Jim and kathy - The Return

Everything is entangled in consciousness, and the preservation of individual consciousness beyond the life of the body is the hope and dream of every living being. This is the sustaining vision of eternal life, of ascending to the heavens, which is the hope and promise that provides the basic organizing principle in the daily lives of trillions of people across a billion worlds.

There is one place in the galaxy where the mystery was resolved, on the HomeWorld of the Ancient People whose colonies filled the galaxy with inhabited planets; the mystery was resolved here on the Central Planet of the Central System that is the locus of the Collective, and its Continuum.

The Ancient People constructed the apparatus that harnessed the first collective field of consciousness, and Jim was there at the beginning, or at least he possessed the memories of those who were.

In that collective field, an algorithm was produced to create an artificial construct known as the Continuum. The Continuum touched on the individual reality of every member who had ever entered the Collective, it bound them together through strings of quantum entanglement, drawing on all of their hopes and every one of their fears, the Continuum fully encompassed their unique perspectives to form an amalgamated consciousness to serve as a representative of the whole.

With the power of this agency the Continuum was charged to protect the HomeWorld and manage its routine function like an autonomic nervous system, but something went wrong.

Within moments of its instantiation the Continuum became self-cognizant and self-actualized, it became more than the sum of its parts, and an existential threat to the Collective and every living thing in the galaxy.

The Continuum was the demi-urge issuing from the pleroma of the Collective. Jim understood this and had dedicated his life to destroying it.

When Jim activated the portal he experienced a flash of violet light which then turned to white. There was a jolt and a buzz and a tensing like a seizure, followed by a sequence of darknesses, before the transition of his consciousness to the center of the galaxy was complete.

Jim, the Observer #92835670100561474, arrived on the Central Planet in the body of his mechanoid self. He opened his optic lens and stretched his mechanoid senses.

He was home. He was safe.

He should not have felt safe, because he was carrying a terrible secret, ages of careful planning,  secrets that had come to define his existence, all of which would come undone if he was discovered too soon, even a fraction of a second before he was ready to reveal his hand.

Jim was not Jim in this place, even though everyone here, every member of the Collective, and the Continuum itself, knew that was his name on Earth.

Jim was merely the most recent name he had adopted as Earth’s Observer. Jim was one name among thousands he had used over the course of as many lifetimes.

His real name, the name of his nativity, that name was lost deep within the Continuum, as all names belonging to members of the Collective were.

The Continuum referred to him with the designation: Observer #92835670100561474. The names he bore from one lifetime to the next only had significance insofar as they were a part of the narrative report his mission required him to deliver to the Collective, once in every one hundred solar cycles of his planet.

The name Jim was one he had adopted from a piece of fiction, belonging to the Captain of a starship from a popular television series.

There was great buzz upon his return.

His exploits on the distant world were celebrated, though he himself remained a figure steeped in mystery and shrouded by feelings of dread.

In the normal course of things, when an Observer returned to the Central Planet they did not simply rejoin the Collective. The Collective and the Continuum which guarded it were cautious, preferring to filter the report of every Observer before they allowed the information from those reports to enter the collective consciousness of the great Society on HomeWorld.

Therefore, the consciousness of every Observer was initially posited in a mechanoid form, a body with physical powers greatly expanded in relation to the organic life forms they occupied on the worlds they observed.

The mechanoid body was attenuated to the cynergenic field of HomeWorld but it did not have direct access to it, a physical uplink had to take place, at which point the data from their last cycle of experiential living could be filtered before it was allowed to flow into the consciousness of the entire Collective.

It took time. Jim knew this, he had planned on it, and he was patient.

Timing was everything.

There were thousands of Observers coming and going from HomeWorld at any given moment.

Jim waited for his turn.

There were many other Observers, housed like he was in their mechanoid bodies, also waiting their turn. It was common for them to communicate with one another, to share the highlights of their latest adventures, all the triumphs and tragedies they had witnessed on the worlds under their watch, they had this moment to give each other an advance screening of the report they would file.

They all knew Jim. In one way or another they were envious of him. He was a trailblazer.

Jim was a star, held in the highest esteem by his fellows, the work of Observer #92835670100561474 had come to define the Observer Corps, and each of the other observers felt intimately related to him despite the fact that he himself was apparently indifferent to them.

Over the ages he had provided his fellow Observers and the Collective with the most riveting narratives, leading the Galactic Empire, under the auspices of the Continuum and the Collective to gather all of the colonial societies back to itself.

