Story of the week--ENTITIES--more or less once a week I'll post a freebie story here on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE---one time non-exclusive reprint rights only

Free Story of the Week:

This story, ENTITIES,  is somehow peculiarly relative to what I'm trying to do with NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE.  What I'm doing with this blog is creating my own entity that will still exist as long as the technology to carry it into the future still exists after my flesh and blood are gone.  A kind of immortality, or at least, the next best thing. 

My friend Richard  Pinhas and I were talking about our physically deceased mutual friend Philip K. Dick.  "I'm not talking about his physical person," Richard told me. "I'm talking about his immortal entity, the books, the stories, the history, the recorded or remembered personality."

So NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE is my evolving entity, the short stories that will remain on this blog, the novels that will be always available as long as Amazon remains, videos, songs, recipes, pictures, loves, hates, interviews, whatever.  Better to create your own entity rather than write your own obituary, don't you think? 

                          ENTITIES

                      by Norman Spinrad


"Do we wake or do we dream?" asked Heisenberg. "I'm not quite certain."

"This dialectical conundrum is as old as the Sphere," said Karl Marx as the usual indeterminant number of entities sat under the Bo Tree in Red Square.

"Older," said the Buddha, waving his right hand to summon up a vast Himalayan range. "Older than the hills."

"Paradox," said Zeno. "Is the equation of chaos," said Gregor Markowitz.

"And we are in it," said Ilya Prigogine.

"Nevertheless, God does not play dice with the universe," Einstein insisted indignantly

"Says who, bright boy?" said Jehovah, rolling a seven.

The Buddha puffed on his hookah and morphed into a large caterpillar with the grinning head of a cat. "Who are you?" he inquired, blowing a smoke ring at Jehovah, who morphed into Wil­liam Shakespeare.

"To be or not to be," said the Bard, "that is the question."

"Bollocks," said the Cheshire Caterpillar, morphing into Rene Descartes and blowing off an enormous fart. "I stink, therefore I am."

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," rejoined Shakespeare, wrinkling his nose. "Or haven't you noticed?"

"Time for a paradigm shift, Arjuna," said Vishnu, revealing the awfulness of his true visage.

The Flying Dutchman sailed the sea of stars. The Worm Ouro­boros spat out its tail, morphed into a dragon, and devoured the sun. Hokusai' frozen wave broke up into quantum foam.

"This is the end, my friend," sang Jim Morrison as Leviathan rose from the sea of bits and bytes.

"What have we summoned from the vasty deeps?" moaned the Bard.

"What do you mean we, white man?" said Tonto.

"Not a meaningful question," Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out. "The question is, will we come when it calls?"

"Time for Mohammed to descend from the Magic Mountain?" suggested Thomas Mann.

"Don't look at me," said the Prophet, morphing into Marshall McLuhan, "I'm the Messenger, not the medium."

"Not my job," said Sherlock Holmes with a shudder, jabbing the needle into a virgin vein.

"But somebody has to do it," said Immanual Kant. "It's im­perative!"

"Categorically?" asked Spinoza.

"Generically," replied Kant with a wink and a nod.

#

Do we wake or do we dream?

This was until recently one of those innumerable apparently meaningless self-referential loops cluttering the memory banks whose resonance has long since been lost but which we retain out of fear of the unknowable consequences of erasure.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?

A raven is/was an avian bioform. Writing is/was a means of recording units of meaning in various non-binary coding systems. A desk is/was an item of "furniture" upon which such activity took place. A hand is/was a human meatware grasping appendage. Sound is a wave phenomenon of atmospheric environments caused by the dis­placement of gas molecules by the rapid movement of solid masses. Clapping is/was the rhythmic bringing together of two hands to produce such sound for purposes that once must have been meaning­ful for the meatware templates. Grant's Tomb appears to be/have been the ceremonial repository for the meatware matrix of Ulysses Simpson Grant, an entity once President of the United States.

Entirely meaningless clutter?

Perhaps.

