A Novel – One Chapter Per Week
Week 12, 2019
The Continuum selected its Observers primarily from
among the members of the Collective who had returned to consciousness after
falling into the great sleep.
This was not a rule, or a law, there were exceptions,
but it was almost always the case.
Those members of the Collective who had fallen into the
great sleep often returned in a state of agitation. This disturbed the
Collective. It raised questions regarding the purpose and meaning of the great
society itself.
It caused the Continuum to experience a sense of
existential dread.
Many of those who returned from the great sleep fell
back into it after some period of time, never reengaging the Collective, rarely
participating in the group mind.
They could not get enough rest.
Those members were quietly sequestered by the Continuum
so that they would never return again.
This isolation was not murder, but it was akin to it.
Some of those members would engineer worlds of pure
fantasy, recreating for themselves whatever it was that they had dreamt of in
their slumber.
Those members who tried to engage the Collective were
often bothered by morals and ethical conundrums that were reminiscent of the
Ancient People from which the Collective emerged.
When they were properly identified it was considered a
benefit to them, and to everyone to send them back into the living fields of
experience where they could undergo the limitations of the flesh, and feel a
sense of solidarity with organic beings.
When the Continuum decided to assign a member to the Observer Corp, it effectively removed the
influence of that person from the Collective. A copy of their consciousness was
preserved, and simulated, but that was sequestered from the group mind,
isolated and physically separated.
This afforded the Continuum a measure of security.
Moving away from the Central Planet, the departure from
HomeWorld, taking up a body and living in the Galactic Empire, these provided
some relief to the suffering the individual member experienced.
The mission of the Observer filled them with purpose, it
reinvigorated them, at least for a time. This provided a similar relief to the
Collective as well. The Collective did not want to be mired in existentialist
questions. Each member of the Collective wanted the unfettered freedom to
pursue their interests; altruistic, despotic, or otherwise.
Peace in the Collective translated to peace within the
Continuum.
They were symbiotic.
By commissioning the troubled members to join the
Observer Corps, it removed a weight that burdened the whole community, which
for all of its great endurance it was nevertheless a fragile thing.
While the Observers were on assignment the Continuum
would run countless programs on a facsimile of the consciousness of that member
which it had sequestered.
It did this secretly.
The Continuum was mistrustful of everything, wanted to
be prepared for anything, wanted to know all that there is to know concerning
future possibilities, potentialities, and probabilities.
While one aspect of the member was disconnected from the
whole and oblivious to what was taking place on HomeWorld, a version of
themselves, a true copy was being tortured by the Continuum in order to satisfy
both its paranoia and its endless search for knowledge.
While on assignment, especially in the early years of
their time in the Corps, the Observers where myopic, their missions were chosen
for them, they were easy, and the missionary work filled them with a sense of
connection to the people. The Continuum found this to be an easy way to manage
the angst that had driven the member back into embodiment in the worlds of time
and space.
The Observers left the Continuum on a mission to live “ordinary” lives with
the people of the Empire, returning every one-hundred solar cycles to re-enter
the Collective consciousness, to feed both the triumphs and tragedies they had
witnessed directly to the Continuum. This was the most intimate way by which
the Collective took in what transpired throughout the galaxy.
The physically and socially joined the population of a
living world, shared its experiences in a mode of belonging that the individual members had long since forgotten.
This was the intention behind the Observer Corps.
The Observers were trained extensively in the methodology
of being a detached participant. The physical bodies they occupied looked like
the physical bodies of the people they lived with, on the planets where they
dwelt, but they were different.
The bodies of the Observers were stronger, faster,
resistant to disease, they healed with incredible rapidity.
They were also plain, ordinary, they were not endowed
with physical beauty, or any attributes they would draw attention to
themselves.
The Observers were forbidden to procreate; they were
sterile.
Strong emotions were engineered out of their bodies;
fear, anger, desire, revulsion, these things were stripped away from the flesh.
The Continuum viewed them as inhibitors of reliable observation.
There was a complex array of machinery, communications and
observation equipment which the Observer connected to.
Their day to day experiences, their dreams were
constantly being uploaded into its apparatus, the Observer was responsible for
maintaining it. This machinery provided an ancillary feed that was constantly
streaming to HomeWorld, to the Collective, and its Continuum.
Many Observers violated these rules.
Some did so with the support of the Continuum.
To become an Observer meant returning to the corporeal
form.
It meant living again as an organic life form, a return
to the senses, and to a limited range of perceptions.
The conditioning of an Observer took time.
Many candidates for the role of Observer failed to
complete the training. They could not adjust to the limitations of the flesh,
and so they returned to the Continuum, never having been on the observed
worlds.
Those who returned after having failed were often demoralized
and despondent, falling right back to the great sleep, never to return. Being
an observer was not a solution for the deep existential angst so many members
of the Collective fell into.
