Official Intelligent Beings: How Our Devices Became Us, And The World Consumed Itself (11 page)

“So what now? Are you just going to kill me?”

“Oh my. Have you not heard anything that I’m saying? Killing you is the last thing that we want to do. What we want to do is offer you a position that no one has been offered before. We want to make you the missing piece, we want to make you our ninth Being—the final unifying Being—the one who will bring the rest of the world together, just as soon as we take care of the Uncommons, or the Underground Sound, whatever you call them, which we now know how to get to them thanks to you.”

“And what makes you think I would help you with such a crazy ass plan?”

“Do you know why we created the threat of an Alien attack and manipulated you into sharing that information?”

“Not a clue, but I’m sure it was merely for your own personal gain. To get what you wanted by scaring my followers. ”

“The only way to really unite an entire world, even if most were already doing just fine, was to convince them that their precious planet was being invaded. At every level of existence there is competition. In our past world there used to be states, countries, territories, that all fought at every level. Within the state, there were cities that competed in sports, within the countries, there were states that competed for land, within the world, there were nations that competed for dom-inance. That has all but been eradicated. There are still some who are not, how do you say, ‘team players,’ those that, like you, failed to fit in, failed to stay in line, take their UrDg like they should, those that want to disrupt the common good that we have worked so hard to create. And so, we found out that by convincing the world that their planet was to be attacked, that people would eventually team up and fight for their world, become one, forgetting their differences. Find a common enemy and the people will come to-gether.”

“That is insane, total web damn insanity!” Confidence rose in Jagz’s voice, about to explode with rage.

“I can see how it would sound that way, but everything is all in place. Your followers have responded. They believe in you. They are just waiting for you to take a stand, which is why I am here offering you a position to be treated like a living God, to rule the world with your words, to unify all of the beings on this planet, to create harmony amongst woman and man. All you have to do is agree and we will take care of the rest. You will be the final Being, the Official Intelligent Being of Communication, of free speech; your words will reach everyone. ”

“You think I would consider your wacked out plan for a split second? You have got to be out of your web-damned mind. You aren’t the only one with secrets. I’ve got some of my own and you’d better hope that they don’t catch up with you!
”
Jagz was on the edge of his seat, ready to pounce.

Mr. Herd smiled, put his left hand up to silence Jagz and said, “I’ll be right back. I have something you’ll want to see.”

Jagz waited a few minutes, his head racing as he tried to process what was going on and what he could do to stop it. He thought about the Alien hoax, about the Beings being fabricated, about the position he was being offered, and he wondered about the safety of Redd and the Uncommons.

Just as he was trying to formulate an escape, looking around the room for any sharp objects, Mr. Herd entered, a slimy smile on his face, and a large box in his hands. From it came an undetectable and pungent odor that made Jagz feel sick.

“I know that you think you have got this whole thing figured out, but as I said, this is much bigger than you. Your only hope is to do as we say. I’ve got a present for you, a little pick me up. It’s from the underground, if you know what I mean.”

Bewildered and enraged by Mr. Herd’s every word, Jagz spit into his face.

Mr. Herd whipped away the little saliva that grazed his face and without flinching said, “okay fine. If you don’t want to open it, I will. I suppose you’ve never had the joy of opening a present anyhow. You couldn’t possibly know what you were missing.

Mr. Herd opened the top of the box, reached his hand in it, and pulled out what was smelling so horribly rank inside.

“No, no, no. You son of a bitch, web damn mother of a bastard. I swear I’ll expose you for this. I’ll ruin you!” screamed Jagz when he saw that Mr. Herd was holding the decapitated head of Redd, Jagz’s only hope of escaping any of this.

Overcome with horror and torn apart in a dark rage, he passed into a deep sleep.

Chapter 20.

When Jagz came to, he was in total darkness. He felt nothing, he heard nothing, he was completely weightless, he knew nothing but peace. He had a sneaking suspicion that this was the end.

I must have been killed by Mr. Herd,
Jagz thought,
I’ve never felt this sensation before, but it’s quite nice, peaceful even.

“Do you even know of death?” Spoke a voice in his ear.

“Who is there? Where am I? I can’t see a thing.”

“I am Shade, the Great Being of Death and you are in the vast darkness. But you do not know of death do you?”

“We give thanks to Shade, for with him we know not of death,” replied Jagz.

“That is correct. But to answer your question, you are nowhere at all. You simply are.”

“So I was right. I am dead.”

“Like you said, you know not of death, so how could you know that you are dead?”

“That is not entirely true. Today I saw some-thing that I had never seen before. I saw the head of a man ripped right off of his body. I may not know what happens in death, I may be the first of my people to ever witness a death, but I can almost assure you that Redd was no longer alive, and as far as I am concerned, the absence of life means death.”

“But you are only partially right. It is true that Redd met his end on Earth, but life and death are not opposing means of existence. Life is what you have right now, whether you believe to be dead or not, you have your life. You can communicate, you can think, you have a sense of awareness about your surroundings, you have your presence. Death, on the other hand, is merely an idea that stems from fear of the unknown.”

“But you have always protected us from Death, how can it be that you have protected us from an idea?”

“Isn’t that all anyone needs to be protected from? Ideas? Thoughts? Concepts and words lead to sentences, sentences lead to ideas, ideas lead to action, action leads to emotions, emotions such as fear. And it is with this fear that humans used to carry the weight around of death, not seeing it for what it really was. When I came in, I was able to abolish the idea of death.”

“But you aren’t even real. Like Mr. Herd said, all of the Official Intelligent Beings are just people turned into living Gods, false prophets for the masses to follow, an illusion, a lie.”