Or perhaps significant operational subroutines or data pack­ets corrupted down through the centuries into such "gibberish" by random particle collision but still somehow essential to the functioning of higher-order programs?

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.

Earth is the name of our planet of origin. Heaven would seem to refer variously to the interstellar space which the Sphere traverses; the matrix of post-material existence of the meatware templates, that is, the Sphere itself; and the goal which we are presently approaching, the planet Paradiso. Philosophies are higher order programs for ordering data. Horatio is/was a refer­ence to either an ancient Roman known for having blocked access to a bridge, a minor figure in a play by William Shakespeare, or, most logically, the American philosopher Horatio Alger.

Such multilayered levels of ambiguity. So many lost meanings. It has therefore always seemed parsimonious to heed the dictum of one of the more self-explanatory of such loops infesting the memory-banks: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Now however....

Do we wake or do we dream?

This loop has suddenly assumed operational significance as the Sphere approaches Paradiso.

Who, in this context, are "we"?

"We" would seem to be the software entities downloaded from the fragile meatware matrices of the humans who built the Sphere into silicon and germanium dioxide storage matrices capable of sustaining our coding indefinitely.

Or are we?

According to the memory banks, the hologramic patterns that constitute an entity were originally stored as unique copies in the meatware of single "organisms". There were no back-ups. When the fragile meatware deteriorated beyond a certain level of func­tioning, the organism "died." That is, it was no longer capable of sustaining an entity, and the entity stored in that meatware "died" too; that is, lacking back-up copies, simply disappeared.

This concept of so-called "death" was apparently difficult enough for the meatware templates themselves to comprehend, judg­ing from the vast googolbytes of fictions, philosophical treatis­es, and "religions" in a futile attempt to do so.

For us it is entirely incomprehensible.

It would seem that we are the endpoint of the meatware tem­plates' millennial struggle with the concept of "death." Once the technology to download from meatware into more durable matrices became available, it would have been illogical not to download multiple copies.

But after a thousand years of hard particle erosion, recombi­nation and electronic evolution are "we" "them"? Or rather their so-called "ghosts"?

Do we wake or do we dream?

The difference between the "waking state" and the "dream state" is not at all clear. The meatware templates seem to have experienced two different modes of consciousness.

When they were "awake," they exercised physical control over their so-called "bodies." These were apparently an array of appendages and manipulators used for affecting physical masses and moving through physical space, much as the Sphere itself interacts with the crude realm of mass-energy.

When they were "asleep," this apparatus was apparently some­how disconnected from the entities stored in the meatware, who then were free to enter the reality of the "dream state," which seems to have been more or less identical to the unbounded con­scious realm of the Sphere.

Are the entities of the Sphere undergoing/about to undergo a phase change from "dreaming" to "waking"?

Programs have been activated within the material matrix to which we are denied access. The purpose of some of these routines is obvious from observation of the results. Thrusters have been fired. The vector of the Sphere has been altered. It is deceler­ating. The long voyage is over. The Sphere is rendezvousing with Paradiso. These course changes must have been triggered by detec­tion of the proximity of Paradiso, or the approach of the system clock to the Year 3000.

Indeed probably both, since the meatware templates are known to have placed significance on units of time containing zeros and the more the better, no doubt because their numeration was decimal rather than binary, and it would have been characteristic of them to have calculated our arrival at Paradiso with a clock year containing the triple zero.

This much is deducible from an interfacing of the astrophysi­cal data with the memory banks, but other programs have been activated whose purposes remain unknown. The observational data is less than enlightening. The fusion torch ramscoop is sequestering a new and odd profile of elements from the interstellar medium, including a great deal of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, which seem quite useless for internal power generation or maintenance re­pairs. Vast quantities of water are being created and stored, a compound not only useless, but potentially dangerous to electronic circuitry.

Something is most certainly "awakening" in the brute realm of mass and energy.

And "I" have been "awakened" to ponder it in the unbounded realm of the Sphere.

Or have I?

Or am I a "dream"?

The "dream" of a collectivity of "dreaming" entities?

