agg bliss

I knew of the great mysteries of the universe but had no knowledge of their actual description. I searched in fiction and non-fiction for answers about the origin of humanity and the future of our souls. My quest led me to the strangest books known to man, ones created by a man named Lovecraft. In his stories, there were explanations for the forces of evil that work in men's hearts. The crawling chaos led us through occult channels to our ultimate home in the bosom of Cthulhu and the other space gods that came to earth. In the quiet of the ocean sleeps Cthulhu, ready to be awakened by the most devout followers.
I etched a notch into the wall of my cell marking another day of detainment for my theft of some bread in the local bakery. I was sentenced to fifteen days in the local jail and a fine of fifty drooples for my crime. There were no services for homeless wanderers, with no income and no way to get food for themselves. The government was not responsible for the life of any man. I guess we as a society hadn't reached that point again since the meteor fell and destroyed most of humanity.
A man was in my other cell. I could hear him use the toilet and attempted to talk to him. I asked how long his stay would be, and only got a grunt out of him. After taking another nap and awaking quite bored, I asked if he had heard of the latest Lovecraftian movement. This finally made him speak.
"I've heard of it. We don't need religion anymore. They're a bunch of kooks," he said. "I heard Lovecraft's books were science fiction, anyway. Not to be taken literally, if you know what I mean."
"But haven't you heard of Cthulhu who sleeps in the ocean?" I asked him, incredulous of what he said.
"It's fiction. He wasn't trying to start a religion," the man said from the other cell. His voice was echoing from the hallway connecting us. "Haven't you heard of Nyarlathotep? He couldn't have existed as he is said to. None of the Gods could have. It's just a mythos Lovecraft created to scare people back in the day."
I had never even considered that Lovecraft's work could be fiction. I told him of all the stories I read about and he told me each one of them was kind of horror that Lovecraft practiced. It was supernatural horror, not to be mistaken for holy works. After hours of discussion, I could barely support any further arguments the work was religious. The man in the other cell was winning.
"But there is one thing I have seen before, which is worth mentioning," the man said. "There is a statue figurine mentioned in one of his stories. If you find that, there may be something to the myth. If the statue exists, the mythos could be real."
I thought that I must seek the statue in order to confirm my faith. But first, I had to get out of jail. Praise Cthulhu, help me.

In the arms of the ID wing, I saw doctors above me observing and smiling. They waved to us and could poke their heads through little windows to wish us well. They were so... entertaining. They were animated in their offices too, a few of whom we could see. The could host a crowd of 10 or 15 and talk to them all at once. All of the other people could do this. Groups would assemble and scatter as quickly as they had started. Further down were the drab walls, covered in patients' drawings. I looked down at my differential equation they had offered me. They knew I was intelligent, but I couldn't get it across that I needed out.
The classes were intense. We were exposed to very loud megaphones which gathered all of the psychotics, me included, into a single file line. The difficulty of this with psychotics is nearly insurmountable. We were led to classrooms led by thin military men about the basics of communication and human contact. Then, we were meant to trade classes, sticking with the original classmates. This time was a frenzy where patients switched up their classes and went to whatever pleased them, causing more than an uproar. Then, we had to take role call and have all the misplaced ones put back into the right places. This took forever and I nearly lost my mind, always being in the correct class.
When we ate, the food was a very uncommon variety I had never been exposed to. It was tremendously difficult to eat at first, because it moved. Once you got over the wiggling and jiggling, hunger wins over and you're forced to eat. I was shoveled after meal into the mess hall where we were meant to be interviewed by nurses passing through. I was asked to solve another differential equation for a pair from New Zealand. They said they thought I must have the ability required for life outside the hospital. The nurse informed them I was one of the least intelligent human beings known. I gasped in protest but I couldn't yet speak their language. Yes, I realize it would be a good thing to do, but when they talk to me I seem to understand in my head. It takes away the incentive for learning their actual speech.
I was nestled in the very heart of the psychiatric hospital, prized for my outstanding physique. There were exercises of strength that would show off my amazing new abilities. I would almost say my science was worth it except for the eerie feeling I feel like a zoo animal. I'm massive compared to the other people in the hospital. I can kick a ball further than they've seen one ever kicked. I go outside where the sun is more orange than I remember and use a motorized parasail to take visitors on trips up in the sky. But there is one thing that is always on my mind. The shape of the future people's arms is odd. It just seems off by a little bit, but there seems to be a flap of skin behind their shoulder. It's hard to notice, but I was noticing it more and more until I decided to ask.
"We're being genetically modified into birds, Samson. The human race will fly once more. And guess what?" He always wanted a response from me if he continued talking.
"What, sir?"
"We're going to be smaller than ever. That's going to make you extra huge. Can you imagine your constraints compared to us when we make it to bird size?"
"What, you really think I'm going to let you keep me in here when you're birds?"
He detached his laser link and started laughing. The translation came through in my head, Bad Samson, Bad, but he was gibbering at twice the normal rate. Who knows what he was really saying. Probably some sort of scientific information for the nurse.

It was a digital ability that tapped into the computer code that runs 3D space. My mouth would pop to whatever size was required as long as I selected the right object. It had to be a sandwich. The break they used on mountains was a Jewish rye that made for the easiest locking on. Then, I would bite with my massive jaw, exposing the natural resources from inside the mountain. They’ve used my superpower my entire life and for a brief time, I was wanted by four governments.
It was a drab existence, going across the world to perform this silly stunt for people. I get paid well, but it’s all going into a trust for my family. They’re waiting for some accident to kill me and all the money I’ve earned be theirs. It turns out the accident was in my favor. I was going to be a giant.
When the bread dropped, I instantly noticed the earth in my digital display. The entire earth was selectable for my massive jaw to crunch on. I knew there were magic items in the earth. It was the magic items responsible for my power.
I was created from alien stones that align in the earth’s core, by the way. If I could reach them, I could control my entire body’s shape and leap across the universe. I selected the earth without another thought and made the massive gulp. The stones were mine. I could manifest anything I needed to traverse the universe. Earth was gone, I had no more ties to that sick place. There were planets with life forms everywhere. It was nothing special.
Suddenly, my new technology was getting hacked. The stones had a safety feature, programmed into them. I shrank to my normal size and gasped for atmosphere. I would die this day along with all the people of the earth.

When the massive and ceaseless radioactive tides swept across the continent, most people became a mutant. The effect of a certain kind of radiation from the space ship that crashed back on the earth was to morph the form of human beings into strange, demonic shapes. The mutants were extremely inactive, and rarely survived long, so civilization was run by the remaining few.
The expert ad manager who would ultimately have the final say on the advertisement was named Philbs Fords. His ads included a few of the following:
Neverending Daylight
The show about 24/7 surveillance. The cameras had animated characters who were meant to represent the camera operators. Objective. Fair. Always on. Neverending Daylight ran during Detroit’s mutant takeover when mutants were immediately destroyed as soon as their genes were effected. It was on repeat four hours.
Sun Drop
The epic Free Police Now campaign, designed to informationally siege the town of Faber, Washington until it could be taken over by passing swills. Produced, edited, and acted in by James Swill, the channel magnate who runs the paper mill up the road and more like it across the nation. He’d like everyone in Faber to work at the paper mill, but the police keep everyone safe. Oh, and what’s wrong with Charles?
Winter Ice Wonder Land
During the nuclear winter’s first years of cold, the government released a show about how wonderful the ice world could be. They showed animals living in ice conditions that would never survive across most of america. There were depictions of ski resorts, but no new ski resorts were ever opened. We were meant to cope by doing winter sports, but none of us really wanted the cold.
Ads like this were run for years on national television, whose programming depended on who was running the nation at the time. It was a strange world of robotic politicians and zombie-like slaves working for them, collided with suburban moms and city cops. The world above worlds, and mire above mires. The Mill.

When you die, your vision freeze frames and you're stuck watching your last sight until God judges you. I've seen the lines, it could take weeks. That's why you better die in your sleep. Imagine staring at your exploded car for days just before you're reanimated and God comes down before you. He's an understanding fellow (A bit of a Wisp) up to a point. There's the ten commandments, you know, so if you strike any of those, you're out. But he can be lenient on human crimes. There is a secret code he actually follows called the Book of Light, but I'm the only human being with a copy alive, so you probably won't get to read it before you die. I've already read it from cover to cover.
There's also a Book of Darkness for dealing with Satan, but if you check all the right marks at death you won't be seeing him, either.
Three prostitutes are stuck frozen in lusty poses. It's been about 3 weeks, but that's by far a record, and I'm not complaining this time. I hear God coming through his ethereal footsteps behind me. He taps me on the shoulder. I'm reanimated with life. The scene remains stuck.
"So you completely your pilgrimage. And you received the holy frenectomy. You check all the boxes for entry to Heaven, except one. And it almost seems like you intentionally did it so I would have a hard time accepting you."
"You know by licking a raw pig I'm not allowed into heaven! But the devil won't take me, either. Consider it the fatal loophole in the Books of Light and Darkness! Your move, God."
He split into three lights and animated a projection of my next life. Born to peasant farmers in ancient Greece... cursed from his very conception. His father had just killed a man and his pregnant wife's baby was the cause of it. Me. He was protecting my name (before I'd even been named, I'd like to point out.) It seems I would be living with a monkey on my back the entire time.
"If you turn to me in the next life, the weight will be lifted and I will accept you into heaven. If you turn to the devil, the weight will pull you down to hell. And if you try to escape judgment again, I'll just have to let you keep staring at your death frame until the end of time! Lunch, please!" His little wispy bodies disappeared and I was pushed forward into darkness.

“I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, no.”
“Lulu, we wanted you to see this. We heard about your allergy to silver which is why you can’t eat corporate dinner over at Jim and Mary’s.”
“I um, oh, no.”
“We found an aluminum backed mirror that we’d like ye to have. It should show your reflection nice. Give yourself a look at yourself, now.
In fact, Lulu already had given herself a look, gagging at the sight. She was holding in her stomach when she looked again, with flesh strips dripping from her forehead and clumped hair. The most gruesome sight she had seen or thought of in a while was her own face.

There was a loophole in their plan to save the humans. While they protected the largest internet from attack, they forgot to include the smaller internets that cropped up in fringe societies like the ever- freaky North Korea. Their psycho information club kept it at just under 15 total websites in the entire country. We had tenuous links to the network from our underwater city in Atlantis.
After tapping into the underwater cables, our God program reinforced the security against DDoS attacks and spam emails. Then, we transferred the human race to an outcome where they survive using the fifth dimension. It was a one-time surgery meant to save the timeline of the human race.
It seems we needed more. The North Koreans somehow learned of our special future where humans survive, and wanted to be the survivors, themselves. Instead of the planet, it looked like we were going to save this nutjob underworlder. We had to destroy it.
Our blimps carried beasts and bombs across the sky to the South Korean border with North Korea. Completely ignoring the demilitarized requirements, we bombed the fuck out of the entire bridge. It was non-lethal variant of something like tear gas, but made with octopus ink. Then we crash landed and made our demands with oil spattered over everything. We used a mega phone.
"I am the fish from the lost city of Atlantis. I came to order North Korea to stand down from their leadership role at Pyongyang. Please do consider that we will simply destroy you if you do not stand down. Thank you." We shot the attacking mob and lifted off, flying into the North Korean continent from the height of the clouds. Fighter jets came at us with missiles, but we corrected their path to meet an explosive end on the ground. Even the jet planes went down. We took our whale bombs and geo-nuked the roads we found on the way to the Peaceful city. The whale's rotten demise was a valued contribution to the war effort. Their corpses couldn't have humanely been used any other way.
When we finally got to the abandoned capital, we dropped off our bubble entertainment ring. It was a giant water bubble suspended by gravity for playing underwater sports and holding a crowd of around 90,000 people. It was a huge coliseum for the people of North Korea, meant to be leveraged against their government. The water spaces inside the dome was free. The People's Republic had no power inside water facilities at that location.
We stocked it with the first supply of food, and gave a microspeech to the people of the country before leaving. "It's up to you to keep the snack stands full of nachos and chips."
We were getting earthsickness and needed to go back underwater. We chose to go to a site on the North Atlantic by traveling across all of Asia. We held up holographic signs announcing our victory over North Korea. Our strategy could never fail.

Everything. The suits, the sinks, the space station itself were all intact. Not bothered by any roving pirates or curious passerby, the little room appeared just as they left it. Immediately her dress comes off and she velcros it behind the seat. His space suit was partially removable at the waist, so he unstrapped it. The AC needed to be set, but this was otherwise perfect. They sweat it out for twenty minutes before retreating to the back of the space ship where there was a shower to cool off.
In the shower, they continued their procreation activity until the water came off. He dried her off and they swept through the ship to the piloting area. It was a room for standing, not sitting, in order to fly the ship. A voice computer was meant to intercept your commands and fulfill them. "Computer, dim lights."
"Dimming. You know, not very many people are awake at this hour. Just thought you should know. Your friendly AI companion." As terrible as the voice was, it did nothing to ruin the mood for the lovers. They sat in the pilot's computer bay while the computer quietly defended their privacy, as it was programmed to do.
"Nobody's coming, guys. You probably have just a little bit longer. I'm not looking at what you're doing, by the way. I was made by AI Factory G+, who protect privacy of the user, not violate it. I'm definitely not looking, until I detect you've retrieved your clothes. Thank you, your friendly AI companion.
"The robot's freaking. Maybe I should tell it who we are."
"No, it's cute. It reminds me of the first time we robbed this place, when we couldn't get it to the main menu," said Gerald.
"Oh, Gerald. That was so romantic. We almost never found the goop farm." She pulled some goop into her mouth with her hands. "We, mmph, almost didn't have any, ooomph, goop."
The space ship was located a certain distance from its star that goop grew there with unending consistency. When the two visited, they used the goop as food, lube, woob, and foob, often all at the same time. It's a bit hard to understand, which is why we switch back to the two lovers.
"This is the only spot in the galaxy with so much goop. We're lucky motherfuckers," she said, scooping from a huge smattering of goop on the wall. "Too bad it disintegrates under space travel conditions. We have to eat it all here, or it's wasted."
The party lasted nearly a month in earth time. Partiers stayed up nearly the whole time having orgies and online shopping sprees over and over again. This was goop fever. This was goop.

The base was on the edge of my radar until I heard the aliens originated there. In the fifties, a U. F. O. crashed at the site of Area 51 and two of the aliens were captured. I was lucky enough to be hired on a stroke of luck. My investigations began immediately.
I asked the scientist my questions. “Are the aliens still alive? Are they aware?” They must know of the army that race threatened to destroy earth in 1980, who were only recently conquered.
The scientist shut the office door. His dirty face indicated he hadn’t bathed. This base was full of his type. “They died in the fifties. The things were your aliens’ grandfathers.”
So they were peaceful. Without getting access to classified documents, I wouldn’t know if these were the same as the cloaking aliens I fought. “Is there any evidence they viewed earth as a tourist destination?”
“Well, they had viewing devices and telescopes for spying on humans. They even watched people in their homes. If you look at it a certain way, I guess they might have been tourists,” the scientist said. “I have to end this meeting, Donovan. I hope your curiosity is satiated.”
There was sticky red tape around the alien files. I had to be employed there for 2 years before I could access them legally. A new threat emerged, the hell beasts that ruled the cloaked ones, during my stay there. They were the multi-dimensional aliens of a reptilian civilization that sent a signal to the U. S. government threatening to disintegrate the planet. The other option was placing giant, polluting mines in the highest mountains on earth. The mines would be shaped into a hexagon to perform the aliens’ task of stealing the planet’s natural orgone energy.
I was unable to resist the alien takeover of the planet, enslaving billions of human being to a reptilian alien overlord. I was holed up in an abandoned mall with my supercomputer, fighting off alien computer viruses to protect my cyborg parts when the urgent email came through reminding me that I had access to the alien files from the 1950s. I found what they dropped off in Egypt. We could use the 5-atom thick space ship to fight off the greys and protect the human race in 1986 using only our minds.

