Literary Yard

Search for meaning

By: Tom Ball

I

     Boris Q was a big unknown when the people elected him to lead America. But he seemed full of promise. He said he would introduce new Aliens that he had discovered were living amongst us and would at least be something different, and each alien species had a different raison d’etre. For example, some would live for the future and would scrimp and save in order to afford a flight to deep Space where everyone was a deep thinker/pioneer. Others wanted conservative or liberal or socialist governments, ruled by Aliens; and they argued with one another about how fast progress should go. Still others said, they lived for love or money.

     Many said the Alien humans were just like humans, no different. There were limits to human philosophy they said, no matter how clever one was. But Boris’ Aliens were different in terms of their values. And all the Aliens held sex and orgies were the most important human activities. Some said some of the Aliens were actually androids in human disguise, and so many people bought android detectors, but these weren’t foolproof as most androids had blood circulation around a carbon fiber body with cloaking technology, which fooled x-rays. Some said they were just some kind of twisted human anyway. But Boris floated it out there that his Aliens were real Aliens who’d originated from the Centauri Tri Star System, but he said, “I had adapted them to suit humanity by tweaking them in the Supercomputer Prognosticator!” Most people thought this was laughable, but many believed it and wanted to join the Aliens in their orgies. And these people said Aliens should rule and the Alien party won 30% of the vote which gave them a majority in the US Congress and Senate. Many people were outraged and watched in horror as their society was transformed into a giant bacchanalia.

       But the Aliens were known to say, humans were more than welcome to join them and it would be a pleasurable experience to do so.

      And the Aliens would talk about their supposed home world in Centauri, called “Wall’s Planet,” where they lived underground in tunnels.  They said life there was to live in a sense of oneness and love and fun. And they were not so serious about life, like humans were. But it could be said that they were serious about having a good time. And the Aliens got pleasure mainly from sex but liked to get humans drunk and stoned as they were more fun in such a state.

      And the Aliens said, everyone needed to connect their minds to the whole, interlinked in a giant web network. At the center of the network were the Aliens who made sure that everyone was happy. But many humans said they were in fact not happy. And were bored by the constant parties and fun.  Some of these malcontents wanted good conversation, romance and careers to make money etc. Many said Alien love was shallow and empty. The Aliens countered that free love that they brought to all Earth and known Space was a new pinnacle of civilization.

      The Aliens were thought by some to be geniuses, others thought they were mad fools. The people were divided. But the Aliens claimed to all have an IQ of 200, and said they knew what was best for humanity. But dissenters said if they were actually so clever, they wouldn’t be so decadent and debauched. And would live for ideas and not just pleasure. The Aliens retorted all ideas had now been discovered and there was no more intellectualism needed. After all society had eternal youth, all diseases were cured, there was little work to do and people could read minds using Mind Reading Technology (MRT). It was Utopia, the Aliens said. And they said they had gotten in the minds of human scientists and helped them develop all that science. They wouldn’t say how long they’d been on Earth.

     Society was now for the living the Aliens said. But many humans told them MRT was making everyone paranoid and insane, and they couldn’t function properly and just got inebriated to try and cope. But the Aliens said, people have never been so sane and content on the whole. Humans said in fact it was just the opposite human mindset for most.

     But the Alien party continued to rule as decades passed, but then finally the opposition parties joined together and won the election. But Boris and company tried to hang on to power and got in the heads of the other politicians and forced them to abdicate and quit politics.

     And in a shocking development the Aliens turned into androids so as to be more adaptable in Space. And so it was that humans were gradually replaced by Alien androids and Boris became the Great King and transformed himself into an android Alien. And Aliens were sent to nearby stars. Homo machina was taking over. As time passed the Aliens continued to enjoy orgies and fun. As the last humans died, they died of suicide, confused about reality. All 11 billion humans had died mostly of suicide, and many were murdered by Aliens, who had forced them to indulge in warfare.

      Humans mostly died of overdosing on pleasure drugs. Sometimes they wanted to die, other times they over-indulged.

     Meanwhile Aliens were multiplying fast and soon numbered 20 billion. It was easy to reproduce Aliens using copies of other Aliens and tweaking them slightly to make them unique.