“That may be true, but what difference does it make? The knowledge that I spread, the truths that I have shared, are still valued in your world. They have shielded everyone that you know from what human beings once believed to be death.”

“And what did humans once believe to be death?”

“Death, for many centuries never had one belief, and that was the problem. When
they
came to be and were trying to find a unifying belief of death to satisfy the masses and keep them on track,
they
found me and
they
found that I had already discovered the truth about death, a truth that was satisfying to all that believed it.”

“A truth? About death?”

“Yes. You see, death as an idea, as it once was, had many beliefs attached to it. Some believed that when you died, a part of you, which they referred to as your spirit or soul, went somewhere else, continued on living. Your physical body died, but your soul went up to a place those in the know referred to as heaven, a place that was believed to be the ultimate divine experience for those who believed in God and were good. However, according to these beliefs, if you were not good your spirit would go below to Hell with the Devil, where you would spend the rest of eternity being tortured for your wicked life on earth.”

“Sounds brutal.”

“That was just one of the many ways people believed death became us. Others believed that through something they termed ‘karma’ each person’s soul, or inner spirit, grew as they lived a better and better life, or fell as their life choices got worse, and when they died they were reborn, or reincarnated, as either a more, or less, advanced being, depending on their previous life. They believed that that cycle went on over and over until one’s soul reached the highest of highs, the ultimate stage of Enlightenment, Nirvana.”

“That idea sounds a bit better than the possib-ility of spending an eternity in hell.”

“Yes. The idea may have sounded better to some, but these weren’t always choices. Some people were born into these beliefs and they saw no way of escaping them.”

“So they never had a choice?”

“It depended on who they were and where they came from. Take, for instance, another belief of death, from what humans used to call Scientists, a religion disguised as something else for many years. Eventually it was exposed for what it really was, just another way of controlling people on blind faith. A large number of scientists believed that humans weren’t born of the spirit, but simply born of the physical body that evolved over time from a very simple organism into a much more complex one, like you today. They believed that when you died, that was it, the end. Your body decomposed back into the Earth and you were no more—you ceased to exist.”

“I’m not so sure that I get that one.”

“No. It is not for you to get.”

“What about death was it that you disc-overed?”

“Long before your time, when people did not take good care of themselves, when physical acci-dents happened and bodies deteriorated at a rapid and destructive rate, humans suffered from a variety of sicknesses. Some of those health prob-lems would put someone in terrible physical pain that they would live with day in and day out, unable to walk or move properly, while others would be destroyed completely from other compli-cations. One of the most unpredictable and myster-ious health complications that a human could experience was called a ‘coma’. Little was known about how comas came to be, and even less was known about how to cure someone in a coma. A person would go into a deep state of sleep and there would be no sign of when that person might wake.”

“Sleep doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It wasn’t the sleep that was bad, it was what caused the sleep that was the problem, it could be any number of disease, it could be intense physical trauma, or even excessive emotional trauma. Humans slipped into a coma and those around them had to wait, hoping they would snap out of it, never really knowing if that day would come.”

“That sounds odd, what would happen if they woke up?”

“Well it depended on the situation. There was something very interesting about comas that I first noticed while searching for an understanding of death.”

“What was that?”

“When a person woke from a coma, while those around them may have waited weeks, months, or even years, the person usually had no sense of how long they were asleep. To them, it may have felt like an instant, even if they were out for months. Imagine years passing by and you just thought you went to bed for the night.”

“How did that lead you to have a better under-standing of death?”

“It wasn’t the waking that interested me, it was the idea of time. You see, time is a relative, not fixed, experience. You could go into a coma, wake up two years later and feel like you only slept for five minutes while everyone around you was waiting for two years. That time may have slipped you by, two whole years unaccounted for, yet that time was lived by everyone else.“

“So what was different?”

“The only things that disrupted this time were dreams. Dreams like this one you are having right now, dreams that are quite uncommon these days, only to the few who do not quite fit in.”

“Dreams? Death? I don’t see what you are saying.”

“When I began to wonder how time functioned for someone in a coma, I looked at those that dreamt and I began seeking out those who awoke from comas and asked them about their experi-ences. The one common thread was that the only concept of time anyone had, the one perception of anything, was while they were dreaming, while their mind was creating a space for them to exist while they slept. Those who did not dream noticed no shift in time from the second they slipped into a coma to the moment they awoke, it was only those who dreamed that had consciousness.”

“Consciousness?”

“Consciousness is what you have, it is what you are always, it is what you are at this very moment. In fact, it’s a lot easier to feel right now, with the absence of your other senses in this darkness. During the day you experience so much stimulation that you rarely notice your own exi-stence, always doing something, always checking something, always staring at a screen or processing your surroundings. But consciousness is absolute, it is the one thing that we all share and it is the one thing that evades death.”

“But how does it evade death?”

“What I realized that humans were really afraid of wasn’t death itself, it was the idea of death. Some weren’t afraid. Plenty greeted death with open arms. But those, like the scientists, who had no place in their theories for the afterlife, and the sinners, who feared what may come after a poorly lived life, were always missing the key to unlocking the great mystery of death.”

“Well, don’t leave me hanging.”

“To have consciousness is to not have death. To have death is to not have consciousness. If you are not conscious to perceive death then it cannot be. Death does not exist within consciousness because it takes someone perceiving it to know what it is. If there is no you to experience death, then you can not die. If you perceive death, if you arrive in some life other than this one, an afterlife, then you are not really dead, you have simply shifted your con-sciousness, shifted reality, but you are still you. Consciousness is all there is, all that we have. There is only one thing that anyone can be sure of if they have consciousness.”

“Which is?”

“I am.”