Emergence 3.0
A Novel – In One Page Per Day
Day 046, Thursday
February 15th, 2018
Chapter Four: Secrets
Every member of the Collective valued and cherished its privacy. Most of
the membership had implicit trust in the safeguards they had devised to ensure
it.
There were some among the Collective who opted not to participate in any
of the communal functions that were available to the group. Those members spent
their entire lives living in their private realities, in wholly constructed
fantasies, interacting only with the artificial lives inhabiting their domain.
They were among the minority, and those members were inevitably moving toward
the great sleep, in which their consciousness became dormant, and they were
ultimately sequestered.
Privacy was cherished in the Collective but every member participated in
the Continuum. The Continuum was an artificial intelligence created by the
Collective to manage all of its affairs, its self-government, its defenses, and
its management of the Galactic Empire.
The Continuum drew on the consciousness and experience of every member
of the Collective for its personality, its intelligence, and its growth, even
the members of the Collective sequestered in the great sleep.
The Continuum was the arbiter of law in the Collective, it enforced all
of the rules of privacy, and from the Continuum all secrets were forbidden
The prohibitions against secrecy were intended to be a rule governing
the Continuum itself, but the Continuum itself hid things, and every member of
the Collective participated willingly in the obfuscation.
For the individual member of the Collective, the concealment of anything
was an art.
Privacy, while it existed, was an illusion.
Even the Observers were exposed to scrutiny through extensive modeling
of their identities, and ultimately through the uploading of their
consciousness when they returned to the HomeWorld.
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