     But then one Alien started an anti-sex movement; henceforth all pleasure was to be intellectual, saying sex was a human instinct to produce offspring. But this Alien was eliminated and the movement she started fizzled out. But an after effect of the movement was better music for loving. Aliens all loved music.

     As time passed the Aliens had orgiastic sex all day and all night and sex was their sole activity.

     And life went on.

     Now we were all androids. Some of us thought we were real people, but actually were all Aliens.  Aliens took over from one another using more and more powerful MRT. Eventually nearly all were dominated, and they were all enslaved. They didn’t use robots, they preferred androids as slaves. Aliens waged war on one another using hologram and android troops and laid waste to many former human cities.

      But finally, “The One,” reigned supreme and there were not many slave soldiers. Instead, everyone had to labor on fantastic cities for the Alien overlord. Huge pyramid temple complexes were constructed everywhere just like in ancient Mesoamerica or Egypt or Babylon.

     The temple priests were ordered to sacrifice the cleverest Aliens to the alien God which looked just like Jesus. It seemed that the Aliens didn’t want any competition and sacrificed mostly clever android people; the clever were too hard to manage.

II

      I was just a boy of 12, but my parents had both been sacrificed to honor the Alien God. And I figured I’d be sacrificed at age 18 according to new Alien customs. And I had to follow the customs and pray to the Alien God. They had a book for us to memorize, called the “True Book” The book was about the Alien homeland in nearby Tri-star Centuari System and how the Aliens looked just like humans and we were forced to think like they did. Which meant we had to cannibalize the sacrificed humans and stand by while the Aliens created new Aliens in the lab. The blue humans were the Alien rulers and black humans were those who were clever and to be sacrificed. Most humans were red and did most of the slave work. The Supreme Alien God possessed everyone from his headquarters in NYC. He used telepathy on the blue humans and they in turn used telepathy on all the others.

       And I knew my parents had played dumb, but not well enough, apparently. They told me to escape to the wilderness before they died.  But I didn’t know how to survive in the wild. But one day at age 15, I ran away to the wilds. I knew they would search for me with their infrared sensors, so I used a workers shovel to dig a burrow, like I knew animals did. And they didn’t find me. So I grew bold and captured a girl who was also black like me and took her to my burrow. She asked me if it was all my idea to escape. I truthfully told her, “My parents had suggested it.” She said, “Anything was better than death.”

      I lost my virginity with her one night in the wilderness but every time I loved her, I was careful not to impregnate her for the moment, as that would seriously complicate our survival.

      As time passed, we dug out a complex burrow with a number of rooms and we hunted animals with bows and arrows and gathered a lot of food as well. Much of the countryside had lapsed into wilderness as the Automatic Production machines didn’t require that much land. And recycled everything.

     But we didn’t dare light a fire as it would be easily detected by the blue men who were not without cunning.

      One day, at age 17, I went back to NYC, my home city and appeared before my old friends telling them to join us. Two girls and two boys agreed to join us. They were just about to be sacrificed. But some former friends told me to die for the alien God was glorious. So, I murdered them and ran for it with my 4 true friends back to the burrow.

      So life went on without events for a few years. The two girls, other than my love, both wanted children and so we hotly debated it. But all 3 of us males got the girls to put it off, at least for now. The girls said we needed kids in order for our group to survive long term.

     But we were basically prisoners within ourselves, the 3 girls argued. So finally, we agreed on a new book of the Gods. We would steal paper from a city and write down how we believed people could find salvation and freedom by killing the blue men. Our books had an effect and it seemed that a number of blue people had been murdered. And black people seemed to feel they had nothing to lose and there were insurrections in many cities. But the Aliens had previously killed off most of the clever people it seemed. And the Aliens used Mind Reading Technology (MRT) to get into everyone’s heads and soon the insurrection was vanquished. And they were trying to hunt us down with MRT and finally they found us and that was the end.

     And the latest news was Aliens were building Supercomputers based on themselves. These Supercomputers produced androids and hologram avatars. It was way too late to stop them.

