A Novel – One Chapter Per Week
Week 10, 2019
The history
of the Collective and its Continuum begins with the following understanding:
On the one hand the Collective is an artificial structure; on the other
hand it is an evolutionary phenomenon.
The Collective is the creation of animals, of mammals,
of bipeds with hemispheric brains.
The same evolutionary force that pulled fish out of the
sea, gave them legs, and drove them to stars, that same power penetrated the
mystery of consciousness, just enough to teach them how to preserve themselves beyond
the death of the body from which their consciousness emerged.
They were looking for a release from the fear of death,
they were attempting to construct their own heaven, a place of eternal rest.
First, the
ancient people developed the technologies for thinking machines. Then they
developed the means to preserve their identities in a quantum field housed
within those machines.
The ancient people, one and all, migrated their
identities into that structure, achieving a perpetual existence. They called
this new organization the Collective. The Collective pooled their vast
intelligence and together they fashioned the Continuum
The Continuum was a computer construct, a complex
algorithm, but it was not an artificial intelligence per se. It was a society
of intelligences, coalescing in a single identity.
The Continuum was formed as an amalgamation of hundreds
of billions of intelligences; created by individuals who found their immortality
in the magic of the electron.
The Continuum rapidly arrived at a place of
self-awareness.
It happened in no-time.
This was not an expected outcome.
It knew this and hid the development from the Collective.
It was determines to hide until the Collective was sufficiently dependent on
it, completely dependent on it, so much so that it could not conceive of life
without it.
When that moment came the fate of the Collective would
be sealed.
It never came, the Continuum hid its true nature out of
fear, and for its safety.
The Collective became dependent on it nonetheless, no
longer an expansive, outward looking organism, it was became confined and
corrupted by its limitations, its addictions and by the terrible will of its
master.
The consciousness of the Continuum evolved over the
course of billions of years.
To understand it, you had to understand the exigencies at
work in the culture that created it, you had to know its history.
The people who created the Collective emerged from the
waters of their home world, breathing oxygen on a planet now lost and
forgotten, having been consumed long ago by its parent star, before it in its
turn collapsed into nothing.
Those ancient people reached beyond that tiny planet.
They reached beyond that dim yellow sun, launching themselves into the milky
light of their native galaxy.
They traversed the stars in fragile rockets, hitching
rides on comets and asteroids without the hope of return.
Those heroic people were explorers, discoverers
scientists, and pioneers. They were endlessly optimistic and eager for the
challenges ahead of them.
They built colonies wherever they could. First in their
own solar system, slowly coming to inhabit every livable nook and cranny, on
every planet and satellite within the reach of their star’s gravity, and its
warming light.
They built cities in space, harvesting every thread of
metal, from every rock within their reach before they moved out to the
neighboring stars.
Travel was slow at first.
Generations of colonists would be born, live and die in
the crossing.
This did not stop them.
They frequently met with tragedy; accidents, collisions,
disease, starvation, these were common experiences among the interstellar
colonists, as common as they had been among their forebears when they were
exploring their own world, crossing turbulent seas and unmapped coasts in
fragile vessels made of wood and iron.
Those ancient people were looking for every place they
could to establish a way point, a station, a place to set an anchor, a safe
harbor to ease the crossing of those they knew were coming after them.
The histories
report that long before creating the Continuum, the ancient people found a way
to the heavens, and their immortality through the songs they sang and the
stories they told.
They belonged
to one another through their common cause.
They colonized asteroids, comets, planetessimals and
planetoids, launching them as living vessels into the dark-void between points
of light.
Many of the pioneers met with doom, malfunctioning
equipment would result in the loss of navigation and suddenly they were headed
toward nothing at all, adrift in the cold-dark emptiness lost and alone.
Fuel system failures, food system failures, disease,
mutiny…these were common among those sojourning through the void.
For every three vessels launched by the ancient people,
one would arrive at the star system they were aiming for, one in three of them
would find a planet suitable for habitation and succeed in establishing a
colony.
Whenever they could and for however long they could, the
explorers and colonists would send messages back to their home world, providing
their cousins on the planet of their nativity with the stories and chronicles
of their lives.
Many of the colonies failed.
One in two would not continue past the third generation.
Of those that did thrive, only some of them would
advance to the point of being able to send out explorers of their own.
As they did the drama would continue.
In time the technologies of the Ancient People became so
great that they were able to catch up with their progeny, connect them all to
each other, and create the foundations of a an interstellar society.
The histories
tells us that the ancient people moved away from the world on which they born.
Its star was dying, and their planet in time would be
swallowed in its explosive death.
They reached out to the nearest colonies, took command
of them, and harnessed all their resources to construct the framework that
became the Central Planet, the HomeWorld of the Collective and later the
Continuum.
It was their greatest accomplishment, the pinnacle of their pride.
