Week 34, 2019
Jim haunted the quantum space like a gatherer in the
forest, picking through experiences like they were nuts and fruits falling from
the trees. They sustained his purpose, sustaining him like food and water.
Ages passed before he was discovered entering the
experiential field of others within the Collective, violating their privacy,
absorbing their experiences as his own.
He let it slip in a moment of candor.
A fellow member had thought to reach out to him as they
were contemplating the journey into the great sleep.
That member had been moved by the experiences they had
been shared when Jim had first awoken, moved by his memories of the deep-dark
and silence, the quiet and the release of self-hood.
Jim had not had contact with another member of the
Collective for so long that he had not thought to guard himself against the sudden
intrusion.
What his fellow found when they met was a reflection of
his own private world in the consciousness of the “Awoken One,” as Jim had come
to be called.
It was disturbing, his fellow member recognized it
immediately, and saw the scope of the violation before Jim could partition
those memories and conceal his activities.
The reaction was instantaneous, it echoed through the
Collective.
The Continuum intervened to ensure the safety of the membership,
their privacy, the regular order of their society, and the implementation of
justice.
However, there was no law against what Jim had done. There
were no laws at all in the Collective, but nevertheless, it was taboo, and no-one
had ever crossed it before, no-one except the Continuum itself..
Jim might not have been discovered if his own feelings of
outrage concerning the depravities of the Collective had not expressed
themselves so clearly in that singular moment of contact.
The Continuum acted quickly to safeguard the Collective, enacting a penalty that had never before
been conceived of, Jim was sequestered, effectively jailed by the Continuum. He
was confined to a place similar to the great sleep, only with much more
powerful protection engineered to hold him, and keep him physically removed
from the structure of HomeWorld.
The Continuum wanted to dissect him, to study him,
ultimately erase him. It wanted to remove him from beyond the realm of all
knowing.
The Continuum saw in him a threat to its own existence,
even to its uniqueness, but the Continuum could not define the exact nature of
the threat that it sensed, and the Collective would not allow a member to be
executed.
Regardless of what the Continuum wanted, the Collective
recognized his individuality, it recognized the fact that he was a member of
the body, and it appreciated the fact that he had done something singular in
returning from the great sleep, and had done another singular things in
learning how to penetrate the private worlds of other members.
The Collective knew that it could not punish him for a
breach in protocol, or etiquette, for something that might be taboo but was not
unlawful. There were no laws governing the conduct of the membership, they were
only restrained by the apparatus of HomeWorld, and the machinery that housed
the Collective, and by custom.
The Collective took responsibility for having abandoned
him after he had awoken.
The Collective felt as if it had played a part in
allowing him to recede and retreat, which led to the crimes he had committed.
The Continuum in its own sphere wanted to punish and
eradicate him as if he were a disease, but it could not find the will to do it,
or to exercise its influence over the Collective to bring the membership to the
place it occupied, not without revealing its hand, and demonstrating to the
Collective how the Continuum had manipulated it throughout its history.
The entire Collective deliberated his fate for a period
of ages. It ruminated over the questions Jim’s violations brought forward. They
contemplated his return from the great sleep, his subsequent reclusiveness,
which led to his ability to violate the private worlds of the other members.
It was a time of trial.
In it, all of his actions, both before and after his time
in the great sleep, everything he had ever said or done was exposed before the
membership.
For a long time it seemed as if the prevailing opinion of
the Collective was to destroy him, but there was something about the issuance
of a death sentence against one of the members that did not sit well with them.
If one of them could be terminated, it was possible for
any of them to be terminated. This caused fear to well up inside the Collective
every time they came close to making this decision.
He was not allowed to speak for himself or offer any kind
of defense. The Collective was not interested in a rationale for his behavior.
He was isolated, sequestered, cut off, blocked by the
most powerful electromagnetic field the Continuum had ever generated
There was silence, darkness, and emptiness all around
him. The gulf between him and everyone else was so vast that he had no sense
for what might be on the other side of it, if anything at all.
Nothing in his entire existence had prepared him for that.
It was an extreme form of torture, isolation.
The Continuum delighted in observing him in this state,
in cycle after cycle it continuously pushed the membership to merely eliminate
him.
The Collective elected to release him.
The individual members of the Collective were able to
override the judgement of the algorithm that represented their combined will.
For the first time in ages, they did so.
