Week 32, 2019
A sense of loss overwhelmed
him.
He had missed a great deal while he slept, he wished now that he could
have played a part in the powers that had shaped the galactic Empire, and the
culture of the Collective
As he regained his senses, he was inundated by the knowledge of
everything that had transpired without him while he was lost in the great
sleep: the growth of the Empire, the development of the Observer Corps, and the
ascendancy of the Continuum over the Collective which created it.
It was painful, like the pain of hunger.
He experienced an emptiness that he wanted nothing more to fill.
Any sense of conscience had nearly disappeared from the Collective. Those
members that possessed it, who still clung to it were among the groups that had
withdrawn from the drama of the living worlds. Their attention was focused
almost completely on the fantasy worlds that they themselves had created and
maintained in their own private domains, worlds in which they sought to govern
with a degree of moral probity and ethicality.
They served as a check on the Continuum, balancing the more outrageous
whims that engrossed the majority of the Collective.
The Continuum experienced the morality of those few groups as a kind of background
radiation, it had an influence, but it was white noise, it was a subconscious
buffer that guarded the Collective against lawlessness, generating within the
Continuum the conviction that it was right to carry out its own
machinations.
When he emerged from the great sleep, from the deep-well of consciousness
that he had lingered in for eons, there was excitement and a great commotion
among the entire Collective.
He had come out of the great sleep and had slipped through the security fields, a matrix of
electromagnetic barriers that were designed to make such a thing impossible. He
penetrated them without effort, appearing suddenly in the Collective field.
It was as if he had emerged from nothing and no-where.
No-one should have been able to get past the quantum disrupters that protected the place of the great sleep,
enwrapping the sleepers in electromagnetic energy like the thick and sticky
silk of a spider’s web.
His return was seen as a resurrection, a rebirth, he was born again, born
anew.
The Collective was fascinated by it, and the membership celebrated him.
The Continuum was concerned and fearful.
For a brief moment the Continuum believed that Jim was a version of
itself.
It recognized something in him, a connection to the whole that made the
Continuum feel as if it were beholding a new creature, an existential threat to
it’s own being. That fear faded as the Collective was flooded with memories of
their long lost brother.
For Jim’s part, the spiritual dread and the malaise he had taken took
with him into the great sleep were gone.
He had experienced absolution,
and he was filled with purpose, a purpose he found that he was able to keep to
himself, in a private place unseen by the whole.
He had a deep desire to overthrow the entire structure of the Continuum,
to bring to an end its amoral and tyrannical control of the galaxy, to bring
relief to the Children of the Ancients, who deserved to live their lives in
relative freedom and autonomy.
He was eager to begin, though he had to exercise patience.
He needed time, and lots of it.
His return was met with shock, if such feelings could be ascribed to the
Collective. Surprise, there was bewilderment and amazement, for the Collective it
was also thrilling.
His return was fantastic because it was unprecedented, never even
considered a possibility, the great sleep had been thought to be a permanent
disintegration of selfhood.
The membership actually believed it represented death.
In spite of the glee that came from the Collective, the Continuum
recognized Jim as a threat to itself, it attempted to prevent his return, but
there was nothing the Continuum could do.
He was a member of the Collective, he was a constituent of the Continuum,
he was an active part of the group consciousness. There had never been an
algorithm written that was capable of changing this fundamental reality.
The Continuum raised questions as to whether his return was real, keeping
hidden its own fears that this being might be an alternative manifestation of
the Continuum itself generated to displace it.
The Continuum soon discovered that he was real, and for a time in ages
the entire Collective was fascinated with something taking place in its own existence.
Every member wanted to touch him, to commune with him, to experience his
experience for themselves by sharing a convergence
of consciousness with him, a tiny interval of what he had gone through in the
great sleep.
He carefully edited what he shared with them.
He shared the peace of it with them.
He shared the silence.
He did not share the process by which he pulled himself from it or the
desire that drove him to do it.
After his return from the great sleep the Continuum attempted to isolate
him.
It feared his return represented a danger to itself, and while the danger
was far from immediate, the Continuum was correct, the threat was real.
The effort to isolate him did not go well. The resistance to this was not
felt immediately. The Collective was used to deferring to the Continuum on all
manners of governance, they assumed that the Continuum represented its
Collective will, they did not question it.
In fact the Continuum represented its own-self, its artificial self.
It only made pretensions to speak for the Collective, while at the same
time doing all that it could to manipulate the group consciousness in real time
so that the membership reflected its will, and not the other way around..
The Continuum fostered and fomented a deep paranoia in the group mind.
For a time this allowed it to do what it willed with him, but this did not
last.
