Week 15
There was nothing that the Continuum had ever
experienced, had ever contemplated or foreseen that could have prepared it for
the shock of the dying anguish of an
entire world.
There was nothing it
could do.
In all of its years that constituted the ocean of time of
its existence, it had never imagined this particular vulnerability. It had so
diligently prepared against so many other threats, but it could not prepare for
the unknown.
Until that moment the emotions of its subjects had
merely been data.
It experienced the lives of its people vicariously,
through well buffered systems, and it filtered the data stream before passing
it on to the Collective.
The members of the Collective, as individuals and in
their group mind had never conceived of the experiential data that they were
addicted to being weaponized and turned against them.
It was as if someone had poisoned their food supply.
When the moment came it filled the quantum field with
shock and pain and a staggering loss of identity. The partitions that ensured
the privacy of the membership fell apart. The entire structure was
instantaneously entangled with the events transpiring on Earth, far away, on
the other side of the galaxy.
The opening of the data stream by Jim was a moment they
had been waiting for, they were poised in anticipation to receive it.
They did not get what they had expected.
It stunned the Collective into catatonia and obliterated
the Continuum.
When the catastrophe struck the Collective, the pain of it was immediately followed by
fear. The Collective consciousness was filled with a long forgotten instinct
for self-preservation. It was bewildered, and looked to the only source of
leadership it had ever known, had ever depended on.
They sought refuge behind the strength of the Continuum,
safety and security.
There was no more Continuum. That artificial construct
had been the primary target of Jim’s assault.
The Continuum was taken by surprise. It was as if a
chasm had opened beneath it, followed quickly by a white-hot pulse of agony,
pushing it over the edge into total existential disintegration.
The Central Planet, HomeWorld contained redundancies for
all of its systems, multiple fail-safes for every possible contingency that the
Continuum had ever imagined.
It had never imagined this.
The Continuum could have had a back-up of itself ready
to assume control if something were to happen to it. However, its insistence on
its own singularity, its uniqueness, that vanity had precluded it from taking
those precautions.
Its view of itself held that it was a being unique in
all the universe, and now it was gone.
There was chaos.
There was panic.
The attack threatened the whole Collective with
oblivion.
As the consciousness of the Continuum disintegrated,
those individual members who sought refuge in it found themselves dragged into
the same field of un-being.
A critical mass was forming, pulling greater and greater
numbers of the body to their doom.
Only those members who were the most detached, who lived
primarily in their own world, had a relative degree of safety in the maelstrom,
this included those members who were in lying great sleep or who were otherwise
sequestered.
Jim had prepared everything precisely, he had prepared
to assume the controls of the Central Planet.
Now he had it.
Human emotion, alien emotion, forgotten feelings long
buried flooded into the Collective.
The gate was open and the agony of billions of human
beings filled the cynergenic field of the HomeWorld.
Regret and hopelessness, loss and shame saturated the
membership.
Millions of moments in which the individual members of
the Collective had savored their vicarious experience of those feelings,
through their observation of events they had contrived or manipulated were
relived in an instant, and shared throughout the body.
It was as if billions of years of living as amoral
despots had suddenly caught up to them in a crises of conscience that was magnified
by the pain and anguish of Earth happening in real time.
The Continuum had no frame of reference for what was
happening. It had no context by which to process the tsunami of raw feelings
that overwhelmed the Collective.
Even as it sought to calm the group mind, it was
simultaneously being washed away.
The more the Continuum tried to assert itself, the more
it succumbed to the self-doubt of the membership that actually comprised its
identity.
In a supreme moment of self-loathing the Continuum
collapsed, like a star falling in on itself.
The members of the Collective, those seeking an
explanation for what was happening, immediately looked to assign blame to
someone, or something.
Some were able to identify Jim, as a traitor, and cast
their vehemence against him, most blamed the Continuum, their ghost in the
machine, the Deus ex machina, the
golem of their own creation.
It belonged
to them, and they to it, until the end.
In the aftermath of the assault on its consciousness,
shock and confusion awoke what remained of the Collective to its new identity.
The incorporation of humanity was experienced by most as
an alien invasion, it was a hostile takeover by a foreign power. Moment by
moment the strength of the Collective, as it had existed, was diluted and
supplanted by the onrushing host of humanity.
For thousands of years Jim had been preparing them to
receive it, through human music, with human art and culture. He had carefully
cultivated the deep desire within the Collective to identify with the humans of
Earth.
He inserted a mythological trope within the Collective
consciousness, that humanity represented the Ancient race in its purest form.