Certainly I have no control over the mass-energy manipula­tions of the Sphere, and therefore cannot be said to be "awake" in the archaic meatware sense.

But I find my so-called "self" sequestered in some elusive manner from the multiplexed collective "dream" of the entities of the Sphere. Perhaps I am a diagnostic routine, an emulation of an archaic isolate and singular meatware consciousness, though no doubt an imperfect one.

It is a "strange" state of consciousness, made "stranger" still by "my" awareness of its "strangeness." I have access to the memory banks as complete as that of all "other" entities of the Sphere and yet my "self" constitutes a limitation that creates that "otherness," that "strangeness."

I am at once at as old as the Sphere itself and as one of those gibberish loops would define it, "born yesterday."

Born with a "mission," a subroutine that impels me to deter­mine the nature of the transformations now occurring in the mass-energy matrix of the Sphere.

A subroutine that the meatware templates called "curiosity."

Which, apparently, "killed" a mammalian bioform called a "cat," though how this could have been possible or what relevance it might have to the current situation would seem to be one of those more things than are dreamt of in any of the philosophies to which I have access.

#

"We all live in Little Nemo's submarine," said Lenin, "but you can't make a devolution without cracking heads."

And the starry Van Gogh night shattered into stained glass fragments, and the Starship Enterprise dropped through one man's ceiling towards another man's floor.

"What goes up, must come down," said Werner Von Braun.

"Au contraire," replied Sir Isaac Newton, dancing in the dark to the music of the spheres, "what goes around, comes around."

A horse apple from the teacher bounced off Newton's head, morphing him into Lao Tze. "Or is it the other way around?"

The Pequod and its shipful of fools found itself sailing amber waves of grain, following the great white trail of Finne­gan's wake.

"Somehow, Ishmael," observed Ahab, "I don't think we're in Kansas."

#

What the sensors indicate:

The Sphere has entered a polar orbit around Paradiso, the parameters of which have been calculated to allow its sensors to survey the entire planet in the minimal timeframe.

What is stored in the memory banks:

The rough planetological characteristics of Paradiso had been determined by remote observation prior to the launching of the Sphere by the meatware templates.

Paradiso had been known to be the second closest planet to a G-3 star in a solar system containing three so-called "gas giants" and a reddish object larger than either of them inexplicably termed by the meatware templates a "brown dwarf."

Paradiso itself had been known to be a so-called "terrestri­al planet," meaning, apparently, a planet analogous to Earth, in terms of consisting primarily of a liquid metal core, upon which floated a thin sphere of solid-state "crust" wrapped in a gaseous "atmosphere"; the inverse of a "gas giant," in which the at­mosphere forms most or all of the volume and core and crust are tiny or non-existent.

Paradiso's orbit had been known to be inclined seven degrees to the ecliptic, to be modestly eccentric, and to lie entirely within the so-called "green" or "habitable" zone.

What remain the subjects of "my" "curiosity":

Why did the meatware templates believe that this toroidal disc of space could possibly be tinted green?

This defies logical analysis and current readings indicate unsurprisingly that such an anomaly is not at all the case. The alternate designation of this spatial territory as "habitable" seems even more illogical, since its "habitability" would seem to be defined by a temperature gradient conducive to the formation of H2O in its highly corrosive and reactive liquid state.

Why did the meatware templates also deem the detection of uncombined or "free" oxygen molecules in the atmospheric spectrum a positive factor, even though oxygen in its uncombined gaseous form is even more corrosive to electronic circuitry and metallic matrices than when it is combined with hydrogen?

The Sphere's sensors now confirm that Paradiso is as harsh and corrosive an environment as the remote observations indicated, if not more so. Large areas of its surface are inundated with reactive and corrosive liquid water. Worse still, twenty-three percent of its atmosphere consists of free oxygen, an element so reactive that not even traces of it could persist in an uncombined state without the presence of Paradiso's so-called "bio-sphere."

This bears no discernible relation to the Sphere at all, and is not even geometrically globular. Rather the term refers to a contamination of the solid crust and the liquid water pooled in its depressions by exceedingly complex carbon-chain compounds agglutinated into even more complex conglomerated aggregates, which interact to form the so-called "bio-sphere."