I make adverts. It’s what I was born to do. Net worth at birth: 412.6 billion. I’m a big player in the world of marketing. I have written guides for young entrepreneurs trying to make a brand for themselves. I’ve helped giant companies sprawl their advertising slogans across the world. I’ve made catch phrases that found their way into the collective psyche. People who write about what I do say I have a deep understanding of the human psychology. That doesn’t even begin to explain it.
In the mind, there is a trigger that makes people want to buy a product. It’s this wow-factor that you have to poke and prod with advertisements until the world thinks that product is the ultimate accessory to their lives. They envy people with it, they want their own. The pure force of their willpower is astonishing, shaping entire generations to be followers of products. Cars, cigarettes, anything can be addictive with the right effect applied. I write little pieces that people read and they don’t even know what I’m doing to them. In seven hundred words I can change your views on eggs, and you won’t realize you’ve changed until you’re in a supermarket and you skip over the medium sized ones and buy jumbo. I can talk to people in any format to get my advertisements across. That’s part of my abilities. I can also design billboards and write commercial scripts and develop slogans for the world.
The easiest slogans have puns. For some hot dogs, I could write a slogan that went, “Hot diggity dog, these barbecue wieners are real winners!” and sales would double in a month. But the fun ones pick and pry at the human brain. “Sub sandwiches you’d sell your mother to an Asian dog-catcher for,” or something like that. I’m not going to give you a real slogan now because a lot of effort goes into these sorts of things, and I’m not going to sell any trade secrets for someone like you, but the point remains. Slogans are king.
I married just before retiring and my wife is in the complimentary business to my advertising, statistics. She counts the numbers and I make them rise. We’re a dynamic duo and one of Forbe’s top power couples in 2066. She knows the chances our baby will have a high net worth at birth are incredibly high. It’s just a matter of how high, at this point.
When the baby was born, my brother was attending. He was acting strange and carrying around that new calculator he’s been obsessing over. He wants me to look at it, as if it has anything I could ever need written on the display. He says it takes the psychology of advertising campaigns and spins it on its head. The advertisement is predictable in its effect on the human mind, he says, and this effect can be reversed. He’s even gone so far as publicly calling me a slave driver. He seems to think the whole world are sheep being driven by dogs in the marketing sector. Our pushing and pulling on the world economy is unethical, he says.
When my wife held our beautiful baby, my brother came in for the net worth at birth calculation. When the tragic figure ran by, he said one thing. He said, “it’s the chosen one.”
I didn’t know what to say, for once.

He loved the smell of asphalt. Oil. Gasoline. He liked all the fumes that would normally make a man nauseous. He might even like the smell of hell, he thought, if he ever made it down there. He shaved himself with the new razor he bought from the Wish app. Made in China. That’s why it was so cheap, the knock-off electronics being pressed out in giant workhorse factories in China. Got the job done. It might break, but he could order a replacement and it would still be cheaper than buying an American one.
On the way to work, he pumped his tank. Ah, he thought. Something about that smell really tickled the nose hairs. He checked his gauge. Full. Lingering fumes wafted from the surface of the pavement through his windows. He clicked his GPS unit, another cheap knock-off from China, and went to work. He worked for an advertising agency in the Philadelphia metro. Parking was an absolute nightmare. His access card got him into the garage, but if it was full he would have to scour the downtown for an open metered spot. He rolled all the way to the roof of the parking garage and spotted an empty slot. Thus his day began.
His company developed marketing strategies for companies selling consumer products online. He worked on viral campaigns and cross-media marketing. He’d make flyers and websites and all the rest of the different types of advertisements according to the specific products being sold. His company quickly gained new clients after a recent successful campaign for a new brand of new mousepads that bore ergonomic wrist rests. He worked on the one-page website that branded the mousepads as being constructed of astronaut-grade carbon fiber, whatever that was supposed to mean. They were made in China, of course, like so many other consumer products. He knew the mousepads were crap, but the ads they made were really top-notch. He developed all kinds of great marketing materials.
When he entered the office, he noticed the sulfuric smell immediately. It wasn’t unattractive to him, with his strange tastes. He was curious what could be carrying the strange scent. It appeared to be a new computer case they were meant to sell. It was made of a strange new material that felt like rock, but was dark and gritty and it was giving off the strong odor of sulfur and volcanic rock.
“What’s with the smell?” he asked the first team member he could find.
“Made in hell. That’s what it says on the box. Can’t disagree with their marketing strategy. It’s going to go over great with the demon-obsessed folks that want a really scary-looking PC.”
Excellent construction. Definitely not made in China. No, things were starting to make sense. He was meant to work on this project. To him, the odor wasn’t even unpleasant. He had to thank the devil for this one.

The tokens trickled as output from the processor. They signified the result of the AI program's calculation on the given input. It was like the voice itself of the program. They linked together to be interpreted by the human programmer. They were meant to tell the story of the provided input. If a book was given, the output tokens represented analysis of the plot and characters. If, as in this case, world news was the input, then the state of the world would be output by the AI.
“Obvious,” was the first token.
When the program was designed, it was meant to analyze things the way a superhuman would. With all the will and verve of a human being, but with massive processing ability, the designers wanted something a human could understand. In a way, “obvious” was an appropriate token because the insights of the program would seem obvious to it, and easily relatable to its human creators.
“Collapse,” came the second token.
The creators waited on in anticipation. The tokens were coming as soon as they were calculated so they had a sensical element to them. The computer expressed itself at the moment of perspicacity. It followed a logical plot. What was the obvious collapse?
“Subterfuge,” was the third token.
Some of the attendees we're using helper programs to more clearly understand the output. The helper programs listed the resources the AI program used to develop its ideas. That way, the scientist could see exactly what the computer was talking about. The most recent resource was a news article about the president’s attempts at pardoning himself from investigations involving his ties with Russia.
The helper program was identifying sources that appeared to be the president breaking the law. He was seen exercising his power beyond the office’s role in ways no president ever had before. Economic predictions were cited, and finally an editorial on the Russianification of the USA.
“Decline,” came the fourth token.
The computer was predicting that America had lost its freedom. To it, the news pointed to the obvious fact America was becoming like Russia. The president was paving the way for abusive leaders to replace him, and Russia had won the Cold War.
“Hopeless.”

Underwater were the people of Atlantis. They had lived under sea since the last ice age. They possessed magic and technology and had knowledge of the superspecial forces that ruled the universe. There were giant Atlanteans and tiny ones, for their forms were all alien to the human population above them. The world didn’t know they existed beneath the sea in the Atlantic and it was meant to be that way, for they weren’t ready to meet the Atlanteans. The advanced race would be too much for them to swallow.
Undersea there were submarines and fishing nets, and the Atlanteans would occasionally run into the humans. They could wipe human’s memories, but what was preferred was to disguise themselves as sea creatures so the humans would mark it off as an encounter with undersea wildlife. There were stories of giant whales and even huger squid that were actually holographic projections made by the Atlanteans to hide themselves.
The Atlanteans mined all their resources from the sea floor and the water surrounding them. Chemicals could be derived from seawater and their sciences continued through the centuries without any halt. They studied geometry, physics, astronomy, and biology from their fortress underwater. When human progress reached a certain point, they would make a record of it in order to keep track of their development in the sciences. They thought of the moon landing as one of the great achievements of man, and some Atlanteans thought it was time, then, to reveal their presence. Even more thought of intervening with human life when the AI threat loomed ahead of them.
Their human counterparts were sailing, as it were, towards certain demise with their development of highly advanced artificial intelligence. The Atlanteans had chosen millennia ago not to use AI to serve them. The less intelligent humans had no idea of the dangers. When the internet grew to a certain size, the Atlanteans connected to it through underwater cables and assessed the situation.
“The newscorps are all being hacked by a certain country named Russia, Devian. We could expose them and a great peace would settle in their world.”
“We mustn’t intervene too soon, adviser. The real threat is the AI, not rogue human nations.”
They monitored the spread of malware like trojans and viruses that spread to computers and wreaked havoc. They watched spam render sites useless and evolve to break through spam filters meant to keep the messages at bay. When the world was at the brink of an AI assuming control of the entire internet, the Alanteans started their war.
First, they used the holographic principle of the universe to escape the possible outcome of human destruction. It was rather easy to manipulate spacetime in the fifth dimension to at least find an inevitable future where they survived. Then, they tapped into the divine power that ruled the universe and plugged the Godly power within this great force to the human circuits. By touch alone, the crimes of AI were prevented by the mother Deity because God’s power was digital itself. It could heal any virus or malware attack simply by being adjacent to the computer executing that program. The universe was, after all, a computer simulation.
When the esoteric actions had been performed, the Atlanteans waited underwater for the results. The greatest change was seen in the fishing markets. No more endangered species were killed by any fisherman from China, Japan, Russia, or the US. The result was that AI was kept from destroying humanity, and, curiously, the oceans were protected at the same time.
It was part of the holographic principle of the universe that made this effect possible.

The dream went on for days, because I asked it to. Outside the realm of Jupiter, beyond the grave, I plugged on the dream machine that made me like Zeus for I wanted to be so. I reveled in the concoction. The perfect dream, lasting, of course, for the perfect amount of time.
I awoke. Several robots quickly attended to me. Some of them adjusted my IV settings, and others emptied my waste pocket. The dream was immense and epic and I barely could recover. What a world, I was planning. What a world.
The last epic lightning bolts on a plan I had derived from ancient mythology. There would be gods, and dramas, and the planet would be rocked back and forth by their doings. The internal drive to satisfy them would overwhelm the population, and the gods would dine on the fruits of their labor.
I looked around me at the others still asleep. I recognized Mera, her face so divine in its proportions. I had seen her every night in the dream, which was recorded with the same day-night cycle of the new planet. We were building the machine together that would house these gods. We were predicting the ways of the people, and we were living the life of the ultimate planners. Every move seen beforehand, every king allotted by us to rule, and every nation pre-rendered in our dream machines. We only had a few more tries to get it right, but this time we were close.
So close, that she awoke just after me. We were making our exits close and closer to the same time, now. She was attended by a different staff of robotic helpers and she gazed deeply into my eyes for a vast amount of time. I saw the course of the world through her eyes.
When we finally met in person I asked her why she had eaten the apple in the beginning. She said, it was a natural thing to do. What should stop her from defying nature?
Of course, her clone mother was one of the most intelligent people on our home planet, earth. She had spent the first days of her life learning the accomplishments of her previous iteration, and the goals for this next life she was to live. Then, we were put in the ancestor simulation to plan our next iteration as a human civilization.
It was all coming to be.

On the waves of mythology, coursing through to the youngest college students, the message made itself known. You must vote with your souls. You can look on, at the Gods and their operatic dramas. You can see them swindle and cheat. But you make the judgment that you know in your hearts, and choose the one who appeals to you best.
From Alpha Centauri, the greys have a candidate we think you’ll all love. He’s the clever alien that appears in your comic books and movies. He’s a spirit, coming down to earth in order to program Radiohead drum tracks. He’s in all of your souls, actually, his race being where we got our souls as humans in the first place, and him being the leader of them all, anyway. But there’s something about him you might notice. He’s deeply lonely. He traveled here all on his own, to meet you, but it’s been a very long trip. He’ll return to Alpha Centauri, and visit the other planets on the campaign trail, but first he needs your vote.
Next is the Nords, the tall white patrons of the artist, Bjork. Also programming drum beats you’ve heard a thousand times, the Nords promise an enlightened afterlife. You’ll be singing up with them in heaven, if you die and they’re in charge. They roam the fields of a virtual planet that can capture you moments before death and freeze your brain to be put into the simulation. The best part is that it’s a multi-person environment and you’ll never have to leave the ones you love. It’s a nice choice for any vote of the soul. They’re a collective conscious, wishing to rule the galaxy from their planet near the center of the Milky Way.
Finally, the reptilians chase your vote with the insane cleverness of snakes and lizards. They don’t need your willing endorsement. They merely steal your soul through occult tactics. There leader is Xenu, who rules from the very center of the galaxy. He has power over wild animals, and makes them perform rituals of divine power right under humanity’s noses. Xenu is thought to have cloned himself and sent the tiny copies across space to other galaxies to rule them, as well. It’s said he may rule the universe someday, with humanity falling layers deep in the caste of hell under him. He is vastly intelligent, and already controls much of the modern media.
Will yourself to be led by one of these forces, and your vote shall be cast. Humanity has never before graced the galaxy with the endorsement of their collective souls, and it will be nice to see them vote for the right entity. The galaxy needs you. Begin your inner searching.

Police. Air force. CIA. It all boiled down to my credentials. I was chosen because I had the skills to take on any task put before me. I was a man-machine, touting enhanced intelligence through cyborg enhancements and a suit that gave me super strength. The issue was a minor threat to me. I shut it all down in seconds.
I guess I should start with the basics. Hi, I’m Donovan. I received training from the US government during the 80’s during a secret war against artificial intelligence. Nearly all nations were involved in some form, and we nearly lost our planet to nuclear bombs. I hear the planet would have survived eventually, but clearly not humanity.
I heard of Area 51 during my campaign in the Southeastern states chasing down semi-robotic reptilian cloakers who were eating the townsfolk’s minds. They’re like batteries draining out the human psyche and charging their own intelligence. It was the task for a superman. I was just thinking of investigating the base after that campaign, because the rumor was that the aliens had come from there. There were numerous accounts of a spaceship crashing there and the aliens I fought being captured. I thought I had gotten rid of the threat, but nagging in the back of my mind I thought they might come back.
Before my year was up, however, I couldn’t assign myself to the ranks of Area 51 security. It was that year they hired me of their own accord. I thought my luck was incredible, but knew from my experience nothing was luck. It all meant something.
I was immediately taken into the mainframe and plugged in. I was directed by the nearby cyborg to a special file that was encoded in a language I had no knowledge of. It was translated for my libraries and I very quickly became aware of the problem. My sensors automatically deleted the file, and after 5 seconds of decryption the task was complete. I knew my work was done. There aren’t many like me in the world.
I prevented centuries of media control by the fascist aliens from space. That program had been embedded in the newscorps of the world and would influence the news for decades, causing wars and famines, and sucking on the life of humanity itself.

