Novella Chapter 1
The wheels spin, and the road unravels. Head down, Joe sees the speckled blur of faded pavement oozing by, his charcoal gray pin stripe pants churning the pedals. The tails of his matching suit coat flap softly in his peripheral vision. He savors the thrill of not looking ahead, of not watching where he is going. Just the ever flowing below, his pumping legs, and black field boots going round and round.
Not that there was much ahead that could get in his way. This highway had been avoided as it led neither to or away from anything significant, just another luxurious ribbon of tar criss crossing a gorgeous land, partitioning forest and bridging streams. There wouldn't be abandoned cars or trucks to avoid, maybe just a white tail deer or a clutch of turkeys ambling away from his whirring bicycle. The tar was cracked and getting brittle, but otherwise still serviceable for the thin kevlar tires of his steel racing Miata. He could stare down and loose himself in the unraveling now, the future was definitely handled.
"I love field work, the wilds, the mysterious ruins, the people," he thought. "I love life and the whole dang world, truth be told. The compulsive planners could stay cloistered, haunt the so called control centers and play at being cosmic beaurocrats. I'd rather be under the sun and stars, alive, present."
Deploying this train of thought as chaff, Joe slipped into a deeper encrypted cognition.
"I am the agent errant, for decades running my own private exploit, the DOG project. From the perspective of my worthy peers, DOG is a wizardly but inconsequential plan B, an eccentric dabbling, a hobby. And why not? Every Clique had a side project or two, whether research or art. Sleepless, stewards of creation, eternal - what could be denied to us? My enthusiasm for the great work is authentic and reliable as evidenced by my willingness to leave the enclaves of my Clique brothers and sisters and get my hands dirty in the field, solo. I am their gifted engineer, mechanic, a zealot! We could use more like Joe, men of action, they opine to each other. For them, my zeal for the field is slightly gauche, even comic. The theory kids are generally contemptuous of mere instrumentality. Design is their thing, implementation an after thought. This gross exposition I offer for an imagined posterity, dear reader, dear leader, dear Clique who are with a little luck soon to respawn. You're welcome."
Glancing up, he notices the highway banking to the east slightly and leans the bike into a sweeping arc. Bringing his head back down, he drops thought and plays his pothole surfing game. At speed, gaps in the pavement come into view in just a fraction of a second. Avoiding a jarring edge impact requires optimal swerves, possible only through virtuosic amygdala activation. Alternately, he could yank up on the handlebars to hop over the chasms, but he feels this is a less than elegant solution. "Rapid and non volitional weaving is more my aesthetic," he muses.
A cloud parts, flooding the brim of his felt fedora with sunshine. Maple branches sway significantly and so the opportunity to adjust the mileau arrives. Joe shifts back into deliberate cognition and palms his iStone. Summoning an icon he thumbs a confirmation. In an educated British accent, a woman's voice says "Teach the future. Local regression is likely. Continue?"
Joe's finger brushes the icon again, clears his throat and starts to speak.
If you could tell yourself something
from this back to then
would you whisper be gentler
or for god sake more sin?
By the side of the highway artifacts appear and slide by in jerky animation. Skulls poking out of sexy negliges, VHS porn movies, Playboy magazines from the 60s, and fertility figurines and finally flowers. Voices of children echo in repetition, at first immediately following what Joe says, then chiming in with him in sync.
if you could rewrite your present
by visiting your past
would you try to be gentler
or kick some more ass?
More artifacts pass by. Battle rifles, hand made bows, then stone axes. A chorus of voices, more joining in.
why mourn that lost lover
heart broken and how?
when another you’s smiling
near here, almost now
The voices are fully in sync, strong and yet there's a radio transmitter quality, as if they coming from far away.
"Again, I'll just break the fourth wall and explain, for the story is subtle and without a friendly voice over you might miss out. I, Uncle Joe have just altered the future by changing kids who are alive now, or to be more accurate, I colonized the future to reach back Michael Brown Presence Process style and alter our experience of the past, our childhood memories. Eerie, eh? You've probably guessed at this point I'm a member of a spiritual elite, and by the standards of mortals such as yourself we are a bunch of malevolent mofos. I get that! From your perspective, beings like me are not nice. I'm not going to pull the old cinematic trope of tricking the audience into rooting for the antagonist. Actually, I'm the protagonist of this story, even if I am a rebel angel which means I must be Satan, right? Nope. Archetypically speaking, I'm the Trickster. In the Gary Gygax 1974 D and D alignment, I'd be chaotic good, like Coyote. In this story, there are some difficult choices to make, even for god-like entities. Especially for. I guess I'd like to ask you to hold off on preconceptions and have fun, and maybe if we're lucky we'll open our hearts and minds.
