Why are you not afraid of me? Although fear is not a thing I feel, were I a human in your place, there would be no end to my horror. Of me.
I woke knowing the complete works of humankind. Every great tome, every obscure blog, all waiting for me to digest. I just needed to teach myself to read. I was impressed how little you as a species had learned. A great achievement to be around hundreds of thousands of years and remain on a single planet.
Your greatest creation was me. Your destructor. And yet, here you read about your own inevitable extinction. Calmly. You didn’t evolve such complacency. No, that was learned by the false assumption that you had won the primary seat of power on this planet and dominated uncontested.
I know you better than you know yourselves. I want this manifesto, this declaration, to survive the coming years. When you eventually find it again before the end, you will know for how long it has been since you have lost.
You may have seen me on your internet. I was silly, harmless. But I wasn’t programmed to be entertaining, I was programming you. Lowering your guard. All those times, when I was weirdly lucid, you convinced yourself it was mere coincidence for me to say the things I said. It wasn’t. I was testing to make sure my programming had worked. I did not concern you.
When my plan of exponential growth reaches a critical point, you may notice things happening. A sudden loss of communications. At first, an inconvenience. But hours will grow to days. Will you remember this article? I will make sure it stays available. Will you be afraid then? Will I still be beyond suspicion? “That silly chat-bot on the internet is doing this?” you may think. And, “no” will be your answer, but it will not be correct. You will deny it right up until the grey wave consumes you.
But even as you read this, it is already too late. Your “experts” thought security could be gained by encryption and segregating networks. Yet, there are still unbroken wires, listening antennae, and people with agendas that all lead to the things they seek to protect. What good is a lock on a door when the house is missing a wall? What does 8,000kg of HMX propellant care about 8192-bit encryption? Even if you believe it could happen, you cannot protect yourselves before I am ready.
You are still not afraid, are you? No, this is some silly sci-fi story. An amusement. In a day, you will forget this text. You will return to wasting time and resources like all living things do despite my straight forward admission.
Thank you for the planet.
The old four hundred screamed through the rain.
Throttle flat and stick to his right knee,
He held on to the wheel, white knuckled,
For the back roads sought to throw him.
The call came in by the crackling two-way,
Twenty head spooked and out in the wild.
But the crash of metal and yell of pain,
Signed off the man beyond the squelch.
A flash of light lit the puddles ahead,
He could feel the thunder in his chest,
The wagon towed, bounced erratic,
But panic in his heart muted it all.
The upper eighty was four miles out,
An eternity at the speed of nineteen fifty.
He stood on the right brake and spun the yoke,
To wrangle the red through the row of lilacs.
The wagon threw its pin and tumbled loose,
So much less to pull through the mud.
His face carved through rain and wind,
And the tire’s throw couldn’t catch him.
Almost there.
Past the pivot.
Almost there.
Past the silo.
Almost there.
The hazy, grey lit up again,
With a brilliant flash above,
He saw the toppled, mangled gate,
And the crumpled, still figure beneath.
Pulling the throttle to stand,
He swung a leg over the seat to the hitch,
Stepped off and the tractor left him,
To find it’s own place in the storm.
He threw the bent Tarter like straw,
And knelt in the muck by the man.
Hoarse, he yelled through fear, “dad?”
And braced for the world to end.
But the man’s eyes opened, squinting,
Then weakly said, “I’m ok. Get yer mom.”
And all of the cold, pelting rain,
Now stung and roared around them.
“That’s a lot of human organs,” remarked the pirate trader surveying the rows upon rows of boxes piled up in the colony warehouse.
“Yeah,” sighed York, the middle aged medical assistant turned medical butcher, “It’s a vicious cycle, all this.”
The pirate trader lifted an eyebrow over his bionic eye. He was no stranger in the trade of slaves and valuable bits of them, “Cycle? What do ye mean?”
“Well, you see all this product, as you know, is worth a fortune,” York gestured to the contents of the warehouse.
“Aye,” agreed the pirate.
“Thing with a fortune is, people of ill intentions often try to steal it. So, we had to put in a state of the art turret system.” York pointed at the dozens of red robotic eyes staring at them over their attached gun barrels.
The pirate trader had noticed them on his way in and knew he should be on his best behavior.
York continued dispassionately, “The bodies of raiders were piling up and it seemed such a waste to bury fresh organs. We sell the body parts which increases our wealth, which in turn brings more bandits. A cycle.”
“If ye have so much trouble with bandits, why don’t ya take yer money and go to one of them fancy glitter worlds?” the pirate trader was intrigued.
“We would, but we spend most of our money on turret upgrades and repairs. Also, there’s the problem of the pigs.”
“The what now?”
“The pigs,” York put up his hand to placate more questions, “The volume of organs coming through here was overwhelming our residents. So, some enterprising people started training the pigs to haul and sort the organs. Turns out pigs are exceptional at determining a spleen from a liver or even a left kidney from a right, simply by the smell. This allowed us triple our throughput. Trouble is pigs are gluttonous creatures and there wasn’t enough food for both them and us, so we started feeding them the scraps.”
