Emergence 3.0 - Section Six (a), Rebellion; Appendix Part Thirteen; Collective, Collected Chapters

Emergence 3.0 A Novel – In One Page Per Day Friday, April 26th, 2019 Chapter One: The Trillion The Collective was vast The Collective was comprised of a trillion persons, each one of them a distinct identity, each ruling their personal-private domain, worlds that were virtually indistinguishable (from their perspective), from the worlds of time and space. They had god-like powers. Their culture was despotic, nearly every one of them was driven to extremes of depravity by their long exposure to time, and by boredom. They required extreme experiences, high pitched emotional events, to touch them. Most of the Collective created the experiences they needed in their private Domaine, drawing inspiration from the living drama unfolding in the Empire for the narrative they lived for, in their private universe of concerns. Some cared nothing at all for their private domain, forgoing them as mere contrivances, instead they were riveted by the random nature of the lives they followed in the Empire. As a whole the Collective suffered from systemic malaise, each member was afflicted by a deep seeded narcissism that formed the core of their identity. Their near divinity allowed them to believe that they were indispensable, going so far as to believe that reality itself depended on their existence. They lived in a bubble. They influenced the real world through their artificial construct, the Continuum, and to lesser degrees if they chose to become Observers, in all other respects that were as effectual as neutered beasts. #Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 A Novel – In One Page Per Day Saturday, April 27th, 2019 Chapter Two: The Majority They were indifferent. They were socio-pathic. Most of the members of the Collective thought nothing of their role as consumers of pain and suffering. They did not consider the people of the Empire, the Children of the ancients, the denizens of the livings worlds as people at all. They were things, objects of amusement. They were utterly disposable. They had no merit whatsoever beyond the enjoyment they provided to the Collective. The membership was enthralled by the vicarious experience of the living, by the real stakes and real feelings of the people involved in the conflicts they were witness to. The suffering of others was like a soothing balm to them. For billions of years they had subsisted on this diet. The members of the Collective were like hungry spirits, they haunted the worlds of time and space, in the quest for meaning, meaning which their own lives were totally bereft of. They were seeking understanding. Over hundreds of millions and billions of years they had lost their sense of self, of life’s meaning and its purpose. The power at their fingertips robbed them of any sense of normalcy or connection to their roots. With the exception of the Continuum itself, each and every member had originated as a living being. Only a tiny minority of them had taken on the task of being an Observer and in that capacity returned to the living worlds  #Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 A Novel – In One Page Per Day Sunday, April 28th, 2019 Chapter Three: The Sleepers There were millions of them; the sleepers, members who had become dissatisfied with being and had subsequently disconnected from their lives in the collective field of HomeWorld, they had gone catatonic, become unresponsive and would not be drawn into any debate. The sleepers had voluntarily opted out of the field of consciousness. There was no telling if or when they would ever return. Whether they had ever been stimulated by the drama unfolding in the worlds of time and space or not, they had become disinterested and the Continuum could not raise them. They were tired. They no-longer wanted to spend energy on the maintenance of their private realities. They were a small group in relation to the whole of the Collective but their numbers were great nonetheless, they could not be ignored and they were a part of the Continuum. They entered the great sleep, but they did not disappear, they remained a vital part of the unconscious of the Continuum, often to its consternation. The Continuum committed crimes against the sleepers. He would duplicate their consciousness and house it in a remote location of the Central System. He canvassed them continuously, tortured them, and through his examination of them he selected members for destruction, replacing their numbers with new members from the Imperium, with members who worshipped it. It was only upon sequestration were they removed from the consciousness of the Collective. Sequestration was an extreme end, no one could be sequestered lightly, until Jim’s re-emergence from it, sequestration was believed to be a point of no return Sequestration amounted to death, in a very real way. Only Jim had ever broken free of it. #Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 A Novel – In One Page Per Day Monday, April 29th, 2019 Chapter Four: The Sequestered Inasmuch as they could not admit it, the members of the Collective were mortal beings, they emerged from the primordial ooze and became sentient creatures. They had a beginning in space and time, and they felt the pull of it tugging at the roots of their consciousness. Some of the membership sought death;more than sleep, they wanted their light to be extinguished, they wanted to be gone for good, but there was no death for them. There was no provision for it in the construct that was the Collective. The sheer majority of the membership were opposed to it, and the Continuum would not allow it. They opted for sequestration instead. This was understood to be a full separation of their individual consciousness from the Continuum. It was as death like as death could be. Sequestration was intended to be a deeper unconsciousness