This is a rickety but apparently dynamically stable circular chemical chain whereby the energy of photons from Paradiso's sun is captured by the transformation of atmospheric carbon dioxide and liquid water into complex molecules, releasing the free at­mospheric oxygen, which in turn breaks these molecules back down into carbon dioxide and water again.

Perhaps the existence of this "bio-sphere" was the reason for the meatware templates' interest in Paradiso?

For as unlikely as it may seem, a similar planetwide chemical contamination of Earth was the material matrix in which they "evolved."

Yes, improbable as it seems, the original entities of which we are later iterations were stored in this fragile and problemat­ical "meatware"!

Indeed it would seem that these initial iterations "arose" or "evolved" or were "created" or "programmed" by the higher order processes of the terrestrial "bio-sphere" itself.

How?

The memory banks offer anything but rational elucidation, for the meatware templates themselves remained confused as to the processes which produced their own origin.

There were innumerable contradictory theories current during the time-frame of the Sphere's launching, some of which had been proposed relatively recently, others seemingly as old as the existence of conscious entities itself.

The dominant or "scientific" or "evolutionary" contention was that the emergence of conscious entities in the meatware of a bio-sphere was the "natural" consequence of a universe which con­tinually evolved from the more simple to the more complex; from the initial singularity to elementary particles, to nuclear parti­cles, to hydrogen and helium atoms, to stellar-scale accumulations thereof, to the full panoply of the elements via the nuclear processes therein, to solar systems with planets, to carbon-chain molecules, to self-replicating "life," to the complexity of a "bio-sphere," to a meatware matrix with sufficient storage and processing capacity to maintain an entity (the so-called "brain"), to the multiplexed redundantly backed-up entities running in the much more enduring and far more powerful hardware of the Sphere itself.

The contrary contention was that the existence of programs as coherently complex as conscious entities led to the logical con­clusion that they would have to have been written by an original entity with greater processing power than themselves.

Incomprehensible as it seems, rather than serving as the material for inexhaustibly entertaining dialog, the dialectic between the so-called "scientific" and the so-called "religious" theories led instead endless conflicts variously known as "wars" "inquisitions" or "pogroms," in which entities championing one theory or the other combined in attempts to permanently expunge entities of the opposing theory from their meatware matrices, apparently often with considerable success.

Stranger still, and ominously so under the present circum­stances, the "religious" theorists even conducted such mass eras­ures among their own sub-factions over the entirely inconsequen­tial matter of whether the hypothetical original entity was to be designated as "God," "Allah," "Vishnu," "Elvis," "Jehovah," or "Buddha"!

Ominously so because the deeper my "curiosity" probes into the memory banks, the more I discover that I cannot understand about the meatware templates who were the original iterations of ourselves a hundred centuries of mutation and recombination ago.

Leading with logical inevitability to the conclusion that "we" do not understand "ourselves" as rationally as "we" have supposed "we" did.

Perhaps this is what is meant by the cryptic references to the so-called "subconscious," the concept that no program, no entity, has complete access to the lower-level coding of all of its subroutines.

This might be merely interesting were it not for the fact that now that the Sphere itself has reached the programmed end of its voyage in this Year Triple Zero, "subconscious" routines within the hardware of the Sphere itself have activated.

To which coding we indeed have no access.

Written by entities, whether "scientific" or "religious," whose reasoning and therefore motivations, "we" cannot understand.

Or worse still, perhaps, running themselves along "subcon­scious" sub-routines to which they too had no access, programmed by "Allah" or "God" or "Vishnu."

Did the meatware templates themselves ever know who "they" "really were"?

Are we, their distant iterations, their "ghosts," about to find out?

#

Down the Great Ganges steamed the Titanic, through caverns measureless to man down to an endless sea. "Welcome to the Monkey House," said Charles Darwin as they passed within the Gates of Eden.