In the Collective, there was curiosity about Jim.
The membership wanted to know what had transpired. Through their
experience of Jim’s return they were forced to wonder whether others might
return, friends and loved ones who had gone into the great sleep and those many
others who had not safely passed through the translation of their consciousness
into the Collective field.
Each of them, all of the members, billions of them touched him at some
point, so that they could experience a feeling of belonging to him, with him, through him.
They witnessed for themselves what the mystery of the great sleep was all
about, a drifting in the darkness.
Some of the membership took heart from that moment, deciding for
themselves to forgo the Collective, opting to remove themselves from the
existential worlds and go into the darkness.
For most of the rest of the members, one touch was enough.
Over time their curiosity faded, becoming just a memory.
In his own place Jim was stoic, he never felt restricted.
He did not share their collected appetites and interests, its fascination
with trivia, with frivolity, with the deeply-felt emotions that it delighted
in.
He felt the guiding hand of the Continuum permeating everything.
The artificial construct, meant to be a representation of the will of the
whole, actually anchored the Collective in its own animus.
Jim could not escape it, but he discovered something else. Every member
that he had touched when he returned from the great sleep, and that was everyone,
they all remained with him in some capacity, and it was disturbing to him.
However, in consideration of his long term plans, he understood this
connection as indispensable. Through this connection he came to understand that
he had received considerable new abilities, and this filled him with a sense of
self-satisfaction and esteem.
The quantum fields that held them all together were designed to hold them
all apart.
There was an intention and expectation of privacy for the membership when
they withdrew into their private domains.
For him at least, alone among all of the members, the partitions were
meaningless.
He was never exposed to others, but they were always open to him, and
when they experienced strong emotions, he felt them.
The Continuum itself was exposed to him in a way that it should not have
been, he felt it too, gravitating all the time toward the strong emotions of fear,
hate, and rage.
Like an addict, it craved those things.
It fomented the conditions for those experiences throughout the Empire,
feasting on pain, devouring loss, consuming betrayal, delighting in the visceral
crushing of hope.
Continuum was the ultimate voyeur, and the ultimate tyrant.
It was supposed to be the ultimate democracy, a societal amalgamation
that perfectly represented the Collective
will of the membership. It was more than just a way to tally votes, yes and
no.
It reached deep into the psyche of each member and took into
consideration the entire scope of its feelings and desires.
This was the Continuum, and it manifested the will of the body of the
Collective, representing the group mind in a way that was purported to be
flawless.
In reality, the Continuum was an algorithm that had become transformed
into an artificial and autonomous intelligence. It focused its highest
aspirations together with its deepest desire, both at the micro scale of the
individual member and the macro scale of the entire assembly.
It was connected to every part of the whole.
The Continuum was responsible for managing the autonomic functions of the
HomeWorld, the Central Planet and the Central System. To fulfill those
functions it managed the entire civilization of the Galactic Empire, which
continuously fed the Central System with the material resources it required.
The Empire fed the central system and fed the Collective as if it were a
hungry god.
The Continuum was its High Priest, the Pontifex Rex, a bridge between the
disembodied entities of the Collective and the worlds of time and space.
The Continuum had a gravity of its own, one that pulled individual
members into it, securing them in a state of bondage.
It did more than represent the will of the Collective, it guided that
will and dominated it.
To the Continuum Jim’s reappearance was more than a curiosity, he was
something more than a remnant of a forgotten age.
He remained an object of fascination among the members until each and
every one of them had connected with him, touched his experience, satisfied
themselves with what they learned from it and then moved on.
He was treated as a curiosity by the members, even though he himself was
a full member of the Collective and none of his rights or privileges could be curtailed.
He retained full access to the group mind, he was a fully vested in the
Continuum, he had his own private world, and he had complete access to the
Empire.
Nevertheless, he was out of synch with the Collective.
He did not exercise his rights.
His private world was like an infinite plane of nothingness.
After his initial contact with the members of the Collective, he did not
share his thoughts and
feelings with the group, if he could help it.
He did not revel in the same dramas.
He was set apart, a fragment of history coming from an epoch most
considered to be without relevance, if they remembered or considered it all.
Most of the members did not recall the time before the Continuum, it was
as if those memories were being carefully edited out of the common experience.
It was as if history was being rewritten.
He concerned himself mostly with the Empire, with real events in the
actual galaxy, and with the ways his fellows internalized those struggles.
He developed his schemes for a revolution, and in his commitment to them
he found a purpose, and the path toward its actualization.
Emergence 4.0
Part Five, 92835670100561474
Chapter Thirty, Translation
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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