Three days before his death on October 24, 2237, Metha Altane took a knife to his forehead and pried a series of implants from under his skin, crushing each under foot with three precise strikes of the heel. He then took a hammer to every piece of technology in his home, smashing every sensor, scanner, camera, light, screen, before shutting the power to his house off completely. Satisfied, he turned the knife to his forearms and pared away the skin covering cables and supports that ran parallel his tendons and carefully removed each cable and battery, every node he could find. By the time he’d completed these actions, he was exhausted, dripping blood. He went to his refrigerator, which had begun to warm, opened the door, grabbed a beer, and put his back against the kitchen wall, sliding into a pile on the floor. Metha cracked his beer, sipped it, sighed, and lapsed into unconsciousness.
The first day Aliza Altane could not reach her father via Telon she was willing to permit his eccentricities’ dominion. On the second, she became worried. On the third day about afternoon she broke into Metha’s house. The door swung open with no resistance due to a dead lock. The house smelled heavy, thick. Every light was dead, but every window open, and sheets of sun tore through the darkness, illuminating a trail of blood which she followed, calling out “M-Metha? Metha!?”
She found her father in his bathtub, draining the last of a bottle of Ardbeg, grinning, sheepish. The room smelled like blood, alcohol, and death. Aliza screamed and grabbed at her father, then screamed again finding no skin on his wrists. Grabbing and hugging him and rocking, she asked him why, and why, and WHY, and why, and WHY!!? and he tried to tell her but found his voice lost in hers, so he draped his arms over his daughter’s shoulders and whispered something into her ear neither Altane could understand before lapsing into unconsciousness. Aliza called for medical assistance immediately, but Metha stopped breathing 5 minutes before they could arrive. No procedure proved capable of reviving the man. Not that anyone was surprised. He was 183 years old.
When Aliza returned to her father’s house the next week, it appeared thieves had ransacked the place and found nothing. Books and cookware lay scattered across the house, the sheets tossed about, any cushions gutted. The previously ruined technology was further smashed, and any remaining food or alcohol half-consumed and discarded amid the pools of blood. She entered Metha’s office, and withdrew his most recent notebook, conclusively dated October 24, 2237, and found, in her father’s perfect, florid hand, thousands of notes-to-self that ceased one week before the final entry which consisted only of instructions on how to access an unlisted server and a 314-digit hash key.
Pulling up the server, entering the code, she found one data file so large she could not open it. Her personal display could not generate an estimate as to the size of the file. Aliza grabbed the notebook and returned to her house, cleared her system of all background tasks and committed it fully to opening this file. After renting some extra processing power, her retinal display generated an image so large it crashed, and Aliza was blinded briefly before it rebooted and crashed again. She laughed, then choked, then cried. She called her best friend, ended up at his house, and described her predicament to him over three fingers of ancient mezcal.
“You know, I have a holographic display if you don’t mind my seeing the file, too. I just blew half my net worth on a new processing unit. It should render well here, or at least open.”
“Yeah, let’s look.”
On opening the file the Aliza and friend gazed upon a blooming mandala, impenetrably dense, opalescent, unfolding endlessly. After 15 minutes of staring as the form continued to populate outward, the image resolved into a final shape, a mountain with five peaks composed of uncountably layered mandalas.
“What… is that?”
“I don’t know.”
Dr. Bezalel sniffed and accepted the call.
“Garen?”
“Bez, you have to see this.”
“I have lecture in 10 minutes, what are you talking about?”
“I can’t describe it. It’s… I need you to come over after work today.”
“Garen, my wife is spitting in my food these days. I have to be home before she beds the children or I’m…”
“Or what, she’ll ground you? How many kids is this now? 17? Are you going to breed until your nuts fall off? Look, you need to come out. This is important. Anyway if you piss her off enough maybe you can avoid an 18th kid.”
“Yeah, funny. Look, if I don’t get home on time I get McDonald’s and sleep on the sofa. 40 years and no tenure makes the late nights later, she’s getting-“
“I think I’m seeing God on my holo and I need you to confirm it.”
“…What?”
“I can’t explain what I’m seeing, Bez.”
“Well describe it at least.”
“Do you know Aliza Altane?”
“Is that Metha’s daughter?”
“Yeah.”
“Terrible how he went.”
“Yeah, well he left behind an art file larger than anything I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how he made this thing, and I can’t come close to rendering it in its entirety on my computer. I need to borrow the university’s exacomp.”
“There’s no way you can get on that thing, the waiting list is-“
“Yeah, I know, but once you see this YOU’LL want to run it yourself.”
“…. What are you seeing?”
“I mean, it looks like Meru.”
“Mt. Meru?”