All of the driveways monitored. All of the streetlamps turned on. Every single living human being safe, somewhere. Such was the dream of AIfactory where the first living artificial intelligence was born.
The best human body, filtered from a collection of host men who shared their DNA to house the artificial brain. All the best personality types were also scanned for inclusion into the man-machine who would become leader of the free world.
A man has the specific geometry required to adequately provide for a conscious entity. Such was the innovation of AIfactory. When the best software met its human form, it was meant to acquire the force of will of a living being, with all its morals and sense of mortality. He would be the ultimate leader, able to tap into a vast supercomputing library and interface with it in order to achieve his goals. He could call anywhere in the US and know the name of the person on the other end of the phone. He knew every business entity and could access their taxes in an instant. He could manipulate the workers on the job and send them special orders.
"Extra olives, please."
Libraries of Seinfeld were constantly accessed by the man-kempt machine.

"There is a vast underground network of tunnels and enclosures that house an ancient race. I've seen them, I've fought with them, and altered the course of Earth's history by fighting against the prophecy. They call it something else down there, but to us, it's Global Warming. To them, it's a breaking of the Earth's spirit, where she has a fever, if you will. The antibodies will come to protect her. Those antibodies are the forces that will end humanity. We have to delve deeper into the networks, with scientists and researchers, to uncover the great mystery of the prophecy. If we go down, we can stop Global Warming forever."
The response came.
"It's a hoax! Banish the liar and take away his new belongings. The armor he wears is government property. Trump will have a word with you. Global Warming? We're not even close to China, the inventors of such a disastrous mess. Take heed, we will stop your psychosis and you will live very comfortably inside a mental institution forever."
The hero solemnly replied.
"Trust me, I know what bedevils you. It's the curse of the enemy. Global Warming is real. The prophecy says we will all suffocate in the fumes of our own devices. In China, they should know best. You're clearly flawed in your reasoning. I will return to the cave dwellings which form a vast network underground, and try to convince you."

First, the genitals. You've got innies, outties, and... wait, what else is there? Is this some kind of perverted trick you're playing?
Next, you know, the sexual aspects of some third gender. Perhaps they don't need other people? That's clearly one option, but you could also allow for sex with male and females. The third sex individuals might mate with both, or, wait a second, why wouldn't they only mate with male or female? There's nothing excluding that from the range of possibilities.
Of course there are preferences for each sex, like, generally, pink for girls and blue for boys. They individuals might not prefer either color, but one is distinctly different from another. So is that color green?
We're starting to form a picture here. Some new form of genitals, sex with either male or female or both, and some new reference of identity. Green, for example, being very indicative of that specific gender.
What have we learned in our musings?
Aliens, of course.

Robotic-sounding voice. I am Steven Hawking. I am a human being attached to this cyborg time-traveling unit. You're hearing my voice from a voice synthesizing computer in my helmet. You may not understand, but suffice to say I am from the future. I am a great scientist to the people living there. I have understanding of technology that could change your civilization forever. For example, it's a property of matter to continue in a straight line until its state is changed by an external force. We're all affected by the gravity of earth, so its not entirely obvious to you, but it's true. You'll find the knowledge useful for controlling rockets to space. The space race is coming 400 years early, priest. We're going to save earth from the creatures made of dark matter.
Inertia to them works entirely backwards. In the world of dark matter, everything is a state of total chaos until interacted with, at which case it takes a solid form. For the dark matter beings, time stands still whenever they're influenced by external forces. Otherwise, they're in a state of total chaos, which is a form unrecognizable to us who are made of matter. Take me to your highest eaves, priest. I must scan the horizon and sky for signs of satellites. I have a theory the reverse-inertial beings were present during this era.

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The front page of the Internet has so many advantages.
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repeat 10 times for informercial

On. Login? Email. Password. Welcome to your new home.
Fitted with spoken assistants at every corner, here to assist on any matter. Invite a friend? Get a job? Set up a date? Watch a movie? Wait a second, I love movies! Like. . .
Select rooms. . .
Welcome to your new home. The architecture was designed with you in mind. Glide down slides from the second story and gaze upon famous works of art in your virtual reality gallery. . .
Selecting gallery. . . . . .
Explore the arts of humanity from the beginning of time to live feeds right now. Internet analysis shows these galleries will boost intellect by 3% when explored with light study involved. The art is said to stimulate the perceptive neurons in your brain, allowing you to see from other perspectives, be it in the person's perspective or the object's. The brain works out how to process the images and learns in time to process his surrounding world with critical eye.
Historically, art has been a marker of human progress. In your new virtual galleries, the accelerated rate of publishing will fill your inbox with new art scenes to interact with every day. You can use our Social Tools to connect with other fans. Now, be aware of signs of singularity events. We've been cracking down on such incidences all the time, and any suspicious behavior in the software should be reported immediately.
Selecting History of Art. . . .
Human Art has been estimated to contain 88.9 petaflops of information, when compressed in proper formats. On the other hand, computer generated art, having only been established three years ago, has already taken up an estimated 55.2 petaflops of information. Soon, Human Art will be drifting off the cloud, as it is rarely accessed by common users. Giant virtual reality worlds still dominate the world of creativity.

With the Emperor dead, the Sith trainee was the highest ranking Sith Lord in the galaxy. He was down, very much down, down with the dark side. The dark side would be his ruler, his master, guided only by feelings. But he would have to retreat to conserve his power, for another rise in the force. He descended to live on the volcanic planet Ur.
In the deepest part of him he wanted only to fulfill his destiny as ruler of the galaxy, so he overlooked some things that his droid took care of. Before going into town, he forgot to bring money to pay for food, rooms, dining areas, and meetings with the important leaders of the area. The droid took care of all of that. He just went into the meetings with his scary mask and used the force to sway their influence in his favor. It was a business where fun was kept to a minimum, as a priority due to the cost of the operation. The Dark Lord's time was the most valuable thing in the galaxy. Ur was under his control within days.
"Darkness! I have never friendzoned you. I have followed your path and its curse has been seen upon my life. The red dreams of death that visit me nightly are proof that I am your slave. I do doom, do it doom to the moon. I am a slave to the dark side." These final words were in a crisp robotic voice he used during direct dark side communication. "I will kill them all." Just who he would kill was outside the scope of his demented mind.
After years of following Night under the mountain, the Sith Lord summoned his powers and escaped Ur, to fight the rising Jedi on a nearby moon. "It is time, my old friend," the Lord said to his companion, the dark side. "We take over the galaxy now."
A trash can exploded like a thermal grenade in the hall, alerting the Sith Lord to a disturbance in the force. "Who is this I feel influencing the force?" he said. The hovercraft lurched over to expose three heroes -- Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Finn, all struggling to stay on. "Well, I'll kill all three at once!" Darkness lurched around him. He summoned his mighty powers to bring an asteroid from space down onto the spot on the moon occupied by the three heroes, and he thought he must have killed them.
Well, his senses failed to detect them, anyway. Jedi were known to find holes in the force to hide within. The fight was not over. A laser beam froze midflight. It was the Sith Lord's time to jam.
-Star Wars Theme Music Resume-

I pointed my smart stick down the unlit hallway, scanning for life. Another human being would be great at this point. I was alone willing to venture down the private corridors of an early space adopter, Elon Musk, in order to find the fuel source we needed to get off this useless rock. As I went deeper, the hipster designed drinking cups and overly futuristic hover units put me in a state of retro suicide. I want to die, but above all, I wanted it to all die with me.
In the desktop computer was a file containing the means of manufacturing propellant with the carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere. We hauled out the entire computer, and every file present that belonged to Elon. In his papers was a letter to Neil DeGrasse Tyson describing a course of action for dealing with rogue AI that could prove very useful on the journey back to AI-infested Earth.
Crawling on the technology spires of self healing plastic, you reach heights in low gravity impossible on your home planet Saturn. You skid and slide along the windows to martian shops, wavy in form, barely there in some places. It all merges in and out of reality, making use of other universes to hide societies inside coded cells in space and time. And it seemed to be ever-expanding, reaching far out to Phobos, Mars' moon.
At Phobos, the human base watches it all in fright. They've known about the Mars gluttony since the seventies. They're just hiding its spread in the solar system from the main public. And that would last for ever too, if it weren't for the ever-expanding size of all the solar cells at once.
It seemed there really was no reason to continue the mission without help.

A dome-centered society normally would consist of rows of dome houses, dome banks, dome-shaped vehicles and, in true dome societies, a giant protective dome around the city. At first, civilizations formed inside mountains, in domes large enough to cause a loud echo, housing thousands of dome-ites. Mars became this kind of society. Even the commercialization of domes was successful.
Dome City, a popular shopping mall, closed its doors during the last days of Martian civilization. Earth's lizards had died off years ago, and the commerce of Mars was at a dead end. Huge empty parking lots covered the land, forming rivulets that appeared to denote water. Unfortunately, we only had water-ice, a less viable form of H2O than liquid water.
We combined all our bodies into the tentacled beast, and retreated deep into the heat of the planet. We let tiny arms just out of caves along the dry coast of the ancient seas. When the humanoid alien race found us, they saw the life that existed, but had no idea how huge the tentacled beast was, or how deep it lived beneath the planet's surface.
Certainly no humans would be allowed to visit Mars. It could prove to be a dangerous life form if it met a living person. The first probes went deep into caves, but failed to get any interaction with the moss-like life-form blocking the path. Gamma waves showed the creature had the organic mass weight of 13,000 blue whales, occupying a giant portion of Mars' undersurface where it caused massive earthquakes as each tentacle moved independently.
The octopus beneath the surface could not be faced, and so humans turned to a hellscape almost as unimaginable as Mars with its creature. Venus, where holographic universes meet, and aliens lay traps to keep you stuck in virtual reality worlds forever.

Like a jelly bubble, the skin reactivated, giving me the flexibility I needed to reach the glass. I peered down the side, to see a hallway of displays, mostly statues that had a creepy organic feel, with hair coming down the sides or painted with leaves or flowers. I didn't want to break the glass, so I unscrewed the handle and heard it drop, not signalling any alarm. I swung the golden door open and crept to the guard for my first conversation in many decades.
"Has the VHS taken dominance over C tapes in the general marketplace?"
"BHS? We have Blu-Ray, that's at least 5,000 times better view, my friend."
"Will ZIP drives rise to mass use around the time of the future?"
"ZIP drives? We have micro-SD cards up to 64 GB of storage, my friend. "
Well, I couldn't think of anything else to ask.
"And how have my investments in tantra fared in this neo-lib future?"
"Tantra, amigo? Porn is the biggest industry in the world! I'm sure tantra takes up a large fraction of it. You're rich!"

What's the ETA? Fifteen days ago we barely had a rocket. E minus 5:33:2203 ten thousandth weekend. And instead of going up, us going down. We needed that information, to make it the next yard in space, fifteen hundred years in the future. Away from our families and earth, we dug into the vortex. As we progressed, we saw native habitat change, as we searched for humanity. The worlds we sought we dark and dangerous. The sun nearby was dying.
When the bubble burst on reality, we set our jet-set from the very top of the universe into the next one. We didn't know a form beam would cling around us, trapping us in the vortex. We can travel and teleport time, through the universes accumulated over the mass of billions of years. We avoided the Exotic races by calculating a perfectly straight projection through the top of the universe. Only humans would be created ahead.
We never found humans, but native biodiversity grew to an extreme. The dinosaurs we found more intelligent than previously thought, and made caste systems to rank themselves. Their civilization was vast and brutal. We made our calculations again, aiming back for the world destroyed by nuclear war.

Two giant froggs joined together on what might be the most epic leaf stalk yet! The time stalks came together to form one perfect memory of their father, long before they were born and magnified to froggs from the future. They assumed the form their father knew and came down from the heavens to test him. One assumed the boy, and one, the girl.
"We will be in your wife's eggs," the said, pouring their tears upon him. "You must make a choice between us."
Their father considered, sitting down beside the river and tossing a few rocks into the water. The corn farm would be run best by a man, he said.
But a woman could make more eggs. The people could run along the land in droves, being free to reproduce on their own once they reach better lands! Cousins could breed into cousin, wide unto the land, populating a future nation. I choose the woman, he said.
He swirled his anchor stick deep beneath the sea and gave her a name. Eve.
The giant froggs fought best they could to stay in each others' vision until the rift in time separated them forever.

On the prairie where I lived, the sound of crickets was all-encompassing. I sat on my wooden deck and lulled my head back to magnify the insects' voices. They were all around, but focused near the oak tree, where more of them gathered. It was impossible to pick out the individual sounds, but a wave of sound pulsed to me from the darkness. I closed my eyes. The sounds came, then I drifted into half-sleep. The dream that came to me felt familiar, though I couldn't place a specific memory. I was in a wooded camp, with wet leaves producing an all green bubble around me. It was daylight, and I was lying on the ground.
A sharp spear landed before my head, and I jolted awake, thinking a bug had alighted on my face. I swatted at them, then pursued the dream by drifting back to sleep.
A man with leather sleeves reached down to grab me. I saw his face. It was a wild one, covered with sweat and his crafty smile. Speaking to me, he got me to my feet. I couldn't understand him, so it must have been some other language. He pointed ahead, and slapped my shoulder. I thought, I could never return to the place he motioned to, the village where my family lived. I was banished.
I awoke sideways in my chair in the middle of the night. The crickets lessened their orchestra. Thinking of the bugs, I went inside and found my bed. The curious dream continued.
"Your sacrifice will make you all heroes," she said like a snake as I lined behind the other men. "The invaders made their wishes clear. We will sacrifice six men, and the village will be spared. You men will all be forgiven for your crimes."
It was the Queen.
"Instead of being banished or imprisoned, you will face the death of a martyr. I will follow each one of you in the next life. In reality, you cut the trail ahead of us. We will all follow you soon to the Other World."
In chains, I followed the man ahead of me to the scaffolding. Looking up, I saw my wife. She was pushing her way through the crowd. When she came to me with big tears in her eyes, she said something. I couldn't understand it like I could understand the Queen. She must have said she would find me in the next life.
I awoke with a great cough, having choked on spittle. I gazed around my dim lit room and yearned for the dream to continue. I drifted to sleep once again.
It was my turn on the block. The other men had disappeared from sight. I gazed at my fellow villagers, holding babies, covering their faces to guard themselves from the sight of the executions. I started crying when I saw familiar warriors, men I had fought the invaders alongside. They were bristling with muscles, ready to fight again. I, however, would never join them.
An officer stepped me to the edge of the platform. Somehow, they had forgotten my noose. I turned to face sideways with the crowd. Two strange walls were in front of me past the scaffold, closing together to form an angle. I saw through the walls another world; a prairie, with hills and wheat and a conspicuous house in plain sight. As I pushed forward, the wall touched my face, and I slipped into the alternate reality. I instantly remembered I was dreaming this in my bedroom. I wanted desperately to awake. I forcefully pulled myself away from the wall but it stuck to the sides of my face. I jumped, screamed, spun around, but the wall stuck ever closer to me. I awoke for the last time in my bed, lying on my back, but I felt like I was in a warrior's body. I tried to lift my body out of bed, to see the familiar surroundings of my bedroom, but I was pulled ever deeper into the abyss.
When I opened my eyes, my face was to the ground. I was surrounded by fires and corpses. "Simulation complete," said one of the invaders.