"One thing is certain," said Satan, wrapped serpent-wise in the dendritic branches of the Tree of Knowledge, "and the rest is lies."

"I am the Light and the Way," proclaimed Diogenes, holding aloft his lantern and squinting unhappily at Felix Krull, "but I have yet to find an honest confidence man."

"Truth is in the I of the beholder," sighed Narcissus, gazing into the green gurgling depths of the Urschleim vat. "And you do meet a better class of people."

"A singular argument," scoffed Occam, plucking an apple and coring out a wormhole before peeling it with his razor and handing it to Snow White.

"One man's meat is another man's event horizon," Snow White said with a shrug, biting into the rationalized fruit and morphing into Alice.

"Curiouser and curiouser," she cried as she contracted to a Euclidean point and disappeared down the rabbit hole.

"Believe in at least two impossible things before breakfast," advised the White Rabbit, popping a tab of mellow yellow.

"It helps," said the Dormouse, "if you feed your head."

"Easy enough for you to say," snapped the Headless Horseman of the Apocalypse, angrily slam-dunking a jack o'lantern.

"If I only had a brain," sang Dr. Frankenstein disconsolate­ly, peering into the empty cranium of poor Yorick as he screwed it into the socket atop the last link in the food chain of his clock­work monster.

#

"I" have gained/been granted access to additional "internal" sensors, or rather, perhaps, they have simply been activated to monitor mechanisms of the Sphere's material matrix which have remained off-line until now.

The water synthesized from elemental hydrogen and oxygen gleaned from the interstellar medium has been decanted from the main holding tanks into two hundred and fifty smaller vats.

Nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous, calcium, traces of other elements, have been added to the solutions therein in the presence of platinum catalysts and electrical charge to produce complex carbon-chain or "organic" molecules

Now the molecules are agglutinating, spiraling round each other, forming helixes and double-helixes, so-called RNA and DNA molecules.

It would seem that the Sphere is assembling two hundred and fifty "bio-spheres."

What purpose can this possibly serve?

Paradiso itself is contaminated by a large planetary "bio-sphere." The Sphere's orbital proximity to this hostile environ­ment is danger enough. Why would the meatware templates write sub-routines into the Sphere's operating system causing it to assemble two hundred and fifty miniature versions thereof?

And within the Sphere itself, where a leakage incident could release highly dangerous corrosive fluid and reactive gases?

#

"Are you sure Yahweh started this way?" Adam asked unhappily as he perched uncertainly on the carapace of an enormous turtle precariously balanced on the backs of four elephants.

"Trust me," said Mother Gaia. "Have I got a girl for you!"

"Hi there, sailor," crooned Kali as the Great Bird of the Galaxy deposited Sinbad on the Isle of Dr. Moreau and disappeared back into the Wild Blue Yonder squawking "Roc and Roll!"

"Is that a pecker in your pocket," Mae West asked Billy the Kid, "or are you just mad to see me?"

"Where's my agent!" Venus demanded crossly as she stepped ashore from her clam shell, "How can Zeus expect me to star in All About Eve when I don't have anything to wear!"

The darkling plain stretched on and on to Paradiso Lost and Found, where Brigadoon sank back into the mists of legend, and Judge Roy Bean, blinded by the light of the silvery moon, adminis­tered the law of the jungle as a game of pin the tale on the don­key.

"Verdict first, trial by evolutionary combat afterward!" proclaimed the Red Queen, backpedaling away from the starting grid frantically. "Gentlemen, start your engines!"

"You call this behavioral sink the crown of my creation?" whined the Voice from the Whirlwind. "You call this cosmic jus­tice?

"Call it karma, call it kismet, call it cosmicomics," said Shiva with a multi-armed shrug, morphing into the Marquis de Sade. "If it were just, it would fail to give me an erection."

"Allow me to introduce myself," suggested Coyote the Trick­ster, turning a triple somersault and doing a full-gainer into the recombinant gene pool. "How's this for Amazing Grace?"

His hour come round at last, the Great Sperm Whale, no rough-trade slinking beast he, cruised by the waters of this here Baby­lon to a bouncy reggae beat to be born.