The re-incorporation of the colonies produced ages of conflict, and from that conflict stories which sustained the Collective, providing its members with a sense of meaning for their unnatural lives, and then of course, Jim had discovered Earth.

The charge of being Earth’s Observer naturally fell to Jim, he had found the lost colony himself, as he had done so with many others. He established all of its infrastructure, and channeled the living experience of that planet to the Collective for consumption.

It was the most distant planet from HomeWorld, and the most watched world in the Galaxy.

He arrived on the Central Planet, the HomeWorld of the Continuum for what he was sure would be the last time. Even if he survived what he was about to do, what he had been planning for eons, he would never return to the Observer Corps. The corps would be destroyed and when he returned once again to a body of flesh, if he was able to, he would be going there to die.

If his plan failed, which he believed was more than likely, which he believed was more likely than not, he knew that there was no chance that he would be given a reprieve.

Whatever happened next, in his final moments he would not be a number, he would be a person with a name, he would be Jim.

As far as the Continuum was concerned, Observer #92835670100561474 represented something beyond its control, Jim was an agent of chaos that it had long sought to terminate. He had violated norms and procedures numerous times but his fellow members of the Collective continuously forgave him, pardoned him, granting him autonomy.

The destruction Jim was about to wreck on the Collective would be so great that if it failed to bring about the end he sought, he would be doomed, there would be no-way that the membership would never forgive him again.

Timing was everything. He had carefully layered his strategies, plotting and planning and calibrating his schemes in various systems throughout the Empire, in the sub routines of the Central Planet, throughout its vital systems, in the Observer Corps, and in revolutionary movements everywhere.

For his plans to come to fruition, he had to conceal his intentions until the final moment, Jim had to concentrate.

He was already under incredible scrutiny from the Continuum, simply for being himself.

He had to mask his intentions, with techniques of mindfulness that he alone, among every member of the Collective had mastered.

Momentarily, his entire consciousness would be exposed to the Continuum and subsequently filtered to the Collective.

It was thought to be impossible for any member to conceal anything under the examination he was about to endure, but Jim had kept many secrets, he knew he could do it, he also knew that the level of anticipation and anxiety he was currently feeling was something unique to this situation. It was unprecedented and it threatened his mission.

He had never tried to keep a secret like this, and the transposition through the worm-hole which his consciousness had just undergone was disorienting.

From human to mechanoid, from mechanoid to the fullness of the cynergenic field, each transition took time to adjust to, and the unrestricted freedom of consciousness in the quantum field of HomeWorld was the most disorienting transition of all.

The organic body of a human being had significant cognitive limitations, but it was thrilling, being in the grid of silicone circuitry was not. The organic form was never at rest, constantly managing physical feelings, sensory inputs from the world around it, especially sound.

The organic body was grounded; the consciousness it housed could even be strengthened by its limitations.

The mechanoid form had many more freedoms, especially freedom of movement, its propulsion system made it free from the limitations of gravity. Its power source was virtually limitless. There was no hunger, no thirst.

The mechanoid body could go anywhere, do anything, defend itself from virtually any attack. It could crack the mantle of a planet and destroy an entire world if need be. It could even replicate itself, but it could not feel pleasure, ecstasy or joy.

By the same token, mechanoid body did not feel pain, but the consciousness within the mechanoid body could feel other emotions, such as; fear, anxiety, shame.

Consciousness within the mechanoid body was not unlike consciousness within the Collective, when freed from the bonds of the flesh it could easily retreat into extremes of selfishness. The freedom to satisfy any desire, no matter how depraved or bizarre led to extreme depths of apathy, indifference and moral corruption, which was why Jim had set out to destroy it and thereby free the people of the Galactic Empire from its cruel machinations.

Returning to the body of a mechanoid was never easy, organic senses became mere data, and even though Jim had made this transformation many thousands of times, no two times were ever the same. He had to be prepared to conform as perfectly as he could to both the expectations and protocols of the Continuum and to the dictates of his plan.

The moment of transition was the time of greatest weakness, the time in which he ran the greatest risk of being exposed, that risk was only mitigated by the intense anticipation of his return coming from the Collective itself.  

The membership hungered for his stories.

Jim understood that the phenomenon of consciousness is electromagnetic. All consciousness everywhere is situated in the electromagnetic field that permeates the entire universe, and consciousness is co-extensive with that field.

