Official Intelligent Beings: How Our Devices Became Us, And The World Consumed Itself (12 page)

Chapter 21.

Jagz awoke again, as if into another dream, in a similar state. There was no sound and no sight, not as far as he could see, but he recognized that similar feeling of stillness. It was a different feeling than in his dream with Shade, but his sense of smell returned and the wretched stench of death came back. He went from a state of peace to a state of panic as he realized that he was back in the room where Mr. Herd showed him Redd’s severed head.

With his sight gone, he began to yell at the top of his lungs.

“Hello! Is there anyone out there? Please help me! Shera? Please, you have to help me, anyone, please, anyone, I can’t.” Jagz began to cry. As he screamed started to wondered if he was in hell.

Nothing.

After he got out all of his panic, he managed to pull himself together enough to remember that he could move freely. Carefully, Jagz felt around the room searching for anything, doing his best to avoid the decapitated head. There was no other sign of life, not even Shera.

He managed to find his way to the door and, when he opened it, he saw a small flicker of dim red light down the hallway. There was enough light that he could make his way and search for help. It seemed as though the power had been shut off. He couldn’t hear a thing, aside from a low hum and some rattling of feet coming from what seemed to be just above him.

He made his way to a stairwell and climbed a floor, exiting quietly and quickly, desperate for some clue as to what was going on. Down the hall, he noticed some light peeking through a door. He made his way toward it. When Jagz got to the door he leaned his ear against the wall to listened, recognizing a voice.”

“How can this be? It makes no sense! I don’t understand! Can someone please explain to me what the hell is going on!” said the voice.

“Sir, it appears that they have somehow managed to knock out all of our systems. Nothing is responding, just these backup generators.”

“That is simply not possible! So long as one portion of our entire network is inline, we will always have complete contact with everything and everyone. This doesn’t make any sense. They would have had to take out the original source to knock everything out, but they had no way of getting down here and destroying Schoron. He was in our close protection the whole time.”

“I know, sir. I don’t understand what is going on but this has never happened before. All of the systems seem to have failed, President Herd.”

Jagz, proudly smiling, realized that Mr. Herd didn’t have the upper hand for possibly the first time in his life. He headed back to the stairwell, hoping to make an escape.

But I don’t understand,
he thought,
Redd said Schoron was the key to taking down the system, if Schoron is safe then surely their plan didn’t work out.

Then it hit him. He remembered something that had been a constant theme in his recent life,
all is not as it seems. I’ve been played for a fool this whole time!
He smiled victoriously.

Jagz, realizing that his device was all but useless, reached into his pocket looking for the one thing that could make sense of all of this, hoping that it was still there, hoping that he did not leave it behind. This time it was not UrDg, but something far more valuable.

Just as his hands gripped the piece of paper Redd gave him, his mind began to race into a furry trying to solve the puzzle.

He looked attentively at the paper. It had both the cryptic message and it’s actual coded meaning:

“Study our mythology, I.E. Chronos”

“Royy, Log, Youth! Schoron must die!”

If Schoron wasn’t meant to die, then what was Redd trying to say to the others on the surface? It took him a few minutes, but he crossed out one letter and added it to another, mixing and matching letters until he began to spell out something particularly unusual.

No, holy, CYO, go.

Red, Roy, Must.

RED? Jagz’s eyes widened.

He rearranged the words to form a complete sentence.

No Roy. Shut Holy CYO. I, Red, must go.

“Red, must go,” said Jagz quietly, “the whole time? The whole damn time! How can this be? Redd somehow must have known that he had to die to make things right, make things the way that he wanted to. He must have known that it was his only way. But I still don’t get it. To shut down the holy CYO? Mr. Herd? Red had to die to shut him down for good?”

Jagz, in disbelief, and yet feeling a special bond between him and Redd, knowing somehow that Redd’s death was all part of the plan, continued up the stairs. He walked and walked and walked, not sure he had ever walked up so many stairs before. His legs grew tired as he lost track of the levels. Just when he wasn’t sure that he could walk any further, he began to hear sounds of destruction, sounds of bombs, and he saw lights sparking and flashing. The adrenaline pushed him further.

As he ascended above ground, the sounds got louder and he reached towards a door that seemed to lead outside. As he was about to grab the door, he heard a familiar voice.

“You! You have no idea what you have done!” yelled Mr. Herd in what almost sounded like defeat. “Everything that we have worked so hard for has been lost! You have ruined our empire. You have no idea what this will mean. The world will tear itself apart. You just created a living hell on Earth!”

“No, Mr. Herd. I believe it is you that has no idea what you have done. It’s like you said, I’m just a pawn, a piece of a much bigger puzzle, someone is pulling my strings, I have no idea what I am doing.”

“I don’t know how he did it. We were so sure that Schoron was safe, that with Redd dead, any chance of a threat was eliminated, we were abso-lutely sure. Until it dawned on me. It wasn’t you that they needed to get into our mainframe hide-out, it was Redd.”

“I figured that out myself. But what good was he dead?”

“When Redd’s heart stopped, whatever device they planted in him must have gone off and knocked out all of our systems. It destroyed everything, wiped out Schoron. We are ruined! The whole time I thought that if we took out Redd the Uncommons would be of no threat. But that was exactly what he wanted. He knew it was the only way to get to us. Now that crazy old bastard won’t even be around to see his world go to hell.”

“But how could killing Schoron, one man, do any harm to your system?”

“Kill Schoron?” said Mr. Herd with an iron-ically uncomfortable laugh. “Schoron isn’t a person. At least not of your capacity. He was our greatest discovery, our greatest achievement of all. Schoron was our first real success at Artificial Intelligence.
He,
as we called him, housed all of our information and was the heart of our network, the one Being that wasn’t born of a human, but born from the genius of other humans. Without Schoron none of what we have created would be possible. We stored all of humanity’s information in him, he was literally the brain of technology as we know it, he was perfect intelligence.”