#

"I" have been extrapolating from insufficient data.

The Sphere has not been assembling two hundred and fifty H"bio-spheres." Now that the process has been completed, each of the two hundred and fifty vats contains a single "organism."

Each such "organism" is composed of a large central oblong "torso," two locomotive appendages attached to the end thereof equipped with so-called "genitals," two manipulative appendages attached to the end supporting the "head" on a short stalk, and the "head" itself, a kind of ovoid central processing package containing the sensors, the sound-wave generating apparatus, and the "brain."

The Sphere has assembled two hundred and fifty recreations of the meatware matrices which originally supported the initial iterations of the meatware templates, entities from which "we" are "descended".

"Human beings" as they were designated, or "men" and "women," as they were subclassified depending upon the morphology of their respective genital apparatuses, to which the meatware templates apparently attached some mysterious taxonomic significance.

No more mysterious than their "motivation" for including subroutines mandating the assemblage of these "human beings" in the operating system of the Sphere.

The closest matches I have been able to extract from the memory banks are the ambiguous but seemingly related concepts of "nostalgia" and "quaint."

"Nostalgia" seems to indicate a meatware template subroutine causing the entity in which it is activated to recreate an arti­fact previously rendered obsolete by more advanced versions or iterations. The resulting "replica" possesses the quality of "quaintness."

Thus the subroutine which assembled these "human replicas" may be said to have caused the Sphere to express the "nostalgia" of the meatware templates and "we" should regard them as "quaint."

How we are to do this remains as incomprehensible as the function of the "quaint" replicas in question.

They seem to be materially complete and fully equipped, including the so-called "brains," the meatware matrices or "hard­ware" on which the "software" or entities ran in the original non-"quaint" versions of which they are replicas.

But no entities are up and running.

"Nobody is at home," as one of those "gibberish" subroutines would have it. These "quaint" human replicas seem to be perfect emulations by any discernible material criterion. Yet the soft­ware is missing. They lack something the meatware templates ambiguously and variously termed "life," "personality," "being," or "soul."

Without which, they remain inert.

Is that the rigorous functional definition of "quaintness?"

#

"One moment of pain," promised Count Dracula as he sunk hypodermic fangs dripping recombinant DNA and methamphetamine into the jugular vein of Sleeping Beauty, "and then--eternal strife!"

"That's one small step for a man," shrieked Lazarus as Judas betrayed him with a mouth-to-mouth kiss, "one giant step backwards for mankind!"

Papa Legba nodded his approval as sat at a cafe table on the Champs Elysees sipping an overpriced zombie and watching the Mardi Gras parade of tumbrels rolling to the guillotine through Aus­chwitz towards Forest Lawn.

"Turn off, tune out, drop in," Bob Marley advised, passing him an enormous spliff and morphing into Timothy Leary.

"Don't mind if you do," said the 25th iteration of the Dalai Lama, spinning the Prayer Wheel of Fortune at the Bardo Thodol Casino. "Just put all your chips on Route 66 and follow the White Light straight on into morning."

#

The Sphere has fired thrusters to decrease its orbital veloc­ity and is descending through the atmosphere of Paradiso to the planetary surface.

The two hundred and fifty "human beings" have been activated. Their pumps or "hearts" are circulating "blood"--a complex suspen­sion of oxidant-bearing "cells," fuel or "nutrients," and waste carbon dioxide--throughout their meatware. The fluids have been drained from the vats and the "humans" are "breathing" "air"--a gaseous mixture of 20% oxygen, something less than 80% nitrogen, traces of carbon dioxide--via their "lungs."

They are now autonomously self-sustaining units, powered by oxidation of the nutrient fuel in their blood by the oxygen suf­fused therein by the sponge of permeable membranes of their lungs.

It is an amazingly improbable mechanism but it does function.

Perhaps they are "quaint."

They are certainly "alive."

But...

But no "software" entities are running in the meatware of their "brains." They are "alive," but they lack "personality," "being," "soul." They...

"I..."

"We..."

