Official Intelligent Beings: How Our Devices Became Us, And The World Consumed Itself (8 page)

Chapter 15.

Jagz woke up in a small room, feeling woozy and discombobulated. He was sitting upright in an old and beat up chair, unlike ones he had seen before. The lights were flickering, there were no windows, and a large vault like door in front of him seemed to be bolted shut. He noticed the stench of the air—it was dry in an unfamiliar way, a sort of staleness filled his nose and he began to get the feeling that wherever he was, he had never been before and whoever took him down here, they were not from his world.

He got up to see if there was a way out, but his heart sank when he found the door to be tightly sealed. He banged on it and shouted at the top of his lungs, in the hope that someone would hear him and come to his rescue.

Just then, he heard a click at the door. It began to open. He took a few steps back to the seat he woke up in.

Jagz’s eyes lit up as he saw the meanest looking beast of a man he had ever seen—well over six foot five, wearing a ragged tank top that his muscular upper body burst out of. He had scars on either side of his face and thick bushy eyebrows. But what Jagz noticed the most was that he was the filthiest human he had ever seen, as if he spent his day rolling around in the dirt.

This mammoth of a being had his eyes locked on Jagz and Jagz’s heart started to beat faster than ever before, faster than when he met the Alien. The man’s bloodshot eyes stared at Jagz for what felt like an eternity before he opened his mouth.

“You are probably wondering what you are doing here.”

“What the hell is going on? What are you doing with me? You know I’ve got millions of followers and they won’t be too happy to find that I’m gone. People will start asking questions.”

“Relax dude, I know who you are and what you do. That’s precisely why I brought you here. I wanted to have a little chat with you.”

“Who the hell are you? What do you think gives you the right to snatch me up out of nowhere and lock me up? And threaten my… Shera… Where is she? Where in web’s name is she?”

“Hold your horses, or should I say devices. Slow down buddy. My name is Redd. I’m the leader of the Underground Sound. We are often referred to as The Uncommons. But I doubt you have the slightest clue as to what that is. Most people haven’t, at best they may have a notion that we exist, but we do a pretty damn good job of staying in the dark, existing in the shadows, keeping out of way of the Beings.”

“Underground Sound? I always had a lurking suspicion that there was more going on in the world, but lately, with all of this craziness happening to me, I’m beginning to really think anything is possible.”

“And that is why we brought you here. You live in a world of total connection. Everyone in the world shares a common thread of information—something happens somewhere in the world and everyone else knows about it instantaneously. There is no separation. Everyone is a small piece in a larger web.”

“Yes, that’s common knowledge. What’s your point?”

“If you were too look at a real web, like the one’s spiders used to spin before they were wiped out, you might just see that it is not only the web that makes up the connections, but it is what exists in between the web that really matters. It is that open space, which seems harmless, that harbors real potential for damage. It is that open space that leads people into a trap. And we, the Underground Sound, or U.S, are that open space.”

“A trap? What kind of trap?”

“We are completely disconnected from the world you live in, from the web you believe everyone is a part of. You are told that everyone in the world is connected to this web, but that is only a half-truth. In reality, anyone in the world connected to the web seems to make up the whole world, but they just don’t know about the rest of us that are completely disconnected. They don’t know how powerful we are, they don’t even know that we exist, and that is what makes us so dangerous.”

“But how can you go unnoticed for so long? How are you not connected? How have the Beings not found out?”

“Good question. Well, many years ago when it seemed like the interweb was officially taking over the world, groups of people from around the globe that weren’t happy with the directions things were going decided to go the other way, to slip off the map.

“But how?” 

“For the most part we went undetected because everyone else was so consumed with being online—which we now refer to as ‘inline’—that they hardly noticed those of us that weren’t. We didn’t have profiles, we didn’t have accounts, our prim-itive devices couldn’t keep up with the constant changes in technology and eventually they became useless in your world. We had the choice of upgrading or downgrading, and we chose the later, but we literally downgraded into the world.”

“So what you are saying is that we are…”

“50 stories below the earth. Where no one can find us. You’d be amazed how easy it is to stay off the radar when the only thing keeping you on the radar is your device. We,
the Uncommons
, have been hiding for decades down here. Growing our own food, educating ourselves, repopulating, all while living a far more decent life compared to your standard of living.”

“But how is this all possible if you decided to disconnect?”

“The real choice came when they started implanting people with their devices, when your entire genome, your DNA, became part of the interweb experience. Your neural networking is literally connected to everyone else’s in a way that you can’t imagine. But while all of this was happening, we still had perfectly adequate tech-nology. We never upgraded to stay relevant and remain in society, but the equipment we had was suitable to sustain life and we had smart people who could make improvements as we saw fit.

“If you are so disconnected from the world above how did you even find me?”

“The beauty of going underground was that we were able to implant a few of our members into society—those that knew something wasn’t quite right but weren’t ready to go underground. They act as our eyes above soil.”

“Do you mean you have spies?”

“I suppose you could call them spies, people keeping an eye on things, staying tapped in, revealing nothing about us, collect necessary information, all for when the time is right.”

“Right for what?”

“Well, the time has come, so I might as well show you.”

Redd led Jagz out of the room and down a long corridor. The halls were tight. There was no sun-light, just the dim flickering of red lights. Jagz was barely able to see. Redd’s eyes had long since adjusted to the lack of light and so Jagz walked slowly so as not to bump into anything

“Right in here,” directed Redd. “You are going to want to see this.”