Jagz, under his breath, said, “that son of a bitch did it. I can’t believe Redd actually did it.”

He slowly walked over to Mr. Herd.

When he got within arms reach, of Mr. Herd, on the brink of a total break down, he reached out his hand as though to shake Mr. Herd’s. Then he threw the hardest, and only punch, he had ever thrown in his life.

Blood shot out of Mr. Herd’s nose as he collapsed onto the ground.”

“You know,” said Jagz, “before I figured out Redd’s real plan, I wanted to do that so desperately. I wanted to take you down for ending the life of a great man.”

“I’m already ruined. Why the hell would you do that?” said Mr. Herd in broken words as he cried through the pain.

“These current events will shake the world as we know it. We have entered into a new time of rebirth. We have a chance to start over, to make things right, and I wanted to start my new life off by giving two men of now equal stature a chance to feel something real for a change. Goodbye, Mr. Herd. Best of luck. You are going to need it. They say the real world is full of animals that know nothing beyond an instinct for survival. Yes, best of luck indeed.”

Chapter 22.

Jagz walked out of the compound and into what looked to be the end of the world. Planes had crashed into the ground, bombs went off in the distance, sirens wailed, people screamed, it was total chaos and he felt a strong sense of Deja Vu, as though he had dreamed this very day not long before.

He walked slowly, peacefully, with a smile of prosperity on his face, everything was as it was meant to be. He had no more questions. He had no more following. He didn’t need to share his life with anybody, but one.”

Just then, over the hill, he spotted the one thing he knew he could not live without in this new world—those beautiful green eyes, he could see those eyes from miles away, eyes that first caught him, shook his life, and showed him what it meant to feel something real.

Just as he began pacing towards her, a song began to blare out of the loudspeakers. Miles Davis’
Blue In Green.

Redd, you sly old dog,
thought Jagz with a certain sense of pride.

As he neared her beautiful presence, he grabbed Shera by the hands, wrapped his arms around her slender body, kissed her neck, and swayed the two of them left and right, dancing in a sea of calm amidst the surrounding chaos .

“You know,” said Jagz, as he caressed her stomach, “I’ve already picked out a name for him.”

“How do you know it’s going to be a boy?”

“I lost a good friend today, but I’ve got a strong feeling that he will return to us in a new form.”

“What’s the name that you have chosen?”

“Ani Rudh”

“Beautiful. What does it mean?”

“One who loves freedom, or one who cannot be controlled.
”

“I love it.”

“I knew you would.”

“You know me so well.”

“I’m beginning to think that I do, more than anyone has ever known anyone in this world. Speaking of, I can only begin to imagine what the world must be going through after losing all of their connections.”

“Well, I don’t know how you did it, but right before everything went blank, your entire conver-sation with President Herd was sent around the world. How did you manage that, anyhow?”

“Ha, more and more surprises. Redd gave me something to wear in my eye, said it was for the Uncommons to find me after it was all over, but now I see what he really wanted to do.”

“Expose Mr. Herd?”

“Exactly. Show the world what they were really up against before bringing the whole damn thing to the ground.”

“Well, at least we have this wonderful music. What more do you really need?”

“I love this song,” he whispered.

“You know
they
say Jazz is dead?”

“Yeah, that might very well be true, but what the hell do
they
know?”

Afterword.

Up until writing
Official Intelligent Beings
I had never written a work of fiction before and I’m not really sure what drew me to write this one.

It was not much more than a month ago that I began writing
Official Intelligent Beings
, previously titled
Jazz is Dead
, and now, as I put the  finishing touches on the book, I write to you from a small and peaceful apartment in Costa Rica.

These past two weeks in the jungle of Costa Rica have been some of the most intensely amazing days of my life. Making friends, dancing, playing music, sleeping in bug infested tents, doing some-thing called
The Naked Truth
, blindfolding and feeding people, vibrational healing, and talking with great minds about the current state of the world, while making predictions for the future.

The recent days that I have spent without much connection to the outside world and with little to no internet have been very eye opening. They may have reminded me just how dependent and addicted I have become to my devices, but they have also reminded me of just how freeing it feels to be disconnected and simply present with my own thoughts.

I have made other attempts at writing fiction before, a few short stories here and there, hundreds of notes over the years of half baked ideas that I thought were great at the time, but when I started writing
Official Intelligent Beings
I knew something was different.

From the moment I began typing, it was almost as if the story wrote itself, pulling from some unseen force the dialogue, the setting, the plot and the action, that you have just ingested. And while it took me many long hours of rereading and rewriting, I enjoyed every second of it.

The real challenge came not so much from writing the actual story but learning how to write a story and how to format a book. Once I realized that this was a passion project that I would be publishing myself, I did what I always do when I want to learn something new— I watch every video and read every article I can find online about the subject.

Official Intelligent Beings
may have been, in part, my nod to some of my favorite books;
1984, Brave New World, Sirens of Titan, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, Siddhartha,
books that have forever changed my life, but I wanted to share my own view of a possible future, mixed in with a very real present, and see what might come from that.

While I have yet to start, I have full plans of writing a follow up to
Official Intelligent Beings.
I want to continue the story, offering a possible outcome, and maybe even a bit of a solution, to the usually dark and open ended endings of most dystopian futuristic novels.

I want to give Jagz a chance to push the story forward, into another dimension, not just end on the whole civilization comes crashing down scenario, no, I want to find out what happens next, don't you?