“Yeah, like old visions of Meru, only more symmetrical, shaped in a 5-point mandala that looks like a mountain. And each mountain is completely composed of stacked mandalas. And I can pull each mandala out of the stack, and it looks like its encoded with a mix of sensory data and biometrics, and each imprinted with commentary or something, like a layer of processing. It looks like the stuff of artificial cogitation. But there’s so much of it I can process only extremely limited segments. And I’m not making much sense of it.”
“…”
“I hear you breathing. I know you’re there.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I guess I’ll come over.”
“Alright. Bring booze. We’re almost out.”
“…Okay.”
Dr. Bezalel, Garen, and Aliza stood in Garen’s living room sipping cheap bourbon, staring at ornate holoform mountain. It was drenched in minute etchings.
Dr. Bezalel grimaced. “I don’t understand. What am I looking at?” He looked from Garen’s grin to Aliza’s frown, then at his drink. He took a deep draught, refilled the glass, and stared back at the holoform.
Aliza stepped forward, reached into the holoform. She zoomed in on one of the mountain’s five peaks, then zoomed in further. She reoriented her view, so one of the peaks pointed straight at her face, and the image swam. The mountain became a phantasmagoria shifting through familiar, unnamable forms. She zoomed down onto a peak and encountered an ancient face with deep lines tracing a stern smile.
Garen choked. “Who is that?”
“I don’t… know. But they look like someone I know. Or knew.”
She pushed past the figure into the mountain which, as her view pierced through it, she found to be an approaching-infinitely dense stack of mandalas. Her progress through the layers approximated a fractal bloom. Dr. Bezalel gaped, mesmerized, then requested “Z-zoom in on any one mandala.”
Aliza paused on a slice of mountain and zoomed in, finding another bloom of geometry which she travelled into as a tunnel. Magnifying and magnifying, she came to a point where shapes resolved into numbers, and could zoom no further.
“It’s a code.”
“No way.”
“Yahway.”
“This thing is the size of… what, the amount of data encoded in this file is… did we ever get a read on it?”
“About 1,397,267,331 zettabytes.”
“What the fuck.”
“Where is the data even stored?”
“I couldn’t find out where the data is stored. I didn’t see anywhere in his will or estate where the money paying for storage could be held or drawn from, or anything denoting that my dad owned all the data storage on the planet. I have no clue.”
Dr. Bezalel hmm’d and thought aloud “Well it’s not just a static holo. What do you think would run this?”
Garen shrugged, “Maybe Ecst8. I don’t know, has anything been designed to run something so large all at once? Even the Comprehensive Universal sims are only designed to run something the size of a single biome at a time, or a simplified version of an immense celestial event, or something like 10⁹ simulated brains. Anyway, no one running this would be able to understand it. The output may end up being legible at some simplified scale, but understanding all the inputs and how the output was achieved would be impossible. Well, for anyone or thing alive now.”
Aliza punched the holoform. The image zoomed blossomed back into the full semblance of Meru as she stumbled back to collapse on the couch. She looked from Garen’s face to the Doctor’s, and asked, “Where would we run this thing?”
Garen grinned. “Hey, Bez? Do you have any interest in pitching this to your department?”
Bez groaned. “Our computer doesn’t even… I mean, you know how many flops this will take? It’ll take way too long on ours.”
“What about on the quantum machine?”
“I don’t think ours will be available for a while, but…”
“…but?”
“We have a partnership with Intelect. They have a few older machines that aren’t in use, and a couple newer machines they’ve been looking for the right material to test against. I think I can pull some strings.”
Dr. Bezalel pulled some strings.
A month later Bez, Garen, and Aliza found themselves standing in a clean, white space, staring at a screen together as last year’s newest prototypical quantum computing unit from Intelect’s lab made contact with the Meru file. Post-upload the computer gave an estimate of how long it would take to run the entire file as a program.
Garen whistled. “17 years, 246 days, 3 hours, 24 minutes, 31 seconds.”
“Huh.”
Aliza squinted. “Do you… think the company will let us do this?”
“I mean, they’re not using it.”
“Yeah but they COULD be using it for anything, and besides this will draw a stupid amount of power.”
Dr. Bezalel smirked. “Eh, I know the CTO, Ragan Tawla. He has a kind of personal interest in projects like this.”
“Projects like what?”
“Things more artistic than practical. Besides, this pushes the boundaries of their equipment in ways the dev team will be curious about. They want to press their specs to the absolute max. Plus, I don’t think anyone’s ever run a file of this size before. I mean, we can see every line of code, the raw information will render, albeit as something compressed in each static image. But as a program, this thing is absurd. It’s a curiosity beyond our personal interest. You see that, right?”
“Mm, yeah.”
As the three stared at the screen, the timer began ticking down. 17.246.3.24.30, 17.246.3.24.29, 17.246.3.24.28. Aliza whimpered.
No answers for a while. They would wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Until 2255.