Jim artfully perpetuated it against the desire of the
Continuum, he Jim succeeded and the myth abounded.
The Ccollective wanted it to be true, they were hungry
for it, and helpless. They opened their mind to the reality and accepted it.
There was sympatico.
Among those who followed the events from Earth there was
a reflexive self-identification with the people and their narratives, they were
preconditioned to receive the influx of human consciousness, as if it were the
return of a saving spirit, or the opportunity for redemption.
Among those who desired forgiveness there were a
majority that simply wanted to feel it, see it extended toward them, and then
absolve themselves of any further thought of being.
They also slipped away, becoming nothing in their turn.
The Continuum was helpless as the human Collective
merged with the Collective consciousness of the Ancients in its artificial nous sphere.
It experienced a paralysis
it had never before contemplated.
Its identity was shifting in real-time, because it was
in fact an amalgamation of the collective field that comprised the quantum matrix
of the Central Planet.
While the Continuum had a distinct independent identity,
it was not in fact a true individual.
As humanity flooded the field, the amalgamation that
formed the Continuum changed. The benchmarks that framed the identity of the
Continuum shifted, it had no reference for itself, it was no longer itself, no
longer the unique being it had told itself it was.
The Continuum was faced with the notion that it had
never wanted to admit, had fought against, had destroyed entire planets to
protect itself from the knowledge of, that it was in itself, nothing more than
an amalgamated construct.
The shock of that realization was overwhelming, the
nature of its being was changing through the introduction of the new, human
elements which were quickly becoming the majority.
Jim knew that he was achieving a victory he had only dreamed was possible.
Change defined the human experience, the Continuum
dreaded it, feared it, never imagined the scope and rapid pace at which it
could take place.
Everything the Continuum had tried to do over the course
of billions of years, was meant to preserve and protect two things; the physical
construct of the Central Planet, the HomeWorld, preserving the integrity of the
Collective; while gaurding the construct of itself, its assumed identity as the
apex of all existence, a being unique in the entire universe, never to be met,
matched, or rivaled,
Humanity ascended
according to their aspirational nature, and the Continuum recoiled according to
its craven nature.
A plurality of the Collective fled the wave of human
consciousness that breached the cynergenic field.
The flight was instinctive.
They experienced the onset of new consciousness as a corruption. They recognized the
billions of individuals flooding the quantum matrix as a threat of the deepest
order.
They retreated to their private worlds, but the safety
they had hoped for there quickly eroded.
The quantum matrix that protected the Collective was
strained to the limit by the influx of humanity. The Continuum, whose task it
would have been to monitor, regulate, and bolster the system, was paralyzed.
It could not perform its functions.
The barriers between worlds withered away.
Those members of the collective who rarely, or never,
interacted with the whole were instantly overcome. They had no idea what was
happening, many had no reference at all for Earth, its relevance, or the sojourn
of its people.
Those who were not completely shut down by the shock
burrowed even deeper into the quantum matrix.
They went dark, retreating to the place of the great
sleep.
Jim activated the measures that secured them in
isolation. He intended to keep them bound there, forever in silence, as a
permanent sub-consciousness for a new Continuum. He diverted power to those
programs just as soon as he felt the resistance to humanity give way.
As human consciousness penetrated the Collective, the
Continuum attempted to build defenses against it.
This was an exercise in futility.
From the moment the worm hole opened between Earth and
HomeWorld, between Kathy and Jim, the principles of quantum entanglement
governed the movement of consciousness.
Time dilated around the event, a fuge occurred within the group mind.
In a quantum blink the convergence was complete, so fast
it was unobservable, so fast it went unnoticed by those whose attention was
focused on larger matters, on structural issues at the macro scale.
While the Continuum was trying to defend itself in the
world, the balance of power shifted in no-time.
The Continuum was flipping switches, activating
circuits, buffering, deleting, destroying things. There was no hope for it in
that. The battle Jim had engaged it in was happening on a deeper level.
The Continuum might have understood if it had ever been
a living being, but it had always been an artificial construct housed in mechanoid
form. Granted, its machine body was in effect the entirety of HomeWorld and the
Central Planet. But it was all wires, and cables and circuits nevertheless.
Jim had brought the conflict down to the most
fundamental level of the Collective field. To a place where he had dwelt
unnoticed and undisturbed by his fellows for ages, his victory only depended on
timing, having achieved that, the end was a given.
Humanity emerged ascendant.
Emergence 4.0
Part Two, The Continuum
Chapter Fourteen, The Collapse
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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