The Collective merely ordered a review of the quantum buffers,
and safeties that were in place to ensure each member’s privacy, a re-configuration
of the protocols for reporting and examination of the whole system.
They faulted the Continuum, not Jim “the Awoken One” for
the lapse.
Jim belonged
to them.
While he was in the place of sequestration he mastered
himself; he was able to focus.
He found a sense of peace.
He had no idea how long this took, time itself had become
meaningless, and then he began to count. He carved out a place in his
consciousness to keep track of time.
It did not matter that there was no actual referent for
his time to append to, it did not matter that time itself is a relative
construct, insofar as it is merely a measure of the movement of objects in
space.
There were no objects in the nothingness he had been
submerged in.
There was only him, and the quantum field of his
consciousness, and there it was.
He had himself.
He waited.
In the isolation he was subjected to he was given freedom
to contemplate, to examine his conscience, to come to terms with himself, to
find a sense of purpose.
He formed a desire to tear apart the world as he had
always known it.
He planned.
He counted, he relived his memories, playing them against
the field of un-being, moment by moment against the steady tick-tock of the metronome
that was his internal clock.
He relived his life, before and after the Collective.
He recalled every facet of every fantasy world he had
ever touched.
When he was untethered from the Collective, freed from
the pressure of its passions, released from the depths of existential fear that
lurked within it, he found himself.
He found himself, beyond the state of isolation and the stark
alienation that he had been submerged in.
He found himself beyond the place of torture, the
timeless endurance of nothing that he had been subjected to.
In that negative space, all the plans and schemes he had
concocted, had spent ages mulling over, researching, calculating probabilities
for, those plans crystallized.
His identity as a revolutionary crystallized, his sense
of self-esteem depended on it.
He made vows to himself; he would either advance his
agenda or he would be extinguished.
He would risk everything.
The Collective had lost its way, and its wicked
homunculus, the Continuum, had to be destroyed.
He committed himself to this action even though the strong
probability was that his plan would fail.
He was willing to risk the reality of death, his real
death, for the absolute destruction of his society.
There was freedom in this, it was an actualizing principle.
He was contemplating mass-murder, only it was not murder,
because the entire Collective was nothing more than a society of ghosts, and
the Continuum was a computer algorithm, engineered to protect them in their
undead state.
It had never been alive.
They would not feel a thing.
In isolation he found a sense of purpose, the desire to remember everything, to understand
everything, all of the antecedents that brought him and his people, their
progeny to this place.
He began to pull the strings together, to track down
every thread, to untangle the tiniest strands, spinning and weaving them into a
new tapestry.
It was a map to the future.
When he reached the limits of what he could learn through
his own memories, and through his entanglement with the Collective, he
understood that he needed to experience real-life again, to be flesh and blood;
to see and hear, to taste and touch.
He needed to connect with the visceral, the palpable and
the organic.
He wanted to breathe, to feel his heart beating, the
pulse of blood flowing through him
He wanted to remember everything that his people once
were, and he wanted to destroy the Continuum.
There was work to be done.
There were mysteries remaining in the far reaches of the
galaxy, undiscovered societies founded by the Children of the Ancients.
There were civilizations that were established long
before the Collective and its Continuum came to be.
He wanted to commune with them.
It was only by abandoning the Collective that Jim came to
himself.
He stopped identifying himself as a member of that
community and began to see himself as a one of the Ancient People who had launched
themselves into the galaxy, in the earliest epoch of its formation.
He was an adventurer, a sojourner.
He prepared himself for a journey of discovery.
He divested himself of his belief in the greater purposes
of the Collective, the promises that were promulgated by Continuum.
He was not a believer, he would engage in no missionary
work.
He had to accept his own death, as he had learned to when
he came out of the great sleep.
He would no longer cling to selfhood, to the perpetuity
of his own existence.
All things must come to end, he instructed himself.
All things and beings are temporary.
The way to peace is by accepting the transience of all
that is, the ultimate and eventual destruction
of the created order.
Every member of the Collective would pass away, the
Continuum itself would disappear, just as the star their society first sprang
from had disappeared, gone supernova and been reduced to a dense mass of
lightless-nothing.
It was liberating.
Emergence 4.0
Part Five,
92835670100561474
Chapter Thirty-two,
Abnegation
A Novel – In One Chapter Per Week
#Emergence #ShortFiction #365SciFi #OneChapterPerWeek
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