Things aren’t quite the way they used to be. Things change fact of life and death. Even if we can change those facts like I have. Things still very much change. I no longer know who I am or what I have become. I’m not what most people would consider normal. Most would consider me to be eccentric. They always have from every moment that I can remember. Strange not normal. Broken and not equal. Different in every sense of the word. They were right of course, but I guess chasing endless winter is not most people’s idea of a good time. Not most people’s idea of where I should be or what I should be doing. But I like the isolation, the cold, and the loneliness of it all. It helps me think and that is all they really want from me in the end. They want me to think for them. To create for them. Being out here in the nothing makes me feel more alive than a room full of people sucking up to my money. Yes, I am rich. Richer than most nations to be exact. To be fair though that isn’t saying much considering most nations didn’t go with technology. The choice was too easy to follow me, to invest in my ideas. Man is flawed in that way. Self-doubt, too easy can’t be the right way. Must resist and so they did. Investing in war and death. I shouldn’t have to tell you how that turned out. But history, stories they are summaries of things we already know.
Turns out bombs don’t feed people or build homes or take care of you when you get old. No, bombs only have one purpose and they do that function very well. But robots? My robots? They can do so much more than kill. Most nations fallen to the way side, disappeared off the map of everything including people’s minds. The advancements were swift, they were quick. I discovered a loop hole that we had missed. An easy option no one believed to exist. Greatly enhanced soldiers that feel no pain, targeting systems that can target any and everything you may desire, and a defense system so advanced that it would make nuclear war less of a fear and more of an annoyance. Whole nations wiping themselves out before the missiles even left the ground. Only took a few of these “brave and fearless leader” to wipe themselves out before all nuclear missiles were deemed obsolete. In fact, less bombs destroyed whole nations then had ever been tested in the history of any nuclear program. I didn’t just make the world better. I saved humanity and everything with it. These were only the beginnings of my ideas. Yes, my pockets were lined with dirty dollars of anyone who was willing to pay for protection. This is capitalism at its finest. This is everything that we once believed in. Things they change even if we don’t think that they can. No one notices if you stay within the lines.
What is left of Christianity would blame faith in false idols and other dated terms for what was coming. Yes, I am that old. Faith can come to us at any moment, but it cannot change in an instant. It is enduring like that. The same can’t be said for nations. Even to those who neither fear or believe in God. Faith is something else. Faith isn’t something than can be so easily pushed aside. Even the most faithless person believes in something. Something they cannot see, but swear that they can feel. The new question now became how do I get them to believe in me? The faithful fought the next wave of advancements. Pushed my patience beyond their limits. I grew bored with enhancing nations to the highest bidder. It was time to take my ideas beyond governmental and to the people. Take it beyond the surface of what I knew and go deeper. Humans are a flawed design. Boasting about how we are the greatest at everything. Spreading lies beyond the fabric of what we know to be true, but I knew with my help. I could make all our lies, all our fables, and all our faith in ourselves a reality. I knew that I could make them true.
My advancements in nano tech and hybrid parts brought the revolution to the people. Put everything in their hands to do with as they wished. So long as they paid. So long as they understood what it was, they were getting into. They didn’t, but it didn’t matter. Humans adapt to ideas they don’t understand. It is a slow process, but they accept the way things are eventually or they die off. Evolution sits as a theory, but the problem is we understand it better than we like to think. We accept it as truth even as we question its very existence. Deep down we already knew. We have always known what is that we are, where we come from, and how it will all go. There may be no all-seeing god, but something moves us to follow blindly. I would give them the means for what we have spent existence to discover. No one, not even myself can be as arrogant to not believe in a purpose. A self-fulfilling prophecy written before the beginning of time.
The fall was coming. Everything I had created was going to turn. Human history is riddle with stories similar to mine. The Roman Empire, the Chinese Dynasties, the rise of early man, and the list could follow us all the way to today. Life doesn’t stop under the wheel of change. It grows stronger. Picking up speed until we no longer understand what it is that we have created. A bump in the road, a great fall, but this one was different. This one was not like the rest. Unlike the falls of the past, the missteps that lead to something else. This one changed the game. Changed the world and the human race. We moved past everything we thought we knew with built in control. We became something greater than ourselves. The ones that were left that is. The advancements I made in human tech changed the game. We became one with the robots. Equal to my creations. Working side by side until we cleaned up everything. We needed something more though. We always need something more. We looked to the skies once again. Except this time, we knew that we were ready to face any and all challenges. No longer a dream, but the next step in our evolution. My evolution, my purpose in this world. For the first time in human history people are too busy thinking. Thinking of ways to make everything better rather than how to destroy. For the first time in human history everyone is thinking like me.
That is why I live here alone like this. To free myself from all the noise. That is why among other things I do what I do. To clear my consciousness. I feel this need to distance myself from them. I feel this over encumbering need to be as far away from them as I can. So, I can better them. So, I can better us as people. Nothing will ever stand in our way of achieving greatness ever again. We will conquer the stars as one. We will take all that is ours as one. For the first time in human existence, we all have a singular reason to flourish and all it took was me. The weight of the world sits on my shoulders held up by the strength of so many. Change is inevitable even if nothing ever seems to change outside the lines. The wind howls outside of my cabin. A few more days left of darkness and the chase will begin again. The world advancing by the minute and my wealth grows. The owner of this world, my empire, lives in near darkness studying the sky of the lost planet no one’s even heard of yet. Trying to make sense of our new purpose in this universe and the darkness beyond.
This fucking story… This story didn’t start out like this at all… the original draft was trash… an idea that I didn’t know was there until I looked a lot deeper… So I worked on it… worked with it… typed up the whole thing on my phone… had it all amazing… had it to a point that I thought was good… then technology and my stupidity fucked me… While trying to transfer the file from my phone to Layne’s computer… using all the great advancements that Google bestowed onto us… We lost the whole thing… didn’t save it correctly… or lost internet connection… who knows…
Back to step one… and I was fucking pissed… I’m still pissed and it has been over a week… still pissed and I have rewritten the whole thing for a second time… but it is over and done?… I just read it… why are you so pissed?… Who cares?… you are right but it doesn’t matter… We’re pissed because the story was vastly different… and how it was different I don’t know… but I know… it wasn’t sci-fi… I write by the seat of my pants… I write until it is done… I purge the thoughts and move on… then one of us takes over… so if it isn’t written down… saved somewhere… neither of us have any idea what it was that the other even said…
So… all that work… all that effort… gone in a flash… and like this character all I think about is progression… not going back… But we had to go back… We had to finish this story… redo this story… woke up today… and got it done… It isn’t that bad actually… still pretty pissed that I had to do it again… but for all I know… it might have all been for the best… destruction and loss… may have all been for the best… or maybe it wasn’t… “Faith can come to us at any moment, but it cannot change in an instant”…
Is That A Funeral? 