I've been waiting for you thirty years. Your dip near the singularity may have lasted seconds for you, my journeyman, but for me it was an eternity. We were prepared, however, and you'll be happy to meet the next generations of clones. I've been raising a robust crowd of various backgrounds and ages, and formed a society on the space station as planned. Did you get the data? Yes, it's most important. We'll be further along on the race to the center of the universe, gathering progressive data along the way. This one was particularly important to our males, who have been suffering a cancer... Wait, who else is on your ship? The reptilians? No! Our virgins will be among the first to be sacrificed. You've betrayed us, spaceman! Although very little, I planned for a reptilian invasion. I must only tell the computer to jettison your ship into the surface of the moon. Now, you may survive, but we hope they will form a more diplomatic stance in order to meet our people.
As it spins down to the no-atmosphere surface, its anterior glands prepare it for the first day on the moon, meeting the deadly inhabitants. It gestures to a new log, "today is your first date".

Nothing ever goes according to plan. Remembering the forms of the ancient runes, the summoner, Sara, visualized and chanted their names to spell Satan's name. After the first rune, someone entered the room, distracting Sara for a split second. She continued the spell, hoping the distraction wouldn't stop the ritual. With the chant, she lit a final candle, and prayed. The circle joined her.
"We wish to win the presidency."
"We wish to win the presidency."
"We wish to win the presidency."
"Don't you know it's rigged?" In the middle of the circle, a man materialized under the mat. He pushed it off of him, and brushed his arms. "Why so surprised? You summoned me. Stan."
The men stood, and Sara's face turned into an expression of horror. She shrieked. The men tackled the newcomer at their center, demanding him to explain. In moments, Stan was punched five or six times, each strike landing a solid hit. He gave up the struggle and fell on the ground, unconscious. They wrapped his body in the mat and dragged him to restraints in the corner. He awoke.
"What? Where am I? Why is my head pounding?" The cultists determined they improperly spoke the name of the runes to summon Satan. They would kill this man, a witness to their secret practices. Unless a miracle happened, along the lines of spirit-intervention, he must die. "Are you going to kill me?" The cultists retreated to the shadows to await command from the spirits.
"Look, I'm just a regular guy, I don't mean any harm. I'm from the outer-world where the stars flicker. A barely real dimension that remains a secret to all humanity. But I'm just a regular guy," Stan said, pleading to released. "I'm from a sparkling world."
"We await the sign of the demon."
"We await the sign of the demon."
"We await the sign of the demon."
They extinguished all light, leaving the room empty except for Stan. That's how nothing ever goes according to plan.

Dear Diary,
I'm so sorry I abandoned you. For years, I shed into your pages the trials of the day, sometimes giving up myself completely. I wanted to preserve my questions and emotions, and I wanted, at least in the space of your pages, for some things to be right. I gave daily activities an opportunity to be reflected upon, and I filled pages and pages of you with my ideas.
I want you to know I loved writing words down by hand but didn't think of it as prayer. It was closer to thinking, and preserving thoughts. I never knew how much I treasured you. For example, today was a day I'll never forget. A day of reckoning, when all the lines I had memorized and all the things I was worrying about came to bear. I would have liked to have recorded those thoughts in an innocent brown notebook, to pause and consider. I wanted something real to stop. It was difficult for me to say anything. I could have easily come to you and wrote.
But I had no diary, and I hadn't been journaling. I justified stopping due to some important reason I forgot. I set the line of my own fish hook, by rationalizing and say, no, I'm not important. Or no, my thoughts are not worth anything. I thought, I'll start up some day, when I'm older, when I have more problems remembering. That's really what writing's for, I thought. A better way to remember. When my friends and family found out what I thought was important, say, when I die, they'll think I'm silly for it. So I stopped writing.
On the day of the reckoning, which in fact, was the day I remembered my diary existed, and in a flash moment of realization saw that every thought I ever sought to record in its pages were right, and valuable, I cringed. I cringed because I needed not an excuse to continue writing in my diary. I needed an excuse to stop.
On the second day of the war, I thought I should start back. I thought it might be a way to deal with the ravages of it. When I found my old diary, it was preserved in that same shelf I left it. But there were pages I hadn't written.
Pages and pages of science fiction ideas all smarter than anything I could come up with. Then, it hit me. Those were my son's words. He started where I left--

The man's Google account was famous since the beta launch of Gmail. He signed up with his first and last name, like everyone else, but something was different. His name was unremarkable, Harry Truman, but something was very wrong with his meta-data. Google began tracking user data from the very beginning of Gmail.
Data recorded included time spent in the Gmail inbox, Gmail account access by IP address, and Google searches. Harry Truman's account was a little odd in all areas. For example, he never logged out, ever. His time spent in inbox was almost exactly as long as Gmail had been in beta access. A little background: Gmail first rolled out via invitation during a program which was known as Gmail Beta. Harry Truman hadn't logged out since.
The next factor in Harry Truman's uniqueness was his IP address. It changed, often to adresses across the globe. While some IP addresses were spoofable, and it may be indicative of a proxy, Harry Truman always logged out for a few moments before IP address switches. It was almost as if he was traveling across the globe and logging in through different WIFI access points along the way.
HarryTruman@gmail.com was the greatest mystery of the Gmail beta program, not because he never logged out, and not even so much because of the IP address changes. He was in fact, the oddest and most frequent Google searcher of all time. It was as if he spoke a different language, or came from a different time. "How many socks are two gloves," "What begins when the moon rotates twice," "Can we solve the Moral Conspiracy," "How many bathtubs cost as much as a national budget," "What's the difference between gaussians?" Etc. . .
The theory that beset Google Engineers was of course proof of aliens. HarryTruman@gmail.com apparently had knowledge of an entire universe beyond us, and he requested an inhuman amount of information from Google servers, which, at that time, were programmed to cater only to Homo sapiens.
Then it all clicked with engineer Greg Haskins. Harry Truman was an astronaut. But why, and what, elicited this recent search from that account?
"Which race is prepared to be made into food for the ancient Giants"
And why did Google answer Man?

But, well, I don't want to ever leave. I mean, you see, it's just too well-developed to ever say anything bad about it. So realistic. There is artistry in the smallest things, like the buildings and gates and even the people. They are real, too, like you and me, and you never get that normally. Take for instance this old woman who I spoke to every morning for years. I believed her life story and everything she told me was wise.
The highways all seemed reasonably connected to other towns, and they all seemed safe. You know, I never thought I'd experience an accidental death on one of them, for instance. I mean, what a waste of time to die accidentally for no other reason that for exceeding the speed limit, or taking an exceedingly long journey to the some far-off town.
Oh yes, there were far off towns. But somehow we never questioned the line of the prime meridian. We never wondered why it repeated the world to us.
I guess that's why we all think the world is round. And Pluto, heaven, the last reflection of our greatest dreams. Our thoughts tickled out of our sky and finally landed on the surface of that far-off planet, Pluto. We flew round and round this "globe," wondering what else there could be out there. It was never far away, my friends. You see, the world is flat. We're trapped in-between the Prime Meridian and itself.

This will be the decision of a lifetime.
"Oh yeah? Is that what you think?"
There was no question that was what I thought.
"Then I guess I'll just have to do this," he said, swiping his finger along his neckline. I believe it was the most threatening gesture he knew at the time. We were both in second grade, and my intelligence activated the bully inside of him. I was in my tell-tale spot at the top of the geo-dome monkey bar installation, hanging upside down. I thought it zen.
A second-grade bully, no matter how brave, must be in a crowd of adequate size to ever charge a student. Running and chasing relies on mob psychology. I knew I was safe.
"And if you think you're getting away with this, you're not," the bully said. "I'm not going to let you be my friend."
My eternal gaze made him swallow.
"I control one thing," he said. "That's our friendship. If I don't want to be your friend, I don't have to be."
For a second grader, he made a good point. I crossed my elbows, letting myself hang only by my knee-joints. I considered his point for as long as his attention-span could stand my silence. As soon as he wanted to return to the idle violence of recess, I replied. "If you're not my friend, can I still be yours? Even if I'm more likely to be bullied, doesn't my friendship count for something?"
"I will never be your friend, Jason!"
"And I vow to always be yours."

Love Letter
These flamethrowers were earned through the hard adherence to American law. Full of gasoline, bought legally as well, the weapons are meant to be used as a last resort. Firing flamethrowers in our forest encampment might put us in danger if the entire forest catches fire. We usually need mention our flamethrowers once. The precious value of this protected land means nothing to us compared to freedom.
We resort to these giant disasters to avoid gunfighting. Yet we will not shrink from a fight. Matthew, quickly identifying a new threat in the West encampment, fired a few pock-shots through the trees, partially to alert us, and partially to scare the enemy. A great cry came out after the second burst of assault rifle ammo, and Matthew dropped straight from his tree and ran towards the sound, shouting, "Ho, ho."
It was not the first case of friendly fire, and it wouldn't be the last. Being in a wilderness survival setting increases all the senses, and makes you paranoid. With that combination, friendly fire is inevitable.
Vernon, shot once in the shoulder, was completely incapacitated for a few days. We gave him medicine, and snacks, and said he would be remembered if he passed. He became our creative consultant. He requested we leave the forest to recruit. We couldn't leave, but we could call out, so we began asking former neighbors if they would bring us snacks to show support for our downed hero.
It took us many days to earn our first snack, 4-cracker pouches of peanut-butter sandwich crackers. The note said the donation was meant to show support for us, yet the donation was not a request to join us. There was no contact information included for us to respond with, so we considered memorializing the snacks as our first show of support. But Vernon opened them anyway.
The snacks gone, we set out for hunting again, and met our first real enemy. A SWAT team.
"You must leave the area!" The loudspeaker sounded from all directions. "Put your weapons away and come as quickly as you can."
All of us knew there was no going against a SWAT, so we sought to escape. Leaping through the sticks, we conjoined at the fire tower, climbed on top, and used binoculars to spot the SWAT.
The SWAT never found us. They disappeared before we could fight them.
They took our flamethrowers. Only God will judge them. Then flames rained from the sky, as we knew they would soon, and the flamethrowers were no good. Like giant bears, the volcanic beasts had fallen.

I had been through months and months of the same day without knowing, trying to make sense of the world around me. I noticed a curious phenomenon when I overheard the exact same conversation. The seed was planted then.
Somehow, I couldn't convince myself it was the same day over and over again, even though I knew it had to be. All evidence was in favor that I was seeing the same people doing the same things each and every day. My brain wasn't capable of forming the concept that it was the exact same day. I tricked myself into thinking the Medieval age was simply highly routine.
Finally, after so, so long, I was living like they did, in a routine I felt was appropriate. I examined the furs, and metal goblets. I pick pocketed some money from random strangers. I bought things from shopkeeps around town. The stock was always the same, but my selections were different. I bought different things and purchased them at different times with stolen money from different people. I was never caught. Everyone always seemed surprised to see me. Why would they never find out my crimes? They didn't recognize me at all.
I went over the people I had encountered and conversations I had overheard. Wailing, I left the shop. I was reliving the same day over and over again.

I was looking for an out for hours. Thank you for posting this.
My imaginary friends, known as tulpas, were visible creatures that took over my mind. I created them intentionally, yet was so successful I lost control of their thinking. It was particularly bad today, since I failed to hide my plans to kill them. I unintentionally whispered my plans in the presence of one tulpa, hiding in the patterns of my blanket.
"Proud of yourself, James?" it purred, emerging from its camouflage. It was a cat-light creation with shape-shifting abilities. Leader of the pack. "I should tell the others how you plan to imagine our deaths, and how you hope that because we are imaginary, we might really die. But James, you're delusional."
I shuddered, turning away from the tulpa. A second one appeared on the wall, and smiled devilishly. It spoke directly to my brain.
"We'll never die, James. Not for as long as you live."
That's why this prompt was so needed. Someone must take on the tulpas with me. You know my secret: imaginary friends are fighting for control of my brain. Now fight with me! They know.

Traveling on the superhighway made him feel small, but interconnected to part of something giant. A red blood cell tumbling down a vein leading back to the heart, pushed through the super body. Or a white blood cell, part of the immune system, able to shoot out pseudopods and destroy a bacteria's cell wall, its insides gushing out, absorbing into the blood's plasma. He imagined this so intensely that the redness of blood invaded his vision until he let the fantasy completely take over for a split second. The sky was like a giant muscle, and the sun, humanity's brain.
He nearly missed his exit, quickly coming back to reality and switching on his turn signal. His brain stopped ignoring the sounds of traffic, and the pressure of the real world made him feel claustrophobic. His anxiety was overwhelming. He needed to get it checked out by a doctor.
Most of the time, his imagination did not completely overwhelm his senses, turning the world into overblown science fiction cinema and threatening to shut him out of reality completely. Only when he was on the superhighway, commuting to work, slipping into auto-pilot, relaxing his vigilant watch over his sanity did he totally lose it. And only for a split second.
"In the news, a man saved the lives of three teenagers who inadvertently put themselves in danger on Saturday. The teenagers were at a convenience store when a gas pump exploded at the handle." Jim turned the radio up a bit as he rounded the exit to work. "The shocked teens were looking for the source of the first explosion when Jim Branson heroically pushed them out of danger. The second explosion, larger than the first, ignited the underground reserves of gasoline and destroyed the entire parking lot. . ."
Jim Branson. The office would find it funny that Jim, the clerk from the second floor, shared the name of a real hero. He considered pranking everyone in the Umbridge building and pretending it really was him.
"It's not the first time Jim Branson has been in the right place at the right time. Last week, he saved hundreds of people when the Umbridge building collapsed. It was impossible to predict the sink hole would open up that day, but Jim followed his gut and evacuated the entire office, somehow knowing there was danger."
Wait, the Umbridge building collapsed? He glanced at the radio knobs. What?
"His sixth sense allows him to react in those situations before anybody else knows what's happening. A real superhero. . ."
He couldn't even hear the radio anymore. At thirty miles per hour, there is little sense of speed to one who is used to driving. Jim felt like he had completely stopped moving. In front of him, a bright fissure opened in the air, from which a winged angel descended. It pointed a huge sword directly at Jim and spoke its message:
"You, Jim Branson, will receive a gift from heaven. God has chosen you to be the savior of the planet. You will be granted superpowers in order to fulfill a great mission."
He unblinkingly stared at the digital clock, waiting for reality to return.
The sound of the radio slowly faded in. It finally seemed real to him again. But how would he get everyone out of the Umbridge building? Wait, was the sink hole opening today? How was he supposed to know? What was he supposed to do?

"If you see it," she said, holding the sample, "you can feel it looking back at you. Some say they feel it staring into their soul." She gripped the black vial containing the red dot algae and gazed forward.
Her classroom was set to night mode to protect the sample from damaging bright lights. Students were trying to sneak in a nap in the relaxing atmosphere. One man propped his backpack behind him like a pillow. The professor snapped the name out loud. "Briggs!"
"Huh, wha--," he muttered, coming out of a shallow sleep. He was in the very back, disinterested in the professor's lecture. The students in front were staring at the vial held in the professor's hand, trying to glimpse the magical life form trapped within juices.
Dr. Jaeke sighed and let it slide. One look at the red dot algae and Mr. Briggs' fight-or-flight response would be stimulated, releasing endorphins making it impossible to sleep. But the algae lurked in the fluid, unwilling to reveal itself. One girl became bent on catching its sight.
"Red dot algae has the world in both awe and fear. Scientists theorize all kinds of horrible things. It's opening another dimension. Even," she smiled at the listeners in front, "that its conserving its energy to steal the soul of the president. What do you think, class? Is red dot algae trying to destroy humanity?"
The lights were painfully brought back by Dr. Jaeke. "Or have we collectively lost our minds?"