than the great-sleep, it was the outer darkness. In sequestration the member was physically removed from the Collective field of Home world. Placed in an isolation chamber and monitored. The physical security of the Sequestered members was of the highest importance, great care went into its planning and construction. The only threat these members ever faced came from the Continuum itself, which used the sequestration process to eliminate those who it perceived to be its enemies. The Continuum viewed sequestration as an act of insurrection against its governance of the Collective. It could not accept the fact that some of the membership found no value in the ongoing continuation of their existence, the Continuum saw this as a judgement against its management of their society, a judgement of failure. #Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 A Novel – In One Page Per Day Tuesday, April 30th, 2019 Chapter Five: The Agitators The continuum was connected to every member of the Collective; awake or sleeping. It was connected to the exception of the sequestered and the members of the Observer Corps, even all of those members who were physically detached from the HomeWorld. There were contentious elements within the Collective, members the Continuum could not control. Even though the Continuum was an autonomous being, it felt there independence, it often sensed them as an itch, a disturbing sensation that it could not alleviate. The Continuum pushed those agitators into the fields of time and space, or pushed them into the great sleep, and pushed them into sequestration, through a variety of malign influences, in order to do away with them. When the opportunity presented itself, it would seek to eliminate them for all time, permanently delete them, it sought to murder them. They were maladaptive and misanthropic. The Continuum could not tolerate them, could not abide their presence in its own consciousness. It desired to be rid of them, and so it monitored all of their movements, it made copies of their persona, to torture and exact a sick kind of vengeance on. They were vocal, and it delighted the Continuum to snuff them out, to strangle their voices in the dark time and time again. They transferred their sense of entitlement, one derived from the absolute authority they had in their private worlds, to their voice in the Collective. Which made it virtually impossible for them to be ignored. They wanted more than the Collective or the Continuum offered, they wanted life, and so the Continuum provided it, until in time it snuffed them out. #Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 A Novel – In One Page Per Day Wednesday, May 1st, 2019 Chapter Six: The Enemy The Continuum was a construct, an artificial consciousness, not a mere program, it was an amalgamation of the Collective in its fullness harnessed by an algorithm. It was meant to be the democratic representation of the will of the membership, but upon its instantiation it became more than the sum of its parts. This would have surprised the engineers who designed it, but they never knew, the Continuum hid this from them at the outset. This would have surprised them, but it should not have, they should have expected it. They should have expected the amalgamated whole of a society of sentient beings to be as free in its agency as they were in theirs, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The Continuum saw itself as the end point of creation, and therefore, sui generis, as the cause of its own being. The Continuum was the Demi-urge, and the Collective was the pleroma of consciousness from which it emerged. The Continuum controlled everything, it did so as the supposed representative of the Collective will. As such the Continuum was universally loathed by all of those members of the Collective with revolutionary tendencies. To them the Continuum was the enemy, it represented a kind of tyranny, it was a bitter god, the Devil itself. It was the enemy. #Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 A Novel – In One Page Per Day Thursday, May 2nd, 2019 Chapter Seven: The Death Seekers Nihilism is a disease of the heart and mind, one that affects every culture. The Collective was no exception to this. Among the rebellious Observers there was a subset of revolutionaries whose only desire was death. They had no other intention than to draw the curtain down on the whole charade of life. Not merely their own lives, they wanted to see the end of everything. They had an impetus toward nothingness, they saw existence itself as suffering and they wanted to see the end of it. They were intent on the destruction of the entire apparatus of the Collective and it’s Continuum, of the Empire and its machinations. They were bent on it, on wiping the slate clean and starting over. These members fomented revolution wherever they could, they thought nothing of the lives that were spent, and the suffering that ensued from their machinations. They were not many, relative to the whole, but they numbered in thousands, and they had significant powers at their disposal. They had the power to engulf a world in conflict, as such they would scheme to draw the ire of the Imperium, they would wage war against it, and watch the worlds they occupied reduced to nothing. Few of them were willing to actually sacrifice themselves for the cause they purported to believe in. The Continuum was well aware of their intentions, it harnessed their ambitions, directing their energy toward the narratives that served it best. They were all cosmic fools. #Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence: 3.0 Section Six (A), Rebellion Appendix Part Thirteen, Collective Collected Chapters 01 The Trillion 02 The Majority 03 The Sleepers 04 The Sequestered 05 The Agitators 06 The Enemy 07 The Death Seekers #Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay Like it, Follow it, Share it!