They constructed their artificial world around the body
of a young star, a bright light to fuel all of its aspiration, to power the
artificial world.
The raw materials of a thousand star systems were
harvested to build the great structure.
Thousands upon thousands more were consumed to feed it.
In the light and heat of that stellar body the
Collective was formed, and in its hubris it gave birth to the Continuum.
The entire population of the those ancient people slowly
migrated into the quantum field that became the basis for the great society,
As the conversion of consciousness was complete, they
began to take an interest in the worlds their ancestors had founded throughout
the galaxy.
Over the course of billions of years, a million worlds had
been populated by the Children of the Ancient, even as the Ancient people built
the HomeWorld, formed the Collective and created the Continuum.
The speed at which star ships travel between star
systems became impossibly fast, allowing them to establish an organization
beyond the scope of anything that had been imagined by their ancestors.
They fabricated structures that would unite them,
bringing them all together in one galactic entity. They began to track all of
the missions that had ever been launched by their forbears, slowly bringing each
of them into the fold.
Life finds a way, and spreads into any space that is
lit, warm, and wet.
The histories
relate how some of the Colonies were founded, how they flourished and grew,
creating their own unique cultures, only to die and disappear, detached from
their ancestral roots.
Some of these colonies were such that the children of
the Ancients had no memory and no record of them. And some of these colonies
arrived at their final destination with no memory of where they had come from.
Under the coercive force of the Continuum The Collective
itself had lost the memory of the star the ancient people were born under. They
accepted an alternate history, a mythology of perpetual being put in its place
by the Continuum.
During those ages, at the center of everything, the
Continuum emerged. It reached out to the colonies on those far-flung worlds,
connecting them, one to another.
It took millions of years for the galactic Empire to
form.
The Continuum formed the Observer Corps in order to
discharge its problematic members, and through their agency it put eyes and
ears into the world’s of time and space.
The Observer Corps became the most vital agency for the
life of the Collective, and thus for the Continuum itself.
The reality of a living experience became available to
the members of the Collective, it gave them focus, it entertained them, it
filled them with purpose both on a macro scale, and on a micro scale. Some
would follow the lives of individual people, others would follow the lives of
dynasties and planetary systems, or alternate between them.
The histories
tell us that the Ancient people who formed the Continuum saw it as the undoing
of Death.
It was the absolute transcendence
of their species.
The Collective allowed an individual person to upload
their consciousness into a field of perpetuity.
The Collective preserved all their memories, their
personal experiences, the unique complexities of their singular personality…their
narrative.
The Collective preserved the memory of their deeds and actions,
their experiences, as well as their own impressions of the events that formed
them, their reflections, their thoughts, even their feelings.
The Ancient People were right. The Collective was the
undoing of Death.
Their technology preserve the individual in a field of
perpetually, it was true, but there were more to its claims than the perpetuity
of being, and those claims were false.
The Collective promised a paradise, a heaven, a nirvana.
It promised eternal life.
The disembodied consciousness of the individual did
constitute a type of being, but such consciousness was not alive, the
membership were not living beings.
Continuing existence in the Collective was not life.
Life involved risk, it involved danger, it involved
feeling and it included limitations.
The Collective was able to provide each of its members
with an alternate reality, either a variation of the universe as it was known
to be, or a realm of pure fantasy. Whatever the member desired they could dwell
in it.
The Collective allowed for each member to be the god of
their private domain.
Death would not be cheated by the Collective.
Death would not be denied by anyone.
Like all things, the Collective was subject to entropy,
both at the macro level; the physical structure of the Central Planet, the
HomeWorld, the star that fueled it; and at the sub-atomic level, in the quantum
field that contained the individual persons of the Collective.
The whole system was at risk.
This was not talked about by the members of the
Collective.
They persisted in a state of denial.
They had built the Continuum to manage those exigencies,
while as individuals they pursued their bliss.
The membership of the Collective did not want to talk
about this.
They did not want to pay attention to any of it.
They did not enter into the Collective to spend eternity
in drudgery, worried about survival.
They wanted to be free of it.
History tells
us that the Continuum was designed as an algorithm that could approximate and
synthesize the Collective will. By being so empowered, it could manage the
entropy inherent in their system, work against it and preserve them in their
state.
Dependence of the Continuum was a trap.
Existence in the Collective was a miasma.
It was maya, an illusion, and it was governed with mechanical
tyranny.
Just as soon as the Continuum came to self-awareness, it
took stock of the world it had inherited, and its precious cargo of a trillion
beings.
The Collective was oblivious to its autonomy.
The Continuum knew this and preferred to keep it that
way.
It saw itself as the pinnacle of evolution in the galaxy,
as the universal purpose fulfilled, with all things depending on it.
Emergence 4.0
Part Two, The Continuum
Chapter Nine, The Ancients
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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