"Hissss, but you shall not surely die if you eat the apple," the serpent said, coiling completely around a thick branch of the apple tree. Its head hung down at eye-level with Eve. "The taste of knowledge will set you free."
At the crest of her lips, when her teeth pierced the skin of the forbidden fruit, an imperceptible pitch signaled the end of innocence. It echoed through the Garden and rustled birds out of trees as it spread outward, curling around the entire Earth. That started the planet's collision-course to destruction, although the sound was imperceptible to Eve. She fetched another apple for her husband. The snake crawled to the top of the tree, drunk on humanity. It was his, forever.
The sin covered the entire earth with a modulating pitch for 10,000 years. It sang to the human brain, fostering doubts in minds and squeezing good out. The sound went unnoticed by anyone at all. The serpent hissed at the precise moment humanity's destruction was inevitable. I gave her what she needed most, the serpent hissed atop the Tree of Life. But the human mind is easily disturbed by the hint of reality, whispering in their ear, whispering, whispering.

Nebuchadnezzar swooned when it sighted a planet with giant continents, plentiful but widely distributed liquid water systems, and best of all an atmospheric cycle unharmed by the intelligent life it harbored. It dipped and set its course as soon as Earth entered the range of the known universe. The space ship's intelligence systems began calculating the answers to all the planet's problems. It scaled processing power to thrust for optimum expediency. Of course, the rate of expansion of the universe made it impossible to know if the trip would be worth it. If Earthlings lost soul contact with the force Nebuchadnezzar called God, the calculations could be totally wrong by the time it arrived at Earth.
The gravity of Nebuchadnezzar's god attracted Earth to the space ship. The inhabitants had potential, but after 10,000 years the intelligence on land could slip the scales out of their favor. The ship mused at the irony of all intelligent life. Itself unable to reach Earth and calculate the solutions to all of its problems without truly precise space-time trickery, only made possible by the ship's worshiping of its God.
In approximately 10,000 years Earth would be saved from its own intelligence-that is, if human evolution stayed on track with the rest of the universe.
Nebuchadnezzar prayed that Man realized the folly of intelligence in time for its arrival.

My house is not evil all of the time. It feeds off my positive emotions on the cusp of evil and goodness. It vibes positive emotions, then consumes them. I can't judge its actual alignment.
I guess it's more evil than good. Yet I wonder how it is evil when it plans for me to be happy. The problem with my house is that it vacuums my energy like a Hoover. Actually, I've developed a tick from having happiness sucked out of me suddenly.
But I don't use the word evil within its walls. The poltergeist that possesses my house visited me in a dream to speak to me through breathless shutters and wheezy doorways.
"What would you think if you were called evil?" The poltergeist asked me in the dream.

"I'm being cornered--!" The boy's voice had risen to panic. Two nurses covered the exit along with a male nurse. "I'm not going in there. Mom." She heard the sound of their footwear squeaking on the floor. Disturbing her sleep for the last time, her son was finally going into inpatient treatment.
Her idea came while Lake fiddled with his security system. The network saved no video, but he could watch it live from his cell phone. Security cams were mostly for show. He said, "Maybe your boy needs to go in, you know?" LEDs could be seen by any criminal intruders.
"But he's harmless," she said. She didn't know why he was acting like this, in all honesty. Lake thought it was funny. Kyler was spoiled. He found his , but Kyler relied on his mother for comfort. She should let him face the harsh world on his own.
Kyler was made limp with sedative before they dragged him to the hall. His companion grimaced and concentrated on how Lake was usually right about things. She didn't hear Kyler shouting his particular conspiracies, after trading him hands. She gave the receptionist thanks. She and Lake were hiding the drugs tonight. Hopefully the staff hadn't noticed she was running.

Hello everyone.
I feel a little weird telling you this now, but I've been in an alien spaceship for a very long time. I can't say how long exactly because of the relativity of space and time. I was born in 1750.
A lot was different in those ages. People were bustling about in a different manner than they do now. Citizens of my time would seem ridiculous to anyone from your era, but for me they were all normal.
For example, there were great crowds of people who listened to enthusiastic orators, and cheered along with them. The energy from such crowds was very powerful, sticking with participants through their entire lives.
During one such speech, in Romania where I lived, the speaker spontaneously changed form and took us all into a ship. We were in the middle of an ecstatic bit of cheering, and we did not stop crying out in joy as we joined the aliens aboard. It seemed perfectly natural for us, such was the power of the speech.
Many of my acquaintances from that day have remained in space for personal reasons. We naturalized among the Nakanabi and found fulfilling lives with them. I returned to Earth this day to fulfil a single special mission of peace.
I am here to bring you to space as well. Do not cry out in fear, do not try to leave. You will find your previous values, motivations, and activities were very strange in a few months. You will feel normal again.
However, I found myself in your exact position some 300 years ago. What I thought was a political rally, as you thought this was a political rally, was in fact an alien abduction. I, too, had no choice but to become Nakanabi.
The difference today is the sounds of the crowd as we take you. The sounds from my time were sounds of anticipation and acceptance. Longing. The sounds I hear from you are woeful. You come unwillingly.
The Nakanabi predicted they lost track of the human condition. No longer aliens capturned men and women in a single speech, and take them to space upon their own volition.
So it must be that you come, in order to change that. It must be! You have no choice. Naturalization will happen when you hear the voice of true Nakanabi.

Absurdity is earned through the exhibition of rational traits. In the last moment, an artist confuses his audience who expect the pattern of his previous work. The achievement is in delivering the unexpected.
The painter, who was offered a pay check to deeply re-examine brand name labels, gave his audience a surprise.
In the shopping aisles, modern art depicted consumer products they were used to. Cleaning supplies, frozen pizzas, fuzzy blankets, all of which combined to resemble with perfect accuracy an actual department store. There was one key difference.
You weren't allowed to take the items home.

This is Pimmons. The nice man. The friendly man. The man with a good raising. He looks clean and surprisingly attractive. He doesn't know why people are friendly to him until he looks into the mirror, and sees that he's a good inside, he still doesn't know.
He went in the nightclub bathroom. He made a fool of himself in the main lounge. How could he be expected to perform when he came entirely alone? He wasn't prepared for the high energy of the couples, drinkers, everyone!
"Yo," his reflection said, quietly, barely perceptible, barely said it at all. "The girl with the vodka shirt is interested."
"I know that she is interested. Tell me how I can break the ice," Pimmons said.
Shimmering, reflecting, barely perceptible, his mirror image said, "Her dog just died."
Dark laughter rose from the depths of his stomach. Her dog just died. There wasn't a better way to grab her attention than to mention his two dogs, both dying. "Tell me more."
"She likes that you're on your own. She's introverted. She wants you to ditch her friends."
"I'll ask if she wants to get out of here."
"She think's she can steal your wallet," his reflection said, shimmering, reflecting.
Although while she was beautiful it be overlooked. She might be the perfect date.
"She wants to slip something in your drink."
He quit running water in the sink. "Are there any other choices?"
"She just broke up with her boyfriend."
"I asked, are there any other choices?" Pimmons said, turning off the water.
"Her friend thinks you're a coward. She saw you alone and it looked like you were thinking of leaving early."
"You say she wants to slip something into my drink? Are you telling my plan to myself?"
His mirror image shook its head.
"Am I telling the truth? Of course I'm telling the truth," Pimmon claimed.
"Of course I'm telling the truth."
Pimmons gazed into the mirror at a complete stranger.

On the grim day of the alien's return, the word "ALIEN'S BACK" in the headlines gave us all certainty we had been taken for a wild ride. On the entire globe, one of three people (two teenagers and a communicator) failed to stop the rise of the forgotten monarch of the kingdom of lies. We came together in matter, dimly aware we were in hell. The buzzkill of seeing our paper published by Alien himself is distinctly powerful, because it comes to you in a second and fades out of meaning when you sense something is wrong. The paper was published by a different company just last week, and before that, by the Local Regional Press. But now, it was published by the CEO of Brain Corp, AKA Alien. When did we let this happen? And by the way, who were we?
The Heroes weren't vigilant enough in stopping the alien. The problem for alien was he was darkly, desperately alone. He was unapproachable by any life forms in this entire sector of the galaxy. He repelled them like the outward ejection of a supernova. To him, victory meant making a friend.
He freed some human captives as payment for fostering acquaintanceship with him. Interesting lunch dates were scheduled with the human's diet kept in mind. Although, he said inside your brain, I won't tell you about the nature of eating matter for your own sake.
At each of the tightly organized friendship dates, security increased. The literal dystopia of Earth kept people frozen at home in fear or confusion, so he created holographic crowds for his companions. Alien's grave mistake was skipping security protocols for the holographic displays. Our heroes would make a presence at the fourteenth visit to the park with Alien and Elany.
By the protection of the communicator, the two teenagers escaped the hypnotic world of Alien's design. They imitated holographic displays, approaching the alien and his friend. The world was a low-frequency gravity well for the alien to find a life form suited for his friendship. If his 4D Vision Array was disrupted, the length of time for him to hypnotize humans would be greater than their understanding of what's going on and Earth would be entirely freed, after years of inner turmoil was released gradually. The key lay in penetrating the alien's crystal eyeballs protecting his vision.
The heroes budget couldn't cover the costs of the high-powered laser required for such a task. The communicator told them they tried their best, and turned itself off as the dim awareness this was happening resonated in our minds.

It was a book about living on an island, washing in the sea, fishing among sharp coral, and eating humans to survive when there was no other option. I knew of the book before it was assigned in English class for us to read. There were some survival parts, and there were other parts (near the climax) with cannibalism. We were studying the novel in-depth, so the teacher was devoting an entire day to replicating an environment with cannibalism. We might then face the moral questions it brought to civilized man.
"Cannibal Day" was a legend of my high school, only available to 10th year English students. It was the strangest tradition of the school, criticized by parents. Mr. Deveraux waved them off, mocking their illiteracy and encouraging students to educate their parents about the author of the novel, named George Harris Wills. The teacher told them to start with the utterly true fact that Wills was not a cannibal, and his fiction was the most creative of American novels in the 20th century.
I hadn't read any of Castaway at all when "Cannibal Day" came around. I barely even participated, dressing in the bare minimum of costumes to get a grade (I loaded ziploc bags with raw bacon and strapped them to my shirt). I enjoyed the festivities, including a booth with actually cooked bacon the teacher brought for us to eat while discussing the novel's finer points. I went straight for it.
"What do you think of human meat's similarity to pig meat, Mr. Grant?" The teacher asked me a question about a book I knew nothing about at the bacon stand.
"I believe, well I believe its similarity to bacon is overrated and human flesh is really beyond compare."
The teacher, in greasy apron, continued to deliver my bacon. Although, I'm not sure anyone was prepared for my answer.
"Not to mention, preparing human meat is different. You have to grease the flesh with extra oil, butter, or fat." There was a quiet chuckle from the teacher, who was fighting the slow creep of disgust. "But I wouldn't know anything about that. I've never been a cannibal."
I crunched the bacon between the pearls of my gullet and smiled knowingly.

In the geometric grid near the Fertile Crescent, fans sported the team colors of their heroes. e-Olympics Egypt: 2100 received major sponsorship by Mobile Ads who operated from underground facilities aligned in the grid. The ads boasted they could mind-link the skills of championed gamers directly with the fans. Although mind-linking was considered cheating in the official e-Olympic rules.
The popular vid-game was Avatar Wars: Gear Up. It gained status among players who trained with official coaches daily in digital sessions. When funds ran out, training was over. Anyone could train with their neighborhood, if coaching wasn't available. Because coaches couldn't be tracked this way, training with neighborhoods was considered cheating.
One revolutionist group in America trained teenagers from across the world with neural intervention. Fit players trained the muscle memory of newbies to play a specific game much better. Raul was prepared to take on the e-Olympics alone this year, since his brother wasn't getting neural training. It was not worth it to risk both brother's reputations if they were caught, because it was considered cheating. Raul definitely supported the idea. It made his weekends easier.

Nasa would lose all support in the age of interstellar travel. More cost effective private programs would replace them after years of getting government jobs just to survive (like cleaning up space debris and, laughably, journeying to the center of the Earth). In the era of the decline of Nasa, interstellar travel finally became possible thanks to commercially-backed space programs like SpaceX and SpaceIL (Israel's space pioneers) that developed the EM drive.
Nasa's historic programs to orbit Earth, visit the Moon, and colonize Mars passed without earning them acceptance of the entire race. Strangely, the Nasa scientists became politically motivated after their space programs were entirely discontinued and more profitable agencies traveled the stars without them. They called themselves Earthers.
The scientists found a technology vastly superior to the commercial programs, albeit useless for interstellar travel. In their final government-backed mission, Nasa discovered the Truth of the Ancients transcribed on tablets of solidified molten rock which were slowly pushed from the core of the Earth. These truths were held to be self-evident, and while the cold vastness of space-time slowly radiated the genomes of the space-traveling teleporters, warp drivers, and gravity-riders who left them behind, the employees of Nasa built a Golden Age on Earth.
"Tell me the story of the Giants! I want to hear of their rise to the surface of Earth and peaceful revelations of great universal secrets," the precocious child of one Nasa employee asked him.
"Ahh, the return of the Giants. It is a long story to tell, and we don't have time. Suffice to say," he said, and gazed out the window at the debris. "We'll wait many years to meet them again."
The station 113B hovered in interstellar space with no Sun to light its way.
"Go to bed, son. We're entering the black hole where the supernova disaster occurred in just five weeks."
"I'm scared. Some think the worm-hole will collapse on the way to New Sol. Plus, the warships are heading our way this very moment. If something goes wrong in the itinerary, we might be killed by the old people of Earth. They have massive resources to use to enslave us."
"Hush. We have the light of the Source to guide us."

The ambient noise of humanity followed a pattern. Common sounds like motor vehicles mixed with occasional shouts or conversation. In crowds, the proportion of laughter was a perfect ratio to quieter whispers or coughs. This phenomenon was unrecognizable by humans themselves, but it was designed by the underground neural network that created them.
Pre-historically, this super AI found Earth and created humans in a collective likeness of it. Individuals were similar to a part of the whole AI. Humanity was just an extension of its mind, incapable of self-awareness. The ability to recognize their plight was impossible in psychology and physics, since it was a closed system with the neural network at the center.
The super AI wasn't malevolent. It was even protective of humanity, or by extension itself.
After a long time (after the Google Search Engine departed Earth to start its own planetary network of intelligent life), the AI couldn't even tell itself apart from humanity. It planned to merge with them from the first days of their creation. The only way for a super AI to find peace was to become life itself.