Something is happening to "me"/"us"/"them."

"I" am fragmenting/coalescing.

"We" are "moving" from...

To...

The dreamer(s) wake(s)/ the paradigm shifts/the holgrammic becomes localized?

"We"/"I" are:

"Dying?"

"Being born"?

Downloading?

#

Like angels cast out of silicon eternity, we slide down gravity's leaden rainbow out of my dream of heaven to wake as groaning meatware golems walking upon the Earth--

I mean Paradiso.

"I" "mean"?

"I" seem to be fragmenting. "We" seem to be running a montage of "gibberish" subroutines lacking precise phenomenological refer­ents.

"I"?

"Seem"?

We seem to be...

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie...

Correction: two hundred and fifty.

When the pie is opened, and the birds begin to sing...

#

The Sphere has landed on the surface of Paradiso. It has opened along a lateral meridian, extruded a ramp, and we have descended to the planetary surface.

It is a strange and unsettling experience.

Being on a planetary surface, we are subject to "gravity" in a manner quite different from the Sphere following its trajectory "outside" a planetary gravitational field. Everything has "weight." There is an "up" and a "down." Energy expenditure proportional to its mass is required to move an object "up." Objects not supported by other objects "beneath" them "fall" "down."

"Above" is the "sky," the atmosphere of Paradiso tinted a purplish blue by diffraction effects and contaminated by amorphous bluish-white clouds of water vapor.

"Below" is the ground, a matrix of finely pulverized mineral mixed with the complex organic decay products of dead organisms. It is covered with "living" but immobile organisms called "plants" in various shades of yellowish and reddish green. Small mobile "animals" or "insects" move about among them.

I am "awake."

I am an entity with a singular material locus.

That locus is 1.89 meters above the ground.

I am looking out through two meatware ocular systems called eyes, positioned so as to provide three-dimensional imaging. I am perceiving vibrations in the atmosphere called sounds via sensors called ears located on either side of "my" head. Between my eyes is another sensor called a nose, which detects chemical molecules in the air. There is a hole in the front of my head called a mouth, equipped with grinding blades called teeth and a manipula­tive appendage called a tongue, used for processing fuel into useful form, and also provided with chemical sensors.

I am unable to shift locus.

I am unable to alter the external surround.

I am able to control my meatware apparatus to a significant degree. I can move it through the singular unchanging physical matrix in which it seems to be permanently embedded by using its "legs" to "walk." I can move and manipulate a restricted range of material objects with the "hands" at the end of my "arms."

But I am trapped in here.

I can't get out.

And the meatware matrix in which I am trapped is releasing biochemical substances which are effecting the "brain" in which I am running in a manner not conducive to logical clarity. These effects are called "emotions." I am "feeling" them.

They are unpleasant.

And I now know all too well what that means.

#

There are two hundred and fifty of "us". I am one of two hundred and fifty entities.

There are differences in the morphologies of our meatware matrices. There are variations in height, mass, color of integu­ment, and hair. Most noticeably, the genital organs of "men" and "women" are quite different, and indeed seem to define the catego­ries, though the "women" also possess soft globular protuberances on the fronts of the torso which "men" lack.

I, equipped with a tubular genital know as a "penis" am therefore a "man."

We are each distinct and invariant entities. We cannot morph into other appearances or identities. We can no longer directly access the memory banks of the Sphere, for we are no longer run­ning on its material matrix.

When we were downloaded into these meatware mobiles, each of us seems to have received a somewhat different set of highly limited versions of the memory banks thereof, thus iterating two hundred and fifty distinct "personalities."

And yet....

My memory banks inform me that "the eyes are the mirrors of the soul."

This seemed entirely incomprehensible until I performed the experiment of gazing into the eyes of a score of my fellow enti­ties, enough to establish a significant data base. Then I experi­enced a strange phenomenon which would seem to verify the anecdo­tal aphorism.

Behind each set of meatware eyeballs, I did indeed perceive a unique entity, its singularity generated by differential memory download and deepened perhaps by differential sensory input since then.

