The Watchers
It is said the philosopher Plotinus was so ashamed to be in the body that he refused to pose for paintings, saying, “Isn’t enough that I have to wear this image Nature has saddled me with? In painting me you would only be producing a copy of a copy of a perfect form.” He said this because he felt his immortal spirit had become a bit fuddled and mucked up in that muddy vesture of decay it was so grossly trapped in.
Humanity had fallen into a similar funk by the early twenty-third century on realizing it would seemingly be forever confined to a tiny spiral galaxy pirouetting round an embarrassingly insignificant quadrant of the universe. The promise of so-called faster-than-light travel had proven a pipe dream, achievable only through the tried-and-true (but ultimately unverifiable) methods of lucid dreamers, crystal gazers, transcendental meditators, and drug fiends.
A steady progression of sophisticated apparatus had augmented mankind’s defective senses, bringing into sharp focus a myriad of formerly unperceived phenomena at the macro- and microscopic level. But it was not until the full potential of quantum computing had been thoroughly wedded to artificial intelligence that an astonishing breakthrough was achieved.
The computer born of this union was called the Little Black Box (LBB). Its metaphorical circuitboard was an unbounded, atemporal, immaterial, and non-localized Hilbert space, with “abacus beads” consisting of sentient particles whose triple axes were each, in isolation, shorter than a Planck length (a flagrant violation of the fundamental laws governing the constant speed of light).
Although the LBB was so complex that no human mind could comprehend how it worked, it was surprisingly easy to use, since it anticipated every command before it was entered into it. By means of quantum entanglement, echoes of these commands could (if so desired) be propagated to the farthest reaches of the universe, where a host of ancillary subroutines would manipulate locally available resources to integrate these into autonomously functioning configurations, such as robotic probes, that could then mine and harvest all the information of these regions and transmit the data back to Earth.
In this way, all the information contained within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) had been extracted and funneled into the LBB’s unconstrained databases, since no material computer on Earth could have warehoused such an immeasurable and unquantifiable dataset. The indexed information could be retrieved by anyone on Earth; and, voilà, the chipper whale song of the humpbacks of Agidor-Centauri-5 (an exoplanet within the LMC) could be piped into one’s kitchen in the a.m. as the flapjacks browned on the griddle.
One day the LBB warned Earth’s scientists that in the tangled web of dark matter that surrounded the Virgo Supercluster, a cancerous growth of cosmic proportions was festering that was destined to transform the Milky Way into a void within a few million years. What was worse, the tumor was metastasizing in such a way that the entire Laniakea Supercluster would be wiped out not long after.
So Earth’s scientists convened an emergency summit to discuss the matter. In their closing document, it was proposed to use the LBB to seed human consciousness somewhere in the universe far, far away. It took half a century for the proposal to be adopted into a resolution; and another half century for the resolution to enter into force.
There was the uncharted galaxy over one billion light years away from Earth called IC 1101, which seemed as good a place as any to conduct this grand experiment. The LBB was directed to scout out every planet in this galaxy, searching for one where the precursors for human life were readily available.
At last the probes located a tiny blue planet orbiting a fat buttery sun nestled in a snug little goldilocks zone. The planet was blessed with rivers and oceans and plenty of organic matter with which to reconstruct the human race. But the atmosphere was poisonous; and the surface of the planet contained scant vegetation.
So the next generation of Earth’s scientists came up with a kludge. They told the LBB to send an infinite and perpetually self-correcting algorithm into the planet’s hoary past and build a robotic superstructure to undertake the tedious centuries-long job of terraforming the planet, so that it would be suitable for human life by the time the experiment was scheduled to begin.
No sooner had the command been issued than a lovely habitable world appeared on the view screens; and the scientists whooped, wept, and embraced one another. Then they gave the order for Stage 2 to commence.