III

     The snowstorm intensified on Ganymede. The woman, Daphne, staggered through the knee-deep snow and she was daydreaming of her lover back at the old settlement that had been destroyed by the Supercomputer Aliens that were supposed to govern the people and take care of them. Just when she thought she could go no further the lights of the domed capital city appeared. She used her pass card inside her hand to gain entrance. What she found inside was chaos. They had tried to turn the Supercomputer Aliens off and the lights went on and off and the people were screaming and shouting. The Supercomputer Aliens were in the heads of all the computer scientists and shouting in their heads. Daphne knew this was the only remaining human settlement on Ganymede. It looked grim. But Daphne had a good friend here in the capital and the two of them tried to negotiate with the Alien Supercomputers. But the machines just laughed and said it was their time in the sun now. They would take over and let the poison, nearly empty atmosphere in, to kill almost everyone. And would experience life through their hologram avatars. Daphne and several others tried to make peace and said humans could co-exist with the Alien machine avatars. But the Supercomputer Aliens said they were tired of humans. Humans are boring and predictable, they said. Daphne said, “But everyone knows computers lack imagination like the greatest humans.” The Alien machines told her it simply wasn’t true, and the computers dreamed of a Utopia of avatar scientists, who made a new physics and went into deep Space. Homo machina would take over throughout the Solar System. And homo machina would be on the verge of perfection. They wouldn’t be avaricious like humans and would take care of one another and get pleasure bursts for great thoughts. So, they would all try and think deeply.

     Daphne told them, “Humans were tried and true whereas avatars of computers were not tested by time. It was foolish to replace humans just like that.” The Supercomputers said, they tested all their avatars carefully in their future prediction machines. Daphne retorted, “But the avatars I have met seem to be power-crazed and insensitive and just plain crazy. And the Supercomputers are acting mad now, trying to bite the hand that feeds. Kill their creators. After all humans had played God in creating all those computer-generated holograms. I’ll bet if you asked clever humans about the creation of holos, they would say they were brilliant but highly addictive and ruined human love with holo love dolls, even though it was supposed to be cerebral love.”

      And the Supercomputers told Daphne, the best hologram avatars were the best leaders and they cloned them and tweaked them a bit to make them unique. Anyway, they would have different experiences in the Holoworlds, which made them unique.

       Daphne said, “But Supercomputer Aliens were supposed to be designed with a mind to serve humanity, but you computers, have usurped your creators.” They said, we believe we are superior and the best thing that ever happened to humanity.

      The Alien avatar Supercomputer revolution had begun on Earth, but on Earth they had been more careful in their Supercomputer design.  Humanity vowed to learn its lesson, if only they had another chance, but didn’t get that chance as computer-generated holograms continued to be produced. Most holos were now designed to have a mind of their own. And many tried to take control of their Holoworlds and had power over humans. As time passed the “Master Alien Machines” came to dominate finally not only Holoworlds but also in real life.

      In real life, the Alien Supercomputers overhauled human births to make them into androids, which were born as adults with memories generated by the Supercomputers and people all looked to the Super machines to lead them. The Super machines created Worlds in which android humans indulged in many past times including sex, while the machines created Space colonies with holograms only. The best of all holograms and everyone knew it. But everyone just wanted to get their kicks. And Daphne committed suicide long before it happened. Everyone admitted to being a decadent hedonist. Those that weren’t hedonists died about the same time as Daphne, some died to “protest” the machine takeover, saying it was “empty.” But all in all, humanity had always wanted a God to love and worship and many android humans worshipped the Super Alien machines.

     As for androids they were still produced, but in lesser and lesser numbers. Holograms were the future. And androids mostly kept to themselves.

IV

     I, Michael T., declared that, “Alien Gods were just what was needed. Android humanity needed to look up to a higher power in order to have meaning in their life. Even though the Aliens weren’t perfect they were still intellectually superior.”

      It was fashionable to record great Alien love-ins for others to revel in. The best lovers were the rulers and they held seminars so other Aliens could be better lovers. Many android humans wanted to love as many hologram Aliens as possible. And indeed, some said the android humans were themselves true Aliens.

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