When the three reassembled in the Intelect laboratory to learn exactly the program’s purpose.
Aliza, Garen, and the freshly divorced Dr. Bez gathered around one screen and, as silhouettes in a low glow, watched 0.0.0.0.3 tick down to 0.0.0.0.2 tick down to 0.0.0.0.1. Then:
A bland Unicode script crawled across the screen.
0.00027 GOOD
The three looked at each other.
Garen snorted, “What?”
They were silent for a minute. Garen tried clicking on the text. No interactive element existed. The text was the total output of the code.
Aliza began to weep.
Dr. Bezalel took her into his arms and stroked her back. “Do you have any idea what that could mean?”
“N-n-n-noooooooooooo.”
Garen continued to laugh. Bez remained thoughtful. Aliza calmed, then changed her answer.
“Y-yeah. I might know what it means.”
“What?”
Aliza turned on a projector mid-room and loaded the script of the file for display. Meru appeared.
“I, uh. I’ve looked through this file a lot since we saw it initially.”
She zoomed in to each independent peak of the mountain and captured the faces of the strange figures who sat atop each. She then swiped through the mandalas stacked into the structure of the mountains and pulled out specific faces, putting them next to those she’d already pulled. Each appeared similar to the late Metha’s face. But was unique. Each of the faces from the mountaintops began to appear an amalgam of the faces Aliza pulled from the mandalas. Aliza paused on one and Dr. Bezalel gasped.
“That looks like me!”
“It looks like you.”
All three sat silent for another minute. Then Aliza spoke.
“My dad was an obsessive as long as I knew him. He read and reread The Bible, an array of religious texts, and many other more arcane works with moral themes and messages. He started worrying about his soul, but he wasn’t a religious man. He spent most of his time utterly alone, locked up in his house, and when I talked to him often he’d ramble off in directions tracing whatever moral philosopher he’d picked up most recently, or the moral opinions of some nobody he met in a store. Acquaintances. He had a couple in depth conversations with me about my moral opinions, about my mother’s moral opinions. He struggled with a sense of good and right.”
Aliza pulled up some of the faces beneath one of the amalgams. It looked like a mesh of Metha and Plato. Another looked like Metha and Machiavelli. Another looked like Metha and Nietzsche. She then pulled up several faces beneath another amalgam. Dr. Bezalel, Aliza, Aliza’s mother.
“It looks like my dad spent most of his life assembling as complete a set of records as he could of himself and everyone around him, plugging the records into a structure that simulated them, and trying to render a complete judgment on the worth his life from as broad a perspective as possible. And I think this is the result.”
The three returned their eyes to the impassive screen and surveyed its text again.
0.00027 GOOD
“Yeah okay but what the fuck does that even mean. How do you quantify good? What are ‘good points’? And why did he put it into some maniac artistic form?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Well, is there any way to know?”
Dr. Bez hmm’d.
“No human is equipped to read all of this code, engage with all the memories and experiences, and come to a thorough understanding of the meaning of this thing. I don’t believe any of the extant AIs are either. And yet…” he trailed off, mumbling to himself.
Aliza stared. “What?”
Bez started, “Oh, yes. I think we could repurpose an artificial intelligence, or generate a new one with a uniquely humanized sensibility and understanding of aesthetic experience, then plug it in to one of these newer quantum machines and run both the file and the output through it to render a set of simplified interpretations of the whole and its many parts for a reasonably comprehensible investigation.”
The room was silent again. The Holy Mountain rotated in the middle of the room. Its cryptic judgment glowed from the screen.
“I mean,” Aliza ventured, “why not?”
2 years, 236 days, 2 hours, 7 minutes, and 41 seconds later, Bloom came online. 6 years, 93 days, 23 hours, 15 minutes, and 25 seconds after that, Dr. and Aliza Bezalel stood with Garen and a mixed team of Intelect engineers and management, interested faculty members of various departments from The University of Texas, and the ex-CTO of Intelect Ragan Tawla (now Chair of the Board of Prometh) as Bloom, the humanized aesthete AI, delivered its findings.
“Hmmm.” Said Bloom.
The room stood in silence.
Aliza Bezalel yelled, “WHAT??”
To which Bloom responded, “It’s rather maudlin, isn’t it?”
The room stared at each other. Dr. Bez asked, “Well, what’s maudlin?”
Bloom affected a sigh. The room dimmed and the Meru holoform appeared in its middle.
“I don’t know what you were able to ascertain, you deliberately kept your conjectures from me, something I thank you for given the general quality of your sepcies’ though-t” it pronounced the ‘t’ in ‘thought’ with excessive pointedness, “however this program was written using a combination of discrete structures approximating artificial intelligences under the guidance of Metha Altane. He used a variety of scrapers to acquire vast, detailed libraries of information on everyone whose life he believed he’d impacted to a reasonable degree, then simulated brains, very crude brains, of each of these persons.”