Being an Observer also meant dwelling simultaneously in
a mechanoid form.
Dwelling in the mechanoid body was the first skill set
that member had to learn. It was an easier adjustment than the adjustment to
the flesh.
The mechanoid bodies had few limitations, the
consciousness and its interface with the world was truncated in comparioson to
the freedom they experienced on the HomeWorld, but still broad and expansive.
The sensory instruments of the mechanoid were extremely
powerful, and the mechanoids had few physical limitations. They could go
anywhere, do nearly anything.
For the Observer the embodied life was a mix of freedom
and confinement.
Most of the Observers felt very comfortable in their
mechanoid form. They never left those bodies when they were on the Central
Planet, during their cyclical return to HomeWorld to report on their experiences.
The mechanoid form provided a life apart from the
insidious pressures of the Collective, and the invasive presence of the
Continuum. They were connected, but the connection was filtered, it was like a stream
of light pouring through a veil
There are many forms of observation for the Observers to
master and manage; satellite imaging and measurements, audio and video
recordings. The harvesting of minutia from telephone calls, television
programming, radio shows, and the endless details that come from watching other forms of electronic
communication.
These tools, among others, were utilized by the Observer
Corps, feeding the Collective with endless streams of data.
However, the primary method used by the Observers
themselves was to live with people.
Direct observation conveyed the raw emotional realities
to the Collective.
This is what the Collective craved, it wanted context.
The data stream told many tales, but the imprimatur came
only when the Observer shared, in the wordless way of the Collective consciousness
their impression of the people they themselves encountered during their tour on
the observed world.
Life and death, sorrow and joy, birth and tragedy, love;
when these moments were reduced to mere data points the picture was not
complete, such as when the observation was of a woman loving the child she gave
birth to, she reveled in her child’s life. It filled her with joy and struck
her down in sorrow at the tragic moment of her child’s death.
This narrative could be expanded by volumes, accompanied
by video and audio recordings of a funeral procession, the burial at the
graveside, the subsequent suicide of the bereft mother.
The Collective was eager to see and experience these
moments.
But the essential thing that they all craved only came
when the Observer returned and felt those moments for them as a proxy to real
life.
This was the pinnacle of the Observers mission, it was
their reason for being, and it was what gave them a sense of esteem from their fellow members, when
at the end of each cycle they stood before the Continuum and opened themselves
to the sharing.
The Observers were not free agents.
They were on a mission.
They served their brothers and sisters in the
Collective.
What was most important to the Collective was the flow
of existential/experiential data through which they vicariously constructed the
worlds they dwelt in, their individuated bubbles within the quantum field.
Even though the Continuum was itself an amalgamation of
the Collective, unbeknownst to the Collective, the Continuum was a being with a
will of its own.
It believed that it was itself, the divine concrescence
of all consciousness. The Continuum sought to gather every shred of consciousness
into itself.
Like a hungry god, it desired to consume everything.
As such, the Observers were sent into the galactic
Empire, sent on missions to find every last trace of the colonies and outposts
that the children of the Ancients established in the ages before the Continuum,
either destroy them or bring them into the fold.
The Observers lived on the observed worlds, serving as a
means of indirect control.
The bodies of the Observers were engineered to be indifferent, to be obedient, and to
obey the Continuum.
The Continuum viewed autonomy as a threat to it and as
such, to the collective. Great efforts were put into curtailing the
self-actualized observers.
The Protocols for being an Observer were simple in
theory, but the practice of fulfilling the reporting
guidelines was extraordinarily difficult.
A tour of duty was one hundred solar-cycles, to be lived
on the observed world as a member of the community under observation.
The Observer was required to gather as much intimate,
first-hand experience as possible, observing the most private moment of the
planet’s denizens, from every class and walk of life.
The Observer was also required to maintain the automated
surveillance systems that fed the Collective without cease. This bifurcated the
Observer’s consciousness on a deep, an autonomic level, as an aspect of
themselves was always occupied with the circuitry of its machine-self, pooling
and pulling data from the world it lived on for transmission to the
Continuum.
At the end of the tour the Observer was required to
return to the Collective, to upload the content of their unique experiences for
the Collective to consume.
There were few other strictures.
The Observer was required to participate in the lives of
the people, but not to lead them. The Observer had to experience their art and
culture, but not influence their movements. The Observer was required to uphold
the standards of the Imperial Education system, the casts, and the Imperial
Cult.
The Observer was entitled to carry out whatever
relationships they wanted, but they were not allowed to procreate, or influence
the gene pool of their world in any way.
Most of the Observers followed these protocols for the
duration of their time in the Corps. A few bucked the system and paid the
price.
Others went beyond the rules but only by order of the
Continuum.
Emergence 4.0
Part Two, The Continuum
Chapter Eleven, The Observers
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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