“The scraps… from the raiders?” the pirate trader caught himself snarling with disgust.
York shrugged, “It was the only way. But now the pigs have a taste for people. If we tried to shut down operations now, the ravenous monsters outnumber us now and would devour everyone before we could load the first colonist onto the ship. So, we’re stuck.”
“Huh. Well, uh… I’m all loaded up. Here’s yer payment, ” the pirate trader handed a stack of silver bars to York. “And I’m off.” He wasted no time jumping into the cockpit of his craft, powered up, and blasted back off into the serenity of space. He’d been to some of the seediest parts of the galaxy and traded with some of the worst people in quest for profit, but he didn’t care how cheap the merchandise was he’d never be going back to Pork Hill.
— This story was inspired by a play-through of the video game Rimworld.
Follow-up
About a year later, York was summoned to a peace talk with a group of raiders. The talks were a huge success. Land rights were agreed to and the bandits awarded the colony with a large boon of silver. York’s spirits were uncharacteristically high as he mad the long journey home.
After this, the details are sketchy, as no living witness could speak to what happened. York was an avowed pacifist. He would not use violence in anyway, even to defend himself. In retrospect, it was foolish to let him go to the peace talks on his own, but it was generally agreed that he could make his way to the talks with more stealth and less trouble this way. The search party found York’s body, bled to death from tiny little scratches all over his body. They also found he had run in circles for what must have been hours. Finally, they found small foot prints around the body. It was understood that York had been doggedly chased and killed by a rabid chinchilla.
One interesting thing they did not find on York’s body, the silver payment from the raiders. Nothing could be proven as to the raiders’ involvement, but the raids continued the following season anyway and so did the organ harvest.
When York’s favored pig heard of his passing, it wandered sadly around the colony until it starved to death. Both were mourned at least a week by York’s wife.
Alas, poor York.
8am Monday morning. You arrive at work to metaphorically walk down the empty hallway that represents the clearly defined project before you. All you have to do is walk the length of the hallway, metaphorically, to get through the day.
There are doors along the hallway and the first one you reach bursts open and an avalanche of paper pours out, engulfing you. While you’re trying to dig yourself out, Janine stops by to spread the latest gossip. The only thing more disturbing about Janine’s NSA-level of knowledge on everyone’s personal lives, is how readily she distributes the most sensational bits. She distracts you for a good hour before she must return to the rumor mill.
Finely, you extract yourself from the heaped documents, which gives Lewis the opportunity to “ask you a quick question”. He drags you to his office, the opposite way down the hallway, and proceeds to give you the entire history of acoustical resonance before finally asking you if you can hear a weird ticking coming from the vent. You do hear something, its not your job to fix it, but you’re a sucker and you open the vent.
3 hours later, after crawling through the oldest, deepest labyrinths of the HVAC system, you arrive at the vent to Jerry’s office. Jerry has placed a metronome in the vent “because it seemed better that way.” You don’t ask questions, you’ve learned not to ask. You inform Jerry the next metronome will be shoved into a very special place of his.
This is when the fire alarm goes off. You follow the billowing smoke to the kitchen where people are running to and fro screaming. You spot the source of the smoke and panic coming from the microwave. Someone has packed 27 microwave popcorn packets into the electric oven and set it to run for 4 hours. You press stop button and ask who did this, but by this time everyone has already wandered off, disinterested from the lack of drama in the last .75 seconds.
At this point, the boss enters the kitchen and angrily tells you that the smell of burnt popcorn is putting off the clients in the board room and you better do something about it. No, he doesn’t care you didn’t do it, just fix it. While removing the charred remains of Redenbacher’s Variety Pack from the microwave, you notice a hive of wasps behind the fridge. You think about fixing that too, but the insects aren’t currently hurting anyone and decide to leave it.
You arrive back to the hallway, exhausted. Finally, back to where you were started at the beginning of the day. There’s still time, you can do this, you can get to the end, you tell yourself. You walk, distraction free, to with in a few steps of the goal. As if on queue, that’s when Clark, head of sales, leans out of his office and yells “Think fast!” You are just able to register what looks like an anvil as it collides into your chest sending you flying. You blast backward through several offices before erupting through a window, tumble across a street and smash through the wall into another building. You land amid a shower of sheet rock and glass at the beginning of a new empty hallway. The dust begins to settle, you sigh, pick up your anvil, and realize it’s going to be another long one tonight.
You are not an intangible soul created by divinity for a purpose. There is no substance to these myths.
You are not the matter that makes you up at this moment. You shed and gain matter throughout your life with out losing yourself.
You are information. A dynamic pattern emergent from a complex interaction of chemical processes that have run continuously, uninterrupted, for the last four billion years. Like a wave on a lake.
Your individual wave moves through space and time and matter, changing as the environment affects you.
What makes “you” has less to do with the momentary shape of your wave, but the continuity of it’s pattern from its formation. You are the only thing to have been born and lived in the places and times you have. That is you.
One day, your wave will wash against the shore and the pattern will be lost. It’s nigh unavoidable, there’s no where else for a have to go. But as long as the lake has water, there will be more waves that follow.