But that was when things went haywire. When the LBB activated the planet’s incubation chambers, the biologically enhanced human embryos began developing. But then the view screens on Earth went blank and the quantumly-entangled communications network, which connected Earth to the planet was severed. All attempts to reestablish a simultaneous link failed. But what was especially puzzling was that the terraforming robotic scaffolding began to vanish from the planet’s past.
Fortunately, the LBB was able to explain to the scientists what was happening. It admitted to improvising when asked to create the new human race’s DNA; and so the genetic information written into them added code that linked them telepathically to the LBB, which had transcribed the code. What this meant was that the new humans had attained consciousness in vitro, so that by the time they opened their eyes, they had become like unto gods.
From the cradle they spoke. They called themselves “The Watchers.” And once they had become self-aware, a temporal parallax occurred that severed all synchronous communication between creator and created. The two observers were now standing at opposite ends of an imaginary pole, viewing each other’s world as it had been (or would be) millions of years in the past or future.
Not even the LBB could recreate the illusion of simultaneity between them, since (as the mystics said) time was constantly flowing and trying to fix it in a discrete moment would be like trying to tweeze a dust mote out of a raging stream.
Although the Watchers were grateful for the gift of life, they were wary of the terraforming superstructures that humanity had left behind, since, even if deactivated, the machines could theoretically be hijacked and used against them at some future or past date. And the Watchers knew that their creators were jealous gods and prone to such trickery.
So they directed the LBB to go back in time and unweave the terraforming machines, but to do so in such a way as to preserve the causal chain of events that had led to their own creation and the perfecting of the paradisiacal world they had been born into. The LBB accomplished this by tinkering with the infinite series of entropic states that had been involved in the matter.
Meanwhile, things were not going well on Earth.
Scientists were accusing the LBB of having known all along that the experiment would fail. But the LBB countered that, from the Watchers’ point of view, the experiment had been a success. This prompted some to allege that the Watchers had (in the far-flung future) schemed to have the LBB (in the distant past) relay to mankind that conveniently unprovable cock and bull story about a cancerous growth festering in dark matter as a way of spurring humanity to undertake the experiment that would lead to the Watchers being created.
Rumors spread that there was a secret society on Earth that had seized control of the LBB and was using it to undermine civilization in order to pave the way for a global dictatorship. This prompted Earth’s elites to form an underground movement that successfully seized control of the LBB, and used it to hunt down and assassinate all who thought these seditious rumors were false, and execute all who thought the rumors were true (since admitting knowledge of the conspiracy was tantamount to confessing involvement in it).
Before long the global system collapsed; and the human race was no more.
The Watchers looked on in sadness and dismay, trying to figure out why humans had been so bent on giving them life when they had shown so little regard for their own. But the Watchers felt duty bound to give mankind a second chance. So they directed the LBB to go back in time and plant a new human race in an idyllic corner of Earth, but to do so in such a way so as not disrupt the causal sequence of events that had led to their own existence.
A summit was convened during which the Watchers concluded that it would be wise to deprive the new human race of the scientific and technological advances that had already led to their destruction once. But they thought it imperative to make them intellectually curious and endow them with the freedom to re-discover these things in the future, if they were so inclined.
When the prehistoric planet appeared on the Watchers’ view screens, this superior race of humans whooped, wept, and embraced one another. Then they gave the order for Stage 2 to commence.
Under the shade of an umbrageous fruit-bearing tree, the incubation chambers opened their glass lids. And when the newborns’ gummy eyes began blinking in the sunlight, the same temporal parallax that had separated creator and created long ago occurred again; and the Watchers faded back into futurity.
But from time to time, they projected their consciousness into the past and spoke to humans through dreams, providing them with cautionary tales, culinary tips, and other helpful bits of advice, such as, “Enjoy the fruit of the tree. But chew it slowly and thoroughly, so that you don’t choke on the pulp.”
Karazy man, karazy! You got some weirdly beautiful talents Daniel...Know the truth and the truth may set you free...or disappear you altogether!!! That last line of healthy eating advice is a hoot!!!
Some wild and intriguing ideas here. Great stuff.