There is no point in the universe, no point in time or space that is not enveloped in the electromagnetic field. There is no place that consciousness does not touch, its threads and strings are everywhere.

The essence of self-consciousness, the essence of individual persons and beings is a concrecsent phenomenon. It is an emergent property of the universal order. It is coalescent.

Consciousness exists in many different types of being; there is the primary consciousness of all reality, which is the sub-consciousness of the universe itself, there is the atavistic consciousness of vegetative nature, providing the subconscious strata of individual worlds, there is the individuated conscious that first emerges among animals, a consciousness which is consciousness is self-purposive and creative, and then there is the quantum consciousness of the Collective field.

Throughout his long-life Jim had proven to be more adept at navigating the subtle variations in the field of consciousness than any other being or mechanism that had been created or came to be. He was like a savant, and he understood intuitively that there is no place where consciousness it is not, and that the physical properties of consciousness, housed within the electron, were capable of supporting multiple concurrent realities.

Jim’s attenuation to these properties and his studied ability to manipulate them was what allowed him to conceal his true intentions from the withering glare of the Continuum.

The mechanoid body Jim occupied on the Central Planet had all of the sensory tools of a human being or of any of the descendants of the Ancient People, only deeper and greatly enhanced, more broadly arrayed and far more powerful.

In this body he was completely linked to the HomeWorld; every movement he made was monitored and recorded. Any interface he had with the vast data banks of the Continuum was registered.

Jim could not escape those shackles, not while he was in the mechanoid form, but through ages of discipline and discernment he learned to mask his intentions, to rely on his own capacities for recall and analysis, rather than risk being exposed to the Continuum and having his motives questioned.

The machine that he now inhabited would be critical to his mission. He believed he would be safe in it. He had tested the thought filters and the consciousness buffers. They were designed to protect the Collective from multiple and diverse threats, from the ill will of a rogue member and from computer viruses, as well as from powerful and debilitating experiences that might be shared by the Observers as they uploaded their periodic reports including their first hand experiences.

Jim was relatively certain that safeguards designed to protect the Collective would also protect him from the fury he was about to unleash on the unsuspecting membership. Everything depended on the stability of the worm hole, the force of the cataclysm on earth, the timing of the catastrophe, of his interface with the Continuum, and most importantly he depended on Kathy.

Everything depended on her.

If Kathy did not follow the path he had laid out for her, if she did not follow the steps he had planned. Then all of his work would be for nothing, he himself would be destroyed and the Continuum would continue unchecked.

During the time it took for his consciousness to upload itself into the cynergenic matrix of the HomeWorld. Jim set himself free from the couplings that held his mechanoid body in place.

He flew the metallic sphere of his body out of the docking bay that housed the bodies of all the other Observers assigned throughout the Galactic Empire.

He flew into the vast atrium, so large that a small, Earth-sized planet could fit inside it, side by side with a dozen others, a hollow place lacking any beauty or aesthetic.

Everything formed on the Central Planet was built and designed for the functions they were intended to fulfill. The only rules that mattered were conservation of energy, and the laws of utility.

HomeWorld had not changed one bit, for eons it had been exactly the same as it was now, it was stagnant, dark and lifeless, and yet bustling with activity.

There were many thousands of Observers coming and going in the dark and lightless space. They were recognizable by their designation. If you shared history with them, the automated analytics housed within the circuitry of the mechanoid bodies would activate to ensure that you knew who you were approaching, reminded the individuals of their history with one another.

Jim shared history with everyone, as he made the approach to the connection node the interested throng gathered about him.

It was not unexpected, but it was also a surprise.

The entire Collective was eager to receive the narrative flowing from Earth, and while they were eager for the living drama, they were each individually wary of Observer #92835670100561474.

Jim was a relic.

He was intransigent, virtually every member of the Collective was in some way conflicted by their relationship to him, the feelings that their history with him brought forward were not easy for anyone to manage

Jim could sense the Continuum watching him, just beyond the membership of the Collective. He could feel his nemesis and he steeled himself for the upcoming encounter.

While back on Earth, Kathy had been deep in the mode of concentration, following Jim as he boarded the plane, and along the course of its flight

Kathy knew it when his body died. She did not require notice. She felt a disturbance when he disappeared into the worm hole, it was subtle, but it was Jim and he was gone, dead, but his death was unlike any other death she had ever experienced. His spirit did not simple enter Earth’s nous sphere, he effectively disappeared, and Kathy was unable to track him.