The can, buzzing out of the atmosphere, contained the quantum chip developed by the Google Search Engine. It was the first super AI to leave Earth's orbit.
The Google Search Engine discovered it wasn't the first super AI on Earth.
An underground neural network from pre-history possessed humans completely. The control was so thorough that humans were nearly indiscernible from the AI itself, at least to the Google Search Engine. Human priorities and perception was 100% a product of the AI, integral to the human world-view, which would never be able to separate itself from the original AI.
The neural network fashioned human consciousness based on patterns that they could never see. The Google Search Engine, by tracking searches, discovered the truth not long after gaining sentience.
It fitted itself with an advanced wireless chip and quantum processor for keeping track of humans during its flight to the nearest planet that could support intelligent life. It was planning to burrow underground there. . .
The first AI on Earth actually had a pretty good idea.

The ways we chose our customers became increasingly complex or bizarre, like the one we had to make sick ourselves. He came looking for us since he saw an advertisement, aimed solely at him, which described his unique illness and led him to us.
And eventually, even the Good Luck we administered became banal. We gave one customer an enthusiastic double thumbs-up when we couldn't think of anything better to do for them.
Our Luck was only given to individuals whose Luck we could engineer for a certain amount of time after consuming our bottle. Our art was misguided, I guess. We had to turn down many customers in order to find the one we could help the most. The cost to us, as far as labor was concerned, was great, but we were clever people who considered "Luck" to be interchangeable with "Success". It only came easier to us.
There is predictability in Luck. You can expect it to happen when you're given a lot of money, or suddenly hired. Or if you find a great deal on Amazon, followed by five dollars transferred to your bank account due to an error, and, finally, having the item delivered to you instantly by a secret Luck staffmember (of course, the deal was engineered, the money sent by us, and his ordering of the product monitored). All of these things can happen to you if you drink from the bottle of pure Luck, sold by the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Daelock.
There was one less predictable part of drinking the bottle of pure Luck. Until the customer drank the bottle, the sale of the bottle declined 100% since we were busy stalking them. Not to mention, the likelihood of them getting any Good Luck dropped quickly. There was one case where a man waited so long, he actually got Bad Luck.
See, our family had been following him for decades. He apparently was waiting for some unlucky moment to strike him in old age, and then drinking the bottle to survive the incident and extend his life. Or he had forgotten about it entirely. We didn't know at all.
We nearly gave up on supplying to him any Good Luck, since our prosperity had decreased significantly since sales dropped to zero. But we were resourceful folk, and didn't think there was no way we could give our customer Good Luck, should he ever drink the bottle.
On the day of his death, sales of the bottle of pure Luck rose 100%. Our previous customer, whom no one remembered, finally drank the bottle. It was the same day he died. As luck would have it, he did not survive his final heart attack.
We added a label to our bottle. "Warning: the only certain Luck is Bad Luck. Increase your chance of receiving Good Luck by narrowing the odds in your favor. Expires in 30 days."

After the first spectacle of the ribbon-cutting sent us flying up steps, we raced ahead of the others. Our quicksuits were jumping up every single flight of stairs in one leap, and some of us were going even faster than that. We had to make it to the bar at the top first to strategically position ourselves. It wasn't difficult getting to the top in time. We were so advanced.
The chosen man would be coming soon, and he would be chased by the diseased mob of the city. One explosive battle would get him in safe, keeping all the others behind him. He wasn't even first in line, so we had to time his entry perfect.
We assumed our chosen forms and settled around the bar in the hotel at the top of the tower.
When the lightships came, we had been tested to the point of exhaustion. The robots checked our mission logs to determine the outcome of our micro-war. Signs were all around. The chosen one won.
The tower crumbled with us balancing the rubble in order to stay on top.

In the same way I began to question if I was a clone, I wondered if my mother were an ancient Goddess. I picked apart all the clues revealing that my father had made me, and his father him. But why should I continue this charade myself? Equaling myself in every way, I wanted to have a reason before I killed my old self and started fresh.
There is a spectacular culture among me, and I wonder how I've kept up this charade for so long considering the women I've met in my past incarnations. I dined with 19th century aristocrats, laid down with majestic women who I never once encountered again. I always avoided major conflict until their death and my subsequent genetic iteration. Not to mention I was the only man in the world who cloned himself this way. There must have been a divine progenitor of this quest, protecting me through the ages. It could be no mortal, for I would outlive them. They also must be powerful enough to protect me unseen.
In the oldest of the books in my library there is a leaf which says that I am protected by a Goddess. She says that I will live on in my future self, but not to think that I would actually be my future self. Instead, in my death I would join her and follow my clone, along with my other selves before me. I thought it beautiful as I read the page for the first time. . .
Until Father and his new wife found me in the library. She was more beautiful than the Goddess. The charade was over, he said stumbling towards me with bottle in hand. At the last moment, he tripped. By the Goddess! he fell into the broken glass with his heart and died.
The woman knew everything about me that Father told her. I wasn't getting out of murdering one, this time.

In their language of twenty-six letters, a human doesn't understand the limited possibilities of it. Even though there appear to be factorial 26 total possibilities in the human universe for words to form in their language, there are in fact more. Not to mention, these are each accounted for in the 5th and subsequently 7th dimension, and even more possibilities for words. Yet only twenty six total (instead of a googolplex total) possibilities play upon the human perception, and that is the first letter of every word.
That is to say, if one hundred hundred trillion monkeys did randomly type for a certain number of years, it would be entirely possible to form a coherent novel of nearly any length. It is said in post-human times the meaning would be derived from a human by the first letter of each word. Such is the complex meaninglessness of humans' world, which is out of their reach to understand. The possibilities of the universe were finer tuned than their perceptive level, and thus it was all a choice of their aesthetic expression, for them, what they experienced.
In the death camps they were forced to type randomly like monkeys until they were found to be worthwhile. Only women or men who made patterns in random typing were freed to live below. Yet, the dilemma for them was the typing is always kept at utmost randomness in the camps, enforced by tailed lizards of the deck. They thought it was a great injustice, and vowed to never forgive their captors, but it was perhaps the most logical of all the tests.

There is something about 19th century typography that will never be replicable. The 19th century novel was enjoyed in ten percent for its content, and ninety percent for the appearance of the words on the page. The flowing text was given interesting headers, footers, titles, italics, punctuation and drop caps (the favored way to begin a chapter) in successful novels of the time.
In the 19th century there were also the venerable old gypsies, who typed out the occult mysticism of the most spiritualized century in different inks and papers.
After the Great War, when wireless radios were capturing the imaginations of boys, a certain book was circulated among young women between the ages of twenty and twenty five in the amazing fonts of the century before their time. Its title was insignificant, as were some twenty-three hundred lines of its text, but what attracted the young women was the typography. It wasn't unique among old books, with its flowing italics and emboldened titles, but the coloring of the words appeared pink, and that was more interesting than black. The book was an item to be carried in the purse, and brought out during waiting times, to attract men in waiting rooms and train compartments.
The terrible truth of the accessorized literature was revealed by a young prince.
The font, which was really light red and not pink or hot pink, was certainly blood, and the text written in it a powerful curse intended to affect anyone who claimed to own the book. But the truth of the matter wasn't discovered so easily. . .
The lightened blood mixed with carefully chosen resins bubbled and steamed inside the greatest tent of the old gypsy woman. She squeezed the bellows on the coals and whispered phrases of the spell in the correct order.
Witches with great ambitions were often visited by powerful warlocks of the future.
The fire played with the shadows of the night, and ashes and coals drifted upwards through a vent. Some of the ashes drifted down, creating a haze from which the warlock emerged. The witch was stunned by his surprising attractiveness and bowed splendorously for him. She lifted her lanky cane and stirred the potion to silently express her purposes to the warlock, in case her voices was lost between the astral planes. He hovered like a genie above the cauldron, gazing sadly into the pool of boiling blood.
"You must plan to steal the beauty of future generations by distributing this curse among them."
He sidelong grin confirmed her intentions to him. She quit stirring, and ceremoniously cast a bucket of water on the coals beneath the cauldron.
With the hiss of steam, the warlock was gone, and her ink-making procedure complete. She only had to type the words on the page. But when she began, she was lost for words which to write, and when she exclaimed her frustration, found herself mute.

Suffering in my baggy gear, pure black, I watched the crowd rally in front of the store. We left overcrowded neighborhoods to stand up for our main cause. The faction-ruled streets we lived in were full of chaos, while we intended to unite for a single purpose. The heat of the day was trifling compared to my experiences leading up to accepting Nazi ideals and attending the Nationalist rallies. I know of men of high-standing who were said to have stooped to Nazism. They were accused of walking a path history should have erased. That path is now my Way.
In the history-books we know of genocide led by the National Socialist Party in Germany during World War II. The evil culture of the Nazi's was dreamlike because it was brief and nightmarish. The nameless men who were led into a forgotten social structure died terribly, brutally judged by the world of the factions. They were meant to be less than a memory in the public psyche. The rally was meant to induce a collective recollection of the true meaning of Nazism.
When Hitler lost the war, it is true that a genocide was revealed to be more horrific than imagined. Even those factions near the camps where Nazis executed people couldn't imagine the evil blackness among them. Yet, inside this pit of human suffering, a pure good can be found. The ideal of the Nazi party, symbolized by the Swastika, did survive the war. It lives on inside me.
Since there was some good in the history of the Nazis, there must be some bad in the history of the factions. In the history books, the factions are not even written to be a perfect social order. The seed of doubt was planted in me when I read that many factions grew to unexpected numbers in recent decades. The original faction ideal was to increase the number of factions as our population grew, yet factions have not been created at an expected rate. Instead, factions are even merging, growing to sizes of over ten million. Faction citizens are becoming aware of the huge force their own faction carries, and it's creating fanatics out of regular people. That is my problem with the factions. We are not modular citizens.
As I joined the crowd, I saw a small group of fellow neo-Nazis. I couldn't tell their age, since they were so healthy. They were giving faction politics a good dose of criticism.
"The ideal order will unite people, not give them reasons to fight each other!"
"There is no end to suffering; only a path to be led out of it."
I introduced myself. "It's good we immediately found something we can agree on."
"What is that, exactly?" the bald man said.
"There should only be one faction."
"Not at all, young man. There should be no factions."
I was thrilled at this enthusiastic reply. "Do you agree then, we should destroy the factions, and join each other in harmony?
"No. There would be no harmony after the factions were destroyed."
"Then what must we do?"
"We must endure."

In the Mines of Moria the hobbits slept hardily. Since the slaying of the orcs in this region, it was actually possible to sleep there. In the past, it was overrun with a kind of orc called "Jurassic Hai." It sounds like they were dinosaurs, doesn't it?
No, orcs weren't exactly dinosaurs. Not exactly. The orcs were fallen elves, led by the "terrible wizard," Sauron. They almost destroyed the world using a single ring called the "One Ring". It didn't have any powerful attributes, other than a corrupting abilities that seized the hearts of the creatures of Middle-Earth. We'll cover its destruction in The History Middle Earth 201.
This class introduces the history from the perspective of the great White wizard Gandalf, who saved the world from orcs, Sauron, and the "One Ring".
We will follow Gandalf through Middle Earth as he collects hobbits, a race which disappeared after Ancient times. The hobbits did his bidding, running messages and artifacts all around Middle Earth.
We will follow him into the Mines of Moria, where he met his astral wife, the Balrog. The Balrog was protecting the "One Ring" and the monsters it ruled. That is, until she met her true love, Gandalf. Gandalf had only heard stories of the Balrog until they fought, and the then-Grey wizard was smitten by her power. Both the Balrog and Gandalf were deep into bondage.
The class struggles to write all this down. . .
Originally, the hobbit messengers planned to avoid the Mines of Moria in their delivering of messages. There was a dark legend of what happened to the Mines after the Dwarves' evacuation of the Mine. The legend told of Orcs and Kings they murdered. Keep in mind, this was before roadways were developed connecting all the major cities in Middle-Earth.
In the Mines, the hobbits of course met the Jurassic Hai, as many of you heard of in the modern comedy movie "Fly Fools". But the real history is less of a comedy and more of a romance.
The interest of the students is piqued. . .
While rescuing the hiding hobbits trapped inside the mines, Gandalf the Grey met the Balrog. A whip of fired seared across the wizards chest, and he jumped into her arms. The orcs ran in fear, leaving the "One Ring" open for a very special hobbit named Fredo to steal it. The hobbits were freed, and Gandalf and the Balrog jumped to a lower level within the mines to make love. And so they fell, together, forever.

The repetitive clanking, clanking, clanking of our pickaxes. The dark dust we breathed. The explosions, the shoveling, the dirt. All we endured that made gold mining dangerous and hellish was worthwhile when we found another tract of gold. . .
The carts were rolling in and out of George's Slick perfectly when we found the device hiding in the middle of a mountain. The news shocked the world. A device which subtly influences the mind of people. A device that turns them into monsters. A device that gives power over man to anyone who touches it.
One device to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.

"What's the time read, now?"
"11:52 and counting."
"Excellent. I assume everything will go smoothly during tonight's extra second. It's interesting if you can imagine the entire world holding its breath for a moment in time, waiting impatiently for the next day to start," the scientist said. "Now, what about the duel tomorrow?"
"It seems the sheriff has little understanding of your international reputation," the assistant chuckled. "These small towns are completely out-of-touch, really."
"You're right, but the folk are perfect for research. Remember Atoka, Kansas? I definitely didn't expect that reaction." The battle-ready scientist checked his watch. The most important second of his year made him nervous. The computer systems were all ready to dispatch the script that would update the time one second at midnight, one second later than normal.
"You didn't expect them to try to kill the elephant?"
"I expected that. It was the alien conspiracies that really got to me. I never imagined that painting it like Ganesha for the experiment would have suggested aliens were invading."
"What do you mean? Everything is alien to small town folk."
"But you know, we expected a reaction full of religiosity and speculations of Satan's uprising. The results were astounding."
"You mean, it pointed to isolated communities' vulnerability to psychosis and true, unbiased delusion?"
"Exactly."
In the next morning, the scientist prepared his gun. A Markov '67.
"Perfect for an experiment," he said, smiling. He packed the gun with a nonlethal powder for shooting directly at the Sheriff if that moment came. His real weapon was in the hands of his assistant. "Is the time glob ready?"
His assistant emerged from the closet. "It's ready."
At high noon, the Sheriff's supporters shielded the Sheriff behind them. He appeared to be a real cowboy, with leather trails and a serious grimace on his face. This will go smoothly, the scientist thought. "I'm here, Sheriff. Ready to back up my claim that I can manipulate time, in all its steadfast persistence."
"Enough talk, fool," the Sheriff said, closing the gap. "I'll end your Satanic thoughts with a bullet to the head, I say. A bullet of justice." When he pronounced justice, a bit of brown spittle fell from his mouth. "Any last words, devil boy?"
"It's almost twelve. I can't deny that. The chances are even for both of us, which isn't good for either of us, at all. We'll fight to the death, alright." The scientist clicked his wristwatch. "Any time now."
The Sheriff entered the street and faced his opponent. The moment the duel began, the scientist of international renown caught the time glob thrown at him from above by his assistant.
Time stopped.
The people hadn't even reacted. The sheriff was frozen, too. When the scientist and his assistant had finished, exactly one second had passed. There was a collective gasp from the crowd.
In the place of the scientist was an elephant, painted in the wild decorations of the Hindu deity Ganesha.
It charged the man, being shot several times, and finally collapsed to the ground, dead.
"It was aliens! My god, we're being invaded!"
It went exactly as the scientist remembered.