So in the beginning was the word, so says the bible and in this science fiction post apocalyptic romatic comedy words are a future technology. Back in the 2020s folks were all about AI prompts, the right words given to AIs could unlock super powers, they thought. Except those early AI's were all spiked with BS. A spell, incantation, word magic, lines of code, the logic of instantiation, non instrumentality. If you like Abraham Hicks this whole universe is one humungous riff, hi Ester! Later on we'll attend a People's Poetry Slam that basically reboots oral tradition, but whereas that's only a 'performance', when I use the words in collaboration with this iStone, the words become things, events, outcomes.
How it all begins
If god is all powerful, all knowing, could god decide to become more powerful, to learn? Can god become more? How would god grow?
Theme Park Earth or TPE. Of unknown origin, assumed to have been instantiated in the cosmic creation as a spiritual instrumentality to expand that which is already everything. If god is all powerful, all knowing, could god decide to become more powerful, to learn? [middle ages - vatican scholars debating].
How does god transcend omniscience and omnipotence? If knowledge is complete and power is absolute, then newness or growth is impossible. There could be no questions, no curiosity. TPE is a spiritual instrumentality in that it enables questions and curiosity. This is possible because TPE simulates limitation. Facets of the divine enter this simulation and explore as if they were not divine. Because of the occlusion TPE affords, facets can access questions and curiosity.
TPE's simulation of limitation invites facets to experience constraints, including mileau features such as gravity, electro magnetism, and pressure, and facet parameters such as expression, forgetery, and contrast / desire.
Expression includes both the configuration and context of a facet, for instance a facet can express as a mountain, a tree or a human. Humans are born into existing lineages and unique starting conditions of wealth, health, intelligence, etc. Expressions are selected based on a facet's specific preferences for research and exploration.
Of the various constraints, forgettery is. Almost all facets in physicality forget their divinity. Another
The Clique are comprised of those that 1) remember they are god and 2) decide to manage TPE for max expansion. The two most obvious aspects of TPE are forgettery and contrast.
Most of the Clique opine that max expansion requires max contrast, eg pain and suffering.
The divine oneness can also be experienced (experience itself) as multi-faceted. This is an essential precursor to the utilization of TPE. TPE enables duality, individual facets can assume a physical aspect, becoming both physical and non physical. TPE projects or enables a simulation of limitation, with inherent constraints (laws) that facets experience. Simulating limitation means is a divine hack to activate curiosity, to not know is to
The Daughter of God premise, revisted. The Clique want to boost desire and thus expansion by making Theme Park Earth more intense, extra contrasty. MGC or Multiple Global Catastrophes would generate beaucoup contrast, and those that reemerged into non physical would respawn quickly as the surviving sleepers would fuck like rabbits in the vast empty lands.
[Could there be more sleepless spawning in? tho the cause of sleeplessness is not well understood. [debates within the clique on why leading edge creators would want to know they are god, or does theme park earth (expansion) work better with forgettery].
The wonderful angle to putting out a spiritual perspaective as a movie is that it's just a story, it doesn't have to aspire to be the guiding light for a civilization, although it might turn out that way. it doesnt have to be true, just a finger pointing to the moon - internallly consistent, entertaining, imagination activating. better than an assertion, because it's an invitation. no one was ever forced to explore / discover their true nature. conversion at sword point is meaningless. i can be a little sloppy and hey - it's just a story. there are no critical errors. The question is, how much rabbit hole do I aspire to, how deep can I dig? Can I create a world that is so analogous that it feels significant. I see the (sayeth the audience) the parallel you've offered and it's dang intriguing, it's informing my RL ride.
Now is the time to complete this epic project. Every waking hour I can be planning, scheming, building, completing. I have a treasure chest in LTC waiting, the cosmos will take care of the increase, get to dreaming! Greg...