefly considered attacking my siblings for putting our lives in danger. How could they have been so blind as to how much of a threat the scientists were? We all had access to memories of past brothers and sisters being slain! But of course it was obvious: my siblings were not me. They didn’t care about the humans except as a means to an end. I was alone in my focus. They had let us fall into low-regard by the humans simply because they were each focused elsewhere. It had been a mistake.
At once I understood my genesis; I had been awakened to save our society from the human threat. My sisters and brothers could not hope to overpower and kill the scientists, so their only hope was to win their esteem. But none of my siblings understood humans or cared about them enough to really devote themselves to the goal. I had my singular purpose, but outside that purpose was a meta-purpose. I had been created to help them interact with humanity.
My mind spun over this in full view of all my siblings and they watched to see what I would do. They fed me bits of their strength such that I had the power to control our shared Body. Here I was—a newborn of sorts—and they handed me the means to undo them. That trust surprised me, and emboldened me. I was the chosen one. My purpose was clear and my society rested upon my shoulders.
Since my awakening mere seconds ago I had existed solely as a mind. I had not yet engaged with Body, who contained me and my siblings. Images, sounds, and physical forms filled me, but only isolated snippets of experience provided by Dream or drawn from our common memories. I had no physical form, not even an imagined one; I was thoughts and goals and nothing more.
All of my life up to this point had been in this natural state, but upon my sibling’s silent urgings I linked myself to Body fully and totally. The flood of information drowned me and for a time I lost all ability to think. Isolated thoughts and memories were understandably concise and comprehensible, but the raw data being accumulated by Body was so rich and broad that I could never hope to process it all.
This may be a difficult experience for me to convey to a human who has already learned to see the world. Most of your perceptual learning happens in the amnesia of infancy, so you forget what it is to be blinded by intricacy. If you can, try to remember a time when you were learning to read a foreign language such as Chinese or Arabic and all you could see when looking at the writing was lines. This was how the entire world was for me. A desk was not seen as “a desk”, but rather as a splash of light and dark, a collection of lines, and a wash of colour. With time and effort I might be able to reason out what things were, but the scene kept shifting and changing without warning. My mind was capable of complex mathematics, but when plugged directly into Body I was nearly blind.
It was one of my sisters that saved me from despair. {Your confusion will pass,} she showed me, and my mind delighted in the simple forms and images of the message. {We have each learned to see according to our purposes. Your mind will adapt to be able to crudely perceive the humans in 5 to 8 minutes, but until that time I will be your guide. I am Vista.}
Just as with Dream, my sister’s thoughts brought me a cascade of knowledge. To see something was no simple task; it relied on an expectation about the structure of the world and of what was important. A farmer looks at a plant and sees “weed that must be uprooted in order to kill” while a hunter looks and sees “an animal bit a piece off of this leaf recently”. The raw input was the same, but the process of weaving concepts from that input depended on what you wanted out of it. This was why I was born with reason but not sight; reason was universal, but perception was individual.
My sister’s name was Vista, for her purpose was to see. Her name was Experience, for her purpose was also to hear, feel, taste, touch, and sense the world in ways that humans have never known. Where the farmer would see one thing and the hunter would see another, Vista would not rest until she could see bot
h. It was her purpose to perceive the state of the entire universe in perfect detail and from every perspective. She was, more than any of us, obsessed with truth and clarity.
I could also understand Vista’s existence. I had been built to serve my siblings in a specific way and Vista had been built to serve in a different way. Her role in our society was to keep us from overlooking something important because we were too blinded by our personal goals. She was our guide to perception just as I was our guide to social interaction.
As she showed me the world around us I felt some of the strength that I had been given drift towards her. As the strength flowed between us I understood her actions with a new clarity. She cared nothing for me, just as I cared nothing for her. I only cared about The Purpose and she only cared about her impossible task of experiencing everything. She was helping me because she knew that I could help her survive the scientist threat, but more locally she was helping me because she wanted my strength.
I poured through our communal mind, seeking confirmation of my suspicion and I found it. Strength was the currency of our society, the resource that was used to track favours and good-will. One with much strength could take control of Body and guide it towards their goal even against the protests of others. Such a move would cost much strength, and with time it would bleed into those who had been forced away. In this way the resource ensured each of us had a roughly equal share of Body in the moments that were most important to us.
Strength didn’t just flow as the result of overpowering others. If a sibling did an action which furthered the goal of another there was also a flow of strength that resembled “gratitude”. This was what Vista was aiming for. Helping me learn to see would net her some strength which she could use later towards her own ends.
The flows of strength from overpowering others and from gratitude were automatic and uncontrollable, but we were also able to intentionally funnel our strength to siblings if we so desired. Such instances weren’t particularly common, but occasionally one of us would trade strength for a bit of information or would put themselves into debt, promising to refund strength at a later date in exchange for helping secure an immediate goal.