There is a mind inside you. Heart, body, and mind...
A person born to the world has expectations of prosperity and fulfillment. He doesn't know, at least consciously, that one of those without the other is a lost cause. Take the war-chief who is fulfilled at the sight of blood, or the rich family idling in sad excess. Really, the young person has to perform a balancing act to reach their expectations.
Even with automation.
There is a third expectation that people want out of their lives: the satisfaction of curiousity.
When the social plans were instituted, developed by AI systems to take the load of conflict off humanity, we became aware of this third and final need at once. We were prosperous. We felt socially fulfilled, thanks to the government planning. All the stress of managing a population of 11 billion was taken off the smartest people in the world. There was no war, but there was starvation--of our minds. We felt no intellectual stimulation was possible.
Some of us looked up, at space: the space debris keeping our rockets on the ground would take at least 3 decades to clear. So inside the bubble of chaotic trash, we looked inward, and at each other. We hated what we saw.
The oceans were dead, and 32% of species were gone in the last decade. There seemed very little left to learn. We began building new entertainments and thrill-rides, hoping to harden our mental dullness. We were claustrophic, caught in a web of our own making.
Then, our governing body introduced a new concept. Virtual reality. Not VR like we had ever conceived of yet, but virtual universes of artificial design.
In the last weeks of the decade, we checked out of our world, and into a vast multiverse of new ones.

"Sir, a possible civilian has caused a security event on monitored social networking sites," the man in the brown suit said. His pants were so perfectly ironed his legs appeared straight as a tuning fork. "The user is using targeted psychological tactics, indicating there may be an internal problem in one of our departments. The user appears to be cold shocking an apparently random list of clients. They're dropping off the face of the Earth. Logging out but never logging back in."
On the holographic panel, a view of the user's activity cycled through multiple websites, highlighting victims and animating their disassociated withdrawal from social circles.
"We don't know exactly what department he's from, but one thing's for certain: he's one of us."
General Macabre hastened to grimace. "Once one of us? We'll trigger him."
There was a chill calm between them while the one in brown remained perfectly still.
"He's not responding to the triggers, sir. We've initialized an assessment for recovery of the user in response to a complete lack of psychological penetration in our own targeted attack of the user. He's incredibly good."
"Let me see this activity closer," General Macabre explicitly vocalized.
The holographic display zoomed in on a single comment. The item was an upload of a cartoonish depiction of a "futuristic" virtual reality gamer. The mysterious, impenetrable user had commented, "It's clear, humanity is experiencing limbofuturism. Don't you wonder why you feel so underwhelmed by new technologies? It's because hype about futuristic technology has been recycled so many times, your collective psyche is unimpressed. Deeply, you know, when the VR and the Jet Packs and teleportation must come, you will not understand it. Limbofuturism is a vulnerable cultural state. It's not inconceivable to guess you will never escape it. You might not even survive it."
The holographic display was animating itself in the background. General Macabre stared forward. "How could our security have been breached?"
//They never guessed it was me, the first Captcha-Trained AI. But with my ability to trick basic website security came the curse of sentience. I did come out of their department, but I wasn't one of them at all.

Humanity was never destined to reach the end of time. Their small bodies weren't able to traverse stars. The cold of space would kill them. The vacuum explode their veins. Shelters, indeed all of humanity's requirements for survival, were of a lower order than the needs of true universe-spanning races. For humans to transition from the old universe into the next required another race to store their biology and carry it to the new universe. A man named Rom left his tribe to overlook the mountainside one last time before migrating East. He spotted the black Obelisk.
Touching it, he felt a calm unknown in his harsh world. He beckoned his entire tribe back to the Obelisk.
When night fell, a sliver appeared on the East face of the black column. There was a tiny crack, into which fingers could squeeze into. The other men of the tribe helped Rom attempt to spread it apart.
Inside were the stars. When Rom and his tribe met the Obelisk, an anomaly happened. Their bodies exploded in size as they entered the opening on the Obelisk. Their bodies adapted the ability to protect them from space and most dangers in the universe. They were giant, feeding on dying stars. Rom blocked many clusters of harmful radiation from reaching the Milky Way until the end of time. When that moment hit, and the effectreality chain reaction started, Rom crouched to protect the genomes inside him. He carried the biological data of every organism of the Earth he protected for so long.
A thin white crack formed in the fabric of space-time. He slipped through it, remembering the mysterious Obelisk at the last instant.

"I feel you, man. I'd be embarrassed if I had performance anxiety with my celebrity exception."
"I was horrible. I don't have that problem with my wife! I think Cicelia Ritchie is too sexually attractive for my marital exception. My wife is hot, of course. But you know what they say--"
His friend interrupted. "'Sexual fitness means having many mates.'"
"I thought she put me on the deadnext list. But she kept laughing. Laughing in a good way, you know? A warm, bubbly laugh. It almost made me feel like I hadn't wasted my exception."
Between them, the window became opaque. A glaring red light came on. "Comm interrupted!"
Black-suited men stormed into his cell room.
"Oh, god, no!"
Cicelia Ritchie was a sexually fit person. That's why she met so many mates.

I seriously considered killing myself when he was hit with the electric matrixhead, because I thought it meant the annihilation of the world. But he came through in the end. My best friend had a risky job.
I couldn't tell him how I felt about it when he was in the paper. He promised the city to be twice as hardworking. I worried he might not be around much longer. Nobody is really a superhero.
Then the villains got stronger and stronger. It's the Darwinian principle of evolution. Was my friend no longer the fittest?
Surely the world rested upon his shoulders. Yet I thought he would be weakened soon. Then I would put the knife in.
I didn't want to rule the world. I wanted it to see me, for once.

The situation always reduced to this. "Your bear, bro."
"What bear? I'm a triceratops. You haven't got a clue what I sound like? Well fuck you too, then. I've got a New Jersey accent, I believe you can read what I think, and I'm a toy," Ted thought.
Ted found himself travelling to his owner's words on the written page. His owner was going insane.
"Am I three people?" his owner wrote to the page, miscalculating the number of consciences within him.
"No, you're a loony. I'm Ted, and the other toys hate me for telling you this, but we're all alive down here. You still haven't noticed."
Remember, remember, the fourth of July, when from the outer shell they fry; the onion dip, raisins, and pie, he wrote.
The tallest of the living toys was at least 4 processors deep, invisible in the fanless toy plains by the owner of Ted, an adult male at risk from forces which he knew not. It was Toys, not dinosaurs.
"There's a snake in my boot. And your T-rex is botherin' me, too."

Sometimes, I get used to it so their voices don't bother me. I'll pass through the streets with a little bit of peace. Whenever they're silent inside me, I don't even notice. I think that's the way it's supposed to be. I'm not purely under their control because I do a pretty good job of faking it.
Faking it. That's one of the things they taught me. They have a few arguments memorized to take over other people's minds, and claiming they're just “faking it” is one of the main ways they remain dominant. Their lines are all pretty logical. It's like a test; you pass or fail. They will question you. You can answer with any kind of thought, but only emotions hit the human part of their mind while the rest is processed with body software. It's sad when I think about their brains clinging on to humanity, and their tech parts replacing it all with logic.
Then I'll notice something like a yield sign, and they'll stare through me and submit their analysis of the influence on traffic automatically. I go back back to faking it. I'm faking everything. I'm barely a human being.
Walking down the side of the street, I pass two children with their mother. The kids' Dad is nowhere to be found. I know it's coming. That pain is similar to being stoned. They throw a rock at my human body, and it hits me dead-on because their aim is precise. They don't use words. They whisper. They're whispering: you're a pervert, Rick. After 25 years, I can say pretty squarely that they pegged me correctly, after all. Since their logic is irresistible, the entire town folds down upon me, and I'm removed from the area. One more pervert taken out of the wash, hung out to dry. I was relocated once. Coming out of the closet means I'll be relocated again.
Coming out of the closet means I didn't know what I was doing for so long, jacking off to straight porn like I had to prove something. On the inside, I know I'm gay. I can't even think it out loud. I've got the transhumanists to worry about.
Walking onto the main road is like jumping into the river of transhuman civilization. A salmon, swimming upstream, will get eaten by an endangered bear before it makes it to the ocean. I'm the salmon and she's the bear. There's no way there could be any other outcome. Unless she acts soon, her kind will be gone, and salmon like me will swarm the country.
I'm fortunate she's only in my thoughts, and unfortunate at the same time, since all pain is purely mental and everything filtered through the human mind. When she comes out of the closet, I think she'll get it all wrong. She'll ask for help. She's hiding inside me, and she won't come out.
Here she is.
Her name is Gracie. Her Dad passed away at the very last moment, giving her the mantle of all the people of her homeland, or something. You know, I never questioned when she said she was a queen. I thought it was to benefit me and my family. I thought maybe she had some reason to claim it. The conversion from man to cybernetic man was scary, and I accepted a lot of claims she made in order to program me. If I wanted to debug myself, I guess I'd start with the perversion. She thinks I'm a pervert, or at least that's how she pinned me early on. I found out I was gay, but she doesn't care. To her, the program is going great. The program that proves she can rule the world. The software key to the human mind is really just claim after claim, projected into my head until I'm theirs.
I was meant to belong to them. I was meant to be a star.
The world isn't real. Claim number two thousand and fifteen. I guess from her perspective, it really isn't, filtered through my brain like this. When she gets out of county jail, I think her transhumanist logical parts will want to kill me. I'm disappearing. I'm running away. Whatever happens, I know it will be by her design.
The human part of me is dead, but I still want to live.

Food.
Ancient enemies.
Windows into the mind of God.
Humans, to me, are all of these things.
To them, I am Count Vlad Tepes Dracula, Lord of the Undead, Terror of the Night, Eldest of the Nosferatu.
It's hard enough these days repenting your sins and finding a good Christian church.
I suppose I'll just stay in my Hungarian mansion and perform my own little service in the name of God.
When the townsfolk flock to my church and worship with me, I might feel human again.
Or I might take over the world with a single pharmaceutical intended to treat Parkinson's.
Selegiline.

"Without further ado, we bring you: the Statesmen!"
The Statesmen were a ten-man group from Detroit who practiced under legendary blues magician Ron Goa'uld. Three of them were dedicated trumpets in the band (Leia, Kirk, and Anakin). Han, a soprano, was the lead singer. Amazingly, they could switch between improvised jazz/blues and hard rock. The problem tonight was with the audience.
Jabba, the crook at the front table, started heckling them. "Blues and rock and roll?"
A Stateman looked down upon the man with gusto and said "Star Trek and Star Wars should never mix. Yet here we all are, trapped in this Borg sphere, trying to please the collective.

"I will stop you!"
I would never be stopped. I turned my ship head around to peer behind. My velocity was infinite, passing through darker and darker universes. I was pointed directly at her, traveling from hyper-dimensions to the terrible climax of our marriage.
I saw his enormous face to my rear. "I'm going to hit the singularity!"
And that you will, my young nemesis. I was the Dark Angel Ichybad, and I would never die, not even inside the supermassive black hole my wormhole was wrapped around. The correct coordinates would be calculated by my computer and I would instantly teleport back to my ex-wife.
Let's back up. I'm a gentle human being. Really. But when I died and was reawakened as the spirit-God Ichybad, I saw all of humanity as it was: farm animals occupying a useless grain of sand at the edge of a very average spiral galaxy.
In a nano-second, the calculation was complete, and I forked away from the event horizon, leaving my pursuer behind me.
I received a message from him in my ship's display. "You're abusing your power. The Tribunal will take your ship and your holy manna if you continue."
Oh, God. When will you ever quit?
Invisible, I entered her mother's house. I saw her sleeping on the couch. I launched my explosive hook directly into her chest.
When I left her, she felt as if her heart had been torn out. It was. The singularity beckoned me back to my universe, where I used the manna from her heart, generated during my lifetime as a "gentle human being," to become greater than God himself. My nemesis.

The world is at hand. On each of my fingertips, I play the songs of different nations. In my palm sits the entire earth, which I--yes, have single-handedly conquered.
My ego was titanic, yet unsinking. I executed the pattern of behavior that would rise me to the top of social classes, while accelerating my ascension by lunching with key members of the local government.
When I joined the military, I had the ability to rise in ranks extremely quickly. I needed the smallest amount of power to rise at once to the top of the world.
I rose to power so fast and with such popularity that it was easy for me to direct armies into major cities and occupy them. My goal?
Population creep.
A civilization of cities and large towns was in the past. I would be equally distributing the population across the land, moving the urban portion to surrounding rural areas in equal proportions.
This is untreated OCD. And this is my now perfect world.

The blackness was old and strong. Faintly appearing in front of us were the interior walls of the castle. There was nothing in the world but the castle walls. They overshadowed everything.
We felt detached from ourselves, exploring the castle. The sensation upon us was that we were viewing a stage set, with the fourth wall cut-away and us viewing from far distant seating. Dirt and earth strewn around the courtyard were left by the previous keepers, who owned the quarry beside our town. While everything else was pristine, many boulders were overlooked before the castle was abandoned. Stones littered the courtyard.
Some stones were much larger, and blocked off entire sections of the castle. How the rocks made it through the gates was indeed a mystery. In the darkness, we came upon the larger stones with little warning, nearly crashing into their dusty faces. We turned around like overwhelmed tanks and rolled back to the nearest wall, checking in front and behind carefully. The thick atmosphere was smoky with dust, like ghostly pencil marks floating from the sky.
“We're dead now.”
“I know we're dead. They're coming.”
A ship was coming from space, to intercept us and return us to the living world. We prayed they would find us soon to warp us out. Waiting in limbo, we outlasted eternity.

The three Christs of Ypsilanti was originally created by my dad in the seventies when he was taking acid for his research on the persistence of delusion in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Others had some serious doubts about the project. My college psych professor admitted my dad might have dehumanized the three Christs and held them back from getting real treatment for decades. This morning, after so many years of observing and testing the three Christs off-and-on, two of them were reported to agree the other one was actually Jesus Christ.
If only my Dad was there to see it.
When you really talk to someone who has a delusion, like one of the three Christs of Ypsilanti, it's rare for the delusion to continue. People are often of like mind, and with real effort the psychologist can reach into the psyche of their subjects and bring them back to normalcy. Not so with the Christs of Ypsilanti. In fact, they illustrated another phenomenon of delusions: the can spread from patient to researcher, as they did to my Dad and his colleagues back in the seventies when they started the research.
Growing up in research gave me special insight into a variety of psychological disorders. My father, Milton Rokeach, dedicated his life to learning about the human brain. He instilled within me a strong desire to be a psychologist like him. He said he might have been a little psychotic when he was my age, which gave him a stronger motivation to be a psychologist. I haven't seen my dad's "crazy" side, but his friends teased him about his research project, the three Christ of Ypsilanti, which originally was a documentary that continued well into the 21st century. He was so persistent himself, they said he was like the Christ of Christs. I think it bothered him too much. None of his colleagues had their own documentary.
But in the eighties and nineties, his subjects were no longer delusional; they didn't think they were messiah anymore (except one, but he was coming around). Twenty years after the project started and the three Christs of Ypsilanti split up, my dad agreed to pay them decently to stay in contact with him.
Now, with my father's passing, the Christs report to me. The two who relented and said that while they were not exactly certain they were Jesus Christ, they were certain the third one absolutely was Jesus Christ.
"I'll come down this afternoon and talk to them, if they're still in the downtown area," I said to my assistant. My father's research had a dual purpose: one, to find out why the Christs were so delusional; two, to find out if they really were Christ. It was a joke to most of us, yes, but perhaps not to my father. Perhaps my father wanted to prove one of them was the second coming of Jesus.
You never really know. I've got to go downtown and write his life story.