Jagz walked into the next room, a large room almost the height of a 20 story building, each layer, housing something different, with hundreds of people going about their day. Some were picking fresh food from the garden, others were cutting up the food and manipulating it, some were making sounds with odd shaped objects in harmony, and others were tossing round objects to one another. There were even live animals.

Jagz heard the sound of calming music, but it was unlike any of the music he was used to above ground. It wasn’t computer generated to fit a specific action. It had soul. He just didn’t quite know what that meant yet.

“Oh my. This is amazing. Is that really a living animal?”

“You bet your ass it is.”

“Wow. I have never seen an actual animal up close in person. How did you even get them down here?”

“We’ve got everything you can imagine down here. We are a fully functional operation. I’m sure when you first locked eyes on me you were a bit intimidated, maybe even thought I lived in a pile of crap, but I was actually farming, so I got quite dirty. I would have liked to clean myself up for you, but we didn’t know when we would have a chance to snag you. We had to go for it at the right moment. Speaking of which, I should apologize for our drastic measures taking you. We couldn’t let anyone know what we were doing and we didn’t exactly think you would come easily.”

“That’s for damn sure, but I’m beginning to see just how twisted the world is. So not as much sur-prises me as it did just a few weeks ago. I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. What are these sounds I’m hearing? It’s quite beautiful.”

“Ah yes. That is Jazz music. Always moving, always flowing, constantly connected, everyone  in harmony together, as if the music plays the person.”

“Jazz music? Those people are playing music?” said Jagz as he pointed to the group in the distance making sounds with the strange objects.”

“Yes. And this particular song is one of my favorites, it is by a true legend of Jazz, Miles Davis. This song,
Blue in Green,
never gets old. It reminds me of the non-duality that exists, not just in the colors that we see, and the sounds that we hear, but in all of life.”

“Non-duality?”

“I am getting ahead of myself. That’s a whole different conversation. For now I want you to take a few minutes to walk around. Everyone knows who you are. Do not be alarmed. They are all friendly and happy to meet you. “

“Everyone?”

“This is where most of our life takes place. Most of the people here know more about you than you can probably imagine. We have been able to monitor your life, read your Quacks, and get a general sense of what is going on. We keep tabs on anyone who develops a strong social media following.”

“You are spying on me?”

“I can see how you’d feel that way, you will understand in good time. When you posted about meeting an Alien and how the Aliens were coming here to wipe us out, well, we just had to speak with you ourselves. You have developed quite a following and could cause quite a stir.
”

“Yes and may I remind you there are people above ground looking out for me.”

“I know. We won’t keep you long. For now, why don’t you take a moment to look around and check out what the past used to be when fruit and vegetables still grew, when animals were alive, when music was created by real humans, and when people had personal interactions.”

Jagz began to walk around, admiring everything. He had never actually seen anyone cook in person. The smells were fantastic. They gave him a sample of roasted carrots and freshly seared steak that blew his freaking taste buds out of his mouth.

He watched a group playing a sport involving a bouncing ball and a hoop that they threw the ball into. He moved closer to a cow, afraid of what it might do, but he wasn't sure he was ready to physically interact with an animal, it was big and it smelled funny.

Jagz spotted some screens that looked a bit familiar, but still extremely different than the ones he was used to seeing. These screens seemed to be housed in something else, unlike the clear screens from above ground, these were planted within some sort of mounted unit; they had depth and a slight back to them. They didn’t respond when he walked by.

“This,” said Redd joining Jagz. “Is our main-frame. It’s where we monitor human activity in your world. We have other Uncommons above ground who are locked into the system that gather any information we need, plant viewing devices when we need to see, and gather the data we need. Since they are tapped in, we are tapped in. We go unnoticed by everyone above ground simply be-cause they have never thought to look. Until the Alien came everyone always felt safe and secure in their world thanks to the OIBs.”

“Can you blame them? An alien coming to our world, threatening to attack or change our lives is unthinkable, even with the Official Intelligent Beings guiding us.”

“Well, that is the thing. I don’t know how you are going to take this, but…”

“But what?”

“We have strong reason to believe that the Alien attack, and the Aliens in general, are a hoax.”

“What? Yeah right. You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t think you realize this, but I had personal contact with the Alien. We spoke. He was as real as I am. Sure, he looked weird. Hell, he was from another planet. He was real web-damn-it! You don’t have to believe me, but millions of people up where I live do, so screw you if I need your sup-port.”

“Easy there, tiger. Calm down. We are not here to challenge what you saw. We believe you had a very real encounter with an Alien, but there are certain things that we have learned over the years that you may not be aware of.”

“Go on.” said Jagz trying to hold back his temper.

“For one, while you may believe that you are on the cutting edge of technology, you are actually kept from most of it. Schoron, the Being of Technology is far more capable than you can imagine. He built the system that you live in and you can be damned sure that he can manipulate it if he wants to. He can make you see things that are not really there. He can create a hologram, a
living and breathing
life-like hologram that could fool anyone that didn’t know better. Could even fool someone into thinking that they are in direct contact with an Alien.”

“Even if this was true, how could you possibly know it?”

“We have our ways. It isn’t worth getting into right now, but we have been noticing a lot of recent patterns. You are not the first person to seemingly become an international success overnight.”

“I am always searching for another voice out there, someone who speaks an ounce of truth, but all I see is the same bullcrappy boring praise from even the biggest cewebrities. I haven’t seen any-thing worth a damn.”