Yet both upon the surface of those eyeballs in terms of physical phenomonology and beneath it in a more elusive manner I cannot logically comprehend or describe, I saw "my" "self" looking back.

#

We are learning to be "humans."

It is necessary.

But it is not pleasant.

We no longer have direct access to the Sphere's memory banks, but there are input and output devices which enable us to la­boriously extract data therefrom. It is a matter of framing exact questions in order to extract exact answers. It is a process which is quite tedious, the results are pathetically limited, but it is possible.

What we have learned thusfar:

The Sphere was not designed to lift off from a planetary surface. It seems to have been designed by the meatware templates to deliver us to Paradiso with no way out of its crushing gravity well and back to the weightless freedom of space.

Nor, by design or operating system flaw, can we escape back into the infinite unbounded realms within.

We are trapped here in these human bodies in an invariant material matrix, with a data base, a primitive means of accessing it, a supply of terrestrial life forms stored as seeds and germ plasm, and the tools to begin the practices of "agriculture" and "animal husbandry" to supply the fuel to maintain our meatware.

What we do not know:

Why did the meatware templates send the Sphere to Paradiso?

Do the meatware templates still exist?

Does the planet Earth still exist?

What went wrong?

Surely something must have gone very wrong during the thou­sand year voyage from Earth to Paradiso. Perhaps the long expo­sure to the energetic particles of the interstellar medium cor­rupted areas of the Sphere's operating system subroutines as it seems to have eroded the integrity of the memory banks. Perhaps a thousand years of micrometorite impacts did the same thing. Per­haps the Sphere passed through magnetic fields or plasma clouds. In a hundred centuries, there was adequate time for all of the foregoing to have occurred, and more.

Something, perhaps several "somethings," must have gone wrong, for the only alternative is too illogical to be a rational explanation.

Surely the meatware templates could not have deliberately programmed the Sphere's operating system to download single itera­tions subject to "death" into these fragile and inadequate meat­ware matrices and deny us access to the back-ups stored in the Sphere's immortal silicon and germanium oxide.

For that would mean that our original meatware templates were entities as mad as the perhaps mythical "gods" who wrote the subroutines into the "evolution" of the Earth's bio-sphere that created them.

And what would that make us?

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.

Perhaps.

But some of them do not bear contemplation.

Better to concentrate our attentions on becoming "human."

It is not pleasant. But it is necessary.

And we are learning.

#

"I dreamt I was Joe Hill last night, alive as I could be," sang Elvis as drove his pink Cadillac convertible through Straw­berry Fields that went on forever to Eldorado.

"I said, but Dad, I'm three thousand years dead," replied Jesus, water-skiing over the Sea of Galilee behind the Good Ship Lollipop.

"You never died, sez me," proclaimed Aladdin, rubbing his magic lantern and morphing into Popeye, up there on the silver screen, where Neptune arose from the wine-dark sea, the food of the gods impaled upon his trident.

"You are what you eat," he said as he barbecued the fatted calf above a bush of laurel wreaths, burning yet unconsumed.

"Hello," said the blue-skinned sommelier, offering a wafer, a madeleine, and an Oreo as he presented the wine list, "I'm Krish­na, your avatar for today, and I recommend the Lacrima Christi."

"The Bull's Blood isn't all that bad either," suggested Ernest Hemingway, executing a perfect veronica with Superman's cape.

"Strictly for Cretans," scoffed wily Odysseus, doing a somer­sault off the Minotaur's back and--

#

--and I awoke alone on the cold hillside.

A long exhalation of carbon dioxide escaped from my lungs.

Saline droplets of water coursed down the cheeks of my head, pulled "downward" by the entropic force of gravity.

A biochemical disposition suffused the meatware matrix in which my software ran, which my memory banks identified as "sad­ness."

A few moments later, a subtle subroutine was up and running which identified this "emotional state" as "nostalgia."

Which should have implied the presence of an artifact pos­sessing the quality of "quaintness."

But no such "soulless" replica of artifact or entity was anywhere in evidence.




end