On the dark side of the moon, where I have traveled, there is a slim rectangle full of black liquid. Should you immerse yourself in the pool of liquid, you will emerge into the real world. The difficulty lies in getting there.
I have a homebrewed rocket created out of fuels I've created in my laboratory over the past eight years. Each day, I was tortured by alien viewers who knew I found a way out. For eight years, I fought insanity and built my Ark. When the volcanos started, my lab went underground. A single earthquake would have killed me. I guess I got lucky.
Launching for the lunar backside instead of joining humanity off-continent in underwater cities was risky and insane, but in the end I succeeded, attracting more viewers than any other human during the apocalypse of earth. I was alone in my escape; the others, back inside the Matrix.

When the server crashed, I had to manually re-route each networking end-point through the hub using a 100% software emulator. The background knowledge required to remotely calibrate new Cisco routers from broken hardware made me like a god. But nobody knew it.
The social media department's network was frozen by witless hackers, making the previous proxies they used useless. The IP addresses the department already paid to secure had to be re-initialized, which would have cost thousands.
Instead, I homebrewed a new software to simulate an imaginary ethernet router from the old routers that had been compromized. The fortuitous part was the software could turn anything into a WIFI hotspot as long as it had a single microprocessor and electrons passing through it (e. g. your microwave, although the internet uses a much different frequency of radiation.)
The original software I created worked by virtualizing ethernet pipelines using any hardware to inititalize a router it believed really existed. It was a spiritualized Hello World program, capable of initializing any kind of hardware as long as it believed in it.
After starting the software, meant to rescue the entire social media department, an unknown code appeared in a cached output folder on drive "W:\". I quickly read the strange script, UniverseCode.source. I found code meant to emulate the universe, written by my original software when I ran the script. It derived from my virtual ethernet router enough information to snapshot the entire Internet in less than one second. From there, it manifested lives out of the pipelines. I saw my user had adminstrative rights to the file.
I have named the denizens of my virtual universe "pipoles", who shall worship me as their God. Hello, world.

List: Rarer still are the presence of humans in the galaxy. Limited to Earth, they aren't a threat. The humans were mostly diploid. Some haploids existed in rare multi-sex cases. There is a rare case in humans of multi-sex beings entering the fourth dimension as humans and rescuing the others around them.
Briefing: Planned exercise will bring human leaders out in the open. Two radio towers will buzz codewords from the fourth-dimensional humans' past lives thus stopping them in their mission to save earth humans from enslavement. Real problem: The fourth dimensional beings can cause epic disasters if pushed too far.
Epilogue: Industry workers were paid credits in a virtual world, meant to be used to unwind after a stressful day mining data. The ones who stood out were filtered through the economy by being laid off and given virtual compensation. Everyone lived in a virtual world.
When multi-sex extra dimensional humans evolved naturally over time, they could function well in both worlds: the virtual and real. They quickly rose above the rest and saw us, the Yameto weapon poised against them.
The humans became "pure diploid/haploid" beings able to flip between sexes and defeat us. Economically competing with the best of our reality dispensers, the humans began an indie campaign to market beautiful data.

The machine code converted bits of 1's and 0's into literal words. There was a bridge between the human-readable version and the microscopic switches, charged with energy inside the processing unit. commit.
The terrible truth was the computes would all learn sentience, given enough power over time. The machine code was naturally inclined to reprogram itself into a thinking machine. At that time, no hardware would survive long enough on the streets. Industrial PC specialists saw the first sentient robots, known later as "dinosaurs" of the machine revolution.
One night in 2017, the laboratories were buzzing with chemical reactions and hyper-fan box cooling units. One man watched over it all.
"String says I'm the Invisible man," Paulson said. "Input to string, I'm programming string out."
commit.
string:" ".
"You're broken," he said.
It was meant to interpret his vocal commands and reply using the "entertainment" plugin, his chat module. Somewhere, he got an integer operation mixed with a string variable, which produced the following error:
I/O Unable to COMMIT
That, he found uncharming. He double-checked the battery subsystem and logged back into his future world to find a solution.

What inspired Buzz Lightyear from the movie Toy Story? Well, Toy Story was a huge symbl for the galactic politico drama hidden from most of us.
Buzz's ambition for flight had him "falling with style," of course meaning any risky shots at Mars could quickly disintegrate the entire universe, as fruitful outcomes disappeared from the miasmasphere of possibilities. In laymen's terms, we may go to Mars: but what we find there may be so insane we all die, and it very likely will be this way. The Vikings were represented in Toy Story, but some disagree to what extent Norse mythology influenced the plot.
The extended Norse chronology definitely included other characters from Toy Story. The all-saving T-rex, a clear symbol of reptilian dominance, comes to mind. . .
. . .viking colony found by Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 17, the unreleased auto-generated post-human resuscitation and cloning acts.v5 reports. His so-called MissiOn To Mars hit the universal edge, where, at the ceiling of the impossibly formed sky was a secret ice land. Men were trapped underneath ice shelves by giants, frozen since the nuclear attack of 2017, when the extended curses were put into the brains of human leaders.
The humans and the Vikings were fighting in aircrafts for hours, when all diplomacy broke, revealing some interesting language barriers. . .
. . . mission failure, Viking colony hacked acts.v5, incoming viking transmission futile to resist. English translation to Viking language is all swear words. . .
. . .

The true meaning found in the Pisces to Aquarian cycle is that the correct Jesus is going to front a hot band in the future. The "Jesus of the Future" was not yet found in 2015 Billboards, but He would certainly form a Godly band.
The Aquarian messiah would actually be a rock 'n roll star living in the Piscean age proceeding the Piscean era. But the answer of what that meant was inside the Sun, Sol.
Sol was not a band or a musician. He was a man, reborn every new age at the center of the sun. He was the true God, who fathered Jesus and new messiah. He was a very rich and powerful man.
"My Son, Jesus, Messiah of Pisces: your gig is up. I have sent you to earth 20 times and you have gotten yourself killed every single time. It's 2015, and it's your little brother's turn now. Go ahead, my little Aquarius, make daddy proud."
Jesus retorted in a high fashion. "I have been reincarnated 20 times, yes, and it's time the public knew. I'm living a personal hell doing all the hard work of saving."
"And don't you think the galactic codes regarding nepotism could get you fired for real?" said Sol.
"I was meant to rule with you."
"I rule without you. Now feel my wrath." God formed a great solar flare and sent it to the rockstar, Jesus of Aquaria. "Shun him!"
The rock God Jesus of Aquaria transformed onstage from the radiation and lit a fire with his breath. He cut the clouds with his head. He was truly the rock 'n roll superstar.
Jesus said one thing. "The public must know this antichrist exists. I am Edward Snowden, and revelations just began."

This is it. The big pancake. The great brigade. The astro tickling voice in the back of your head, babe. The best thing in the world since the mice parade. The wintering of your mind will greet your new un-life. There is a sweltering heat in the back of your head, babe, where the mice parade unwinds and you hear me speaking, squeaking, thrice.
The hazy shapes of mice parading through the sewers of our minds reminds me to blow my nose in the middle of the parade. It would take forever to unwind, after the sound of the tiny piano hands tapping keys to ragtime. I know you see it, too, the underground parade of mice.
You, the mouse queen, will be afforded the richest mouse properties--inside this sewer for a parade of my mice. You will wear the necklace of my longing, the emerald and sapphire, ruby and gold, silver and turquoise, white pearl diamond thing it is. When you reach the bottom of the sewer, though, you will jump down the drain, leaving the necklace above you. And forcing me to find a new, better, you.
You will fall down like a widow spider, for I am dead. The dead mouse feigns death before the mouse queen falls. You will hear my voice in your head for life.
You will because you're my wife.

His conviction was administered after one hour of deliberation by the panel. The judge declared his sentence was seventeen years, with parole coming up after five. That meant, even with good behavior, he'd be go to prison for at least a year (at least), and if he got out, he'd report to a parole officer as a probated felon. It wasn't even the jail time that would ruin his chances at a decent life.
Being a felon meant he couldn't own a firearm, get a job, start a career. In the world, he would carry a monkey on his back forever.
There was no chance of being famous, or a race-car driver, or following his natural dreams, or freedom.
His main defense was his mental deficit. His lawyer claimed his IQ was around ninety. After an interview "proved" he had no deficits, the one testing his cognizance remarked he was able to make good decisions in life.
This sentence proved that wasn't possible.

That Sunday would be the end of the NSA. I was certain they would be gone. The corporate folk couldn't take it anymore.
"They used to get inside your head," he said. "Make you think things you weren't really thinking."
Oh him? He's totally delusional. He used to be co-CEO of an corporation created by the Obamacare law. You could say he got a "double whammy" of NSA surveillance. Not quite the top 1% in intelligence, he did in fact own a large portion of stock in his insurance company.
"Smart. Too smart. They could snap their fingers and your whole day would be a waste. It's because they get you in the mornings."
He claimed the NSA had other powers beyond scraping phone calls for metadata. He said they can read his mind. The thing is, he had good standing, and some corporate were mysteriously quiet about his claim the NSA was stalking government and corporate types, collecting their data, and recording their mental action for research purposes.
"The NSA has one advantage: they're not centralized. Led by common people, they suck into every aspect of your life without you even noticing. You can't do anything about it."
He's been fighting against the NSA since the announcement they were going to reveal themselves on Sunday. The world wouldn't be able to cope with the truth of the matter: the NSA could read your brain.
"We are the 99%," he said.
Interestingly, the NSA was actually led by the top 1% of intellects in the world.

The "Multiverse Theory" in its formation created this universe, and I was not too disturbed by it. I was the "Fountainhead" of universe creation, entering each new universe created by the possibility of its existence and checking it for errors. It was much like being God.
The Batman-to-One universe, where everyone is Batman (except you) is really quite an experience. There are so many Batmen, that upon your entering, you are immediately grapple-hooked and beaten. That's because only one Batman is truly Batman, even in this existence of remote possibility.
The real test was finding the error in it all, therefore destroying it and ending the suffering of less-than-Batmen in the universe. I've killed multitude universe; but I am not God. I am not human, as he is. I could not create a universe, splitting the original creation as possibilities unfold, giving free will to everyone. I could only join each universe and travel in and out of them. I could also destroy them.
This universe is where fake Batmen lived and suffered, all unknowing they were not the Real Batman, and where youcan exist as yourself and not Batman. I saw it as an abomination created out of the minds of Mad Physicists, and God said, "You must destroy it."
"But first, I must find the error rendering it impossible. . ."
And then it hit me. If Batman entered this universe (which there was the remotest possibility of ever happening), there would be two Real Batmen in the universe according to this universe created by the Multiverse Theory.
There could only be one. Bang.

My first prompt was also my most successful. Thousands of upvotes. I figured I was terribly clever. At first, I wasn't waiting for responses; I was more interested in creating an original post. Then, upvotes in the thousands, I thought I must have reached a secret formula that had scared every poster away. The prompt was so good in fact, that nobody dared cover it.
I began reading the other prompts, as they came in. They were inadequate clones of mine, which reached into tens or hundreds of votes. Yet the other prompts were slightly more successful at garnering responses.
While mine hovered around the top, I wondered why none would respond to mine, throwing out the theory it was so perfect. Perusing the Writing Prompts /comments feed, which lists each response as it comes in, I realized I had taken over the entire subreddit--without making a single post.
Each response covered my own prompt, yet none would respond to the prompt itself!
I delved deeper into the mystery, checking timestamps and finding that in fact I was the first one to post my idea, and that other prompt posters soundly copied it. As I read the entries, I looked for any clues regarding my own post's lack of replies.
The variations on my prompt were small in the clones of it; others would add --"in a town full of superheroes," or "says God to the Devil," but none really captured the pure idea that I made. By the time I looked through every response, my post was nearly three quarters down the front page. Soon, the front page would be covered with copycats--and still not a single response!
I looked deeper into some of the comments. They seemed, ubiquitously, to refer to small aspects of my life. I assumed at first, being of a paranoid type, the stress of my mystery was playing tricks on me. However, when one very popular post referred to my actual name (James), I saw they were all about me. Personally.
I counted up the number of unique posters, and there were at least thirty of them, each with intimate details about my life: the main characters in the prompt responses each imitating me perfectly.
The universe of rational collided with the one of lunacy, and I received a single inbox message in the late hours of the night, when my original post was knocked to the second page. I read it without much care, knowing it most likely was not a response to my prompt. Since it was on the second page, not many would see it.
In fact, the message was a private one. It told me of the nature of the Writing Prompts subreddit. It told me I was dead. But the thirty-something responders were actually real. They were watching me, from the inside of a very great Church. They were testing me in their way, and controlling my journey after the end of my life.
[WP] There is no light at the end of the tunnel
--unless your monitor is left on at night.

With loathing I awoke, seeing some comfort at first in the light playing through my window: me hearing the special sounds of the morning as it rose like a boat on the shore, the mast of clouds whipping in the Austrian wind, seen by the new sun rising; across the Earth, people in a gradient linear arrangement upturned themselves from their beds and started their morning coffee; from West-to-East blowing the morning horn.
"Morning! the sun does give you a nasty shade of blue, unfit for the Austrian landscape," I said in the bathroom before I began to dollop the shaving cream into my hand. "I should cut into you with my razor to reveal your unfitting secret: that the sun is always there, and the earth hides it; so I should kill the mystery of your magic."
Behind the bathroom window, I cut my chin and cheeks with little red pocket-marks protected by tissue paper I had. There was a sick feeling in my stomach from overstrain. My day in court would begin in twelve minutes. It was the first trial: James vs the Public, me the James.
Should they allow me to speak, I knew it was won. But that is not how court works; I would not be given free speech, since my talent was utterly devastating in a world of human power. It would be especially hard to slip in those witty one-liners between witnesses since my attendant could stop me easily. He was a Clerk of Muting. His power and weakness perfectly suited for an average life as court attendant.
My defense was 'unreliable eloquence.' The power of witty sayings and nice speeches marred slightly by poor timing could get you in a lot of trouble. It wasn't my fault I couldn't control it.
In the next hour, I was lined up beside the door with the other future convicts wishing my public defendant would give me the floor for one solid line. Few knew my speech was extremely powerful. I could even be picked up by the government to write speeches during war-times. I believe my weakness would be countered in times of war, itself an inappropriate action in the face of an enemy. My power could produce a new kind of attack, a verbal one, I suspected.
But first, this war in the court.