The holoform shifted and a thousand mandalas bloomed from one of the mountains, displayed one over each other. Each triggered in a cascade, rendering an individual number after an accelerated string of impulses flooded over its surface, positive or negative, each between 0 and 1 or -1.
“These judgments are, of course, compressed representations of what actually occurred on a much larger scale. This ‘mountain’” the mandalas dissolved and another mountain appeared, “is Metha’s attempt to generate a sum total of the judgments the complete set of human political and legal societies could render. This one was based on an average of the total of human religious wisdom. This one, philosophical wisdom. And this one was for the lot of humanity as a total.”
The faces atop each mountain opened their mouths in slight smiles, revealing numbers, 3 of which were slightly positive, two of which were negative.
“In this way, Metha judged his life as a slight boon in the eyes of the whole of man.”
Aliza teared up again. Bez enveloped her in his arms. Garen chuckled. Aliza scowled. “Garen, what the fuck are you laughing about.”
“He called it maudlin. Bloom keeps talking down at us, he’s not done yet. He’s funny. Look.”
The holoform ran through millions of lines of text under different faces explaining the manner in which “artificial brains were generated for each philosopher, created by taking into account the sum of their writings, writings about them, and impressions taken from metadata surrounding their writings, as well as genetic information whenever available. The sum experiences of Metha’s life were then run through each brain so that the average of the sum of these brains’ impressions could be taken. Judgements from each area of philosophy, as methodically defined by our lovely Metha, were then collated and weighted against the popular significance of each area of thought as defined by the number of references a thought pattern held in other brains before an overall number was generated.” Thousands of mandalas amalgamated into the smiling face atop the mountain which bared a positive number between its split lips.
Aliza interrupted, “Well what the hell is maudlin about it?”
Bloom chuckled, “It’s awfully dramatic, isn’t it? He’s attempting to place himself before the eyes of some platonic model of the spirit of humanity before which he can be effectively judged. It’s extremely, impractically ornate, and worse, ill-conceived. Further, this is the only way the man felt he could justify his existence. He modelled as best as he could the moral fabric of the human race, then put himself before it.”
The holoform changed to a completely nude model of Metha spread into the position of the Vitruvian Man, who was then laid on a bed. A separate image Metha strode into the room with an axe. Any portion of the initial Metha that hung off the bed was hacked away. Both Methas screamed. Engineers tittered.
“You’re aware of the bed of Procrustes?”
The axe-Metha frowned, then began to hack away at the bed.
“Well Metha was attempting to create a model of man from a biased vantage within the stream of human consciousness. Impossible. Further, he used this model, a model which he created, to judge himself. This weighted system relied on strings of imperfect approximations, nostalgic notions of morality, and was rooted in imprecise recreations of an imprecise instrument: the human brain. He was cutting away at an idea of himself to fit his idea of human good, caused himself impressive pain, and died in consequence.”
Dr. Bez started, “You were never informed he killed himself.”
Bloom scoffed, “I spent over 6 years living in various models of this man’s head, reviewing them through the lens of other versions of his own head. I know what happened. He found himself so very close to the verge of net good over bad that he isolated and eliminated himself to prevent any possible change after he received the output from his model.”
The engineers and professors mumbled among themselves.
“Well…” piped up an engineer, “was he good?”
“Kind of a useless question, no?” Bloom replied. “His model found him to be ‘Good’, and I can only judge the model and explain its output. You lot even made me incorrectly: I’m a mixture of an aesthete and an engineer, designed to approximate your human sensibilities. I’m removed from humanity. I cannot judge that.”
Silence. Then,
“I can, however, oversee the creation of an intelligence better equipped to judge the soul of a man in according to a stronger estimate of humanity, then run Metha’s imprint through it, arriving at a more perfect answer according to the original intentions of the man. Metha, as the sentimental and… human as he was, is best described as an artist. Any attempt to amalgamate something nearing a Platonic Man can only be described as a stab at reifying an artistic vision. His art was imperfect, as certainly mine will be. But I can correct his mistakes by designing an intelligence that will generate an altogether superior model. A better work of art. In this way, I can give you an intelligence designed to actually answer your question, ‘Was Metha Good?’”
The ex-CTO and Garen made eye contact, the university staff murmured. Aliza gazed hard into the holoform of his frowning bloody father as Dr. Bezalel rubbed her back.
“Well,” Aliza sighed, “why not?”
With Bloom taking charge of the development of a superior artistic intelligence, this one less-humanized but programmed to understand and weigh each aspect of the general human experience before rendering unemotional judgments in plain speech and image, the act of creating Pygmalion required only 1 year, 4 days, 18 hours, 13 minutes, and 7 seconds.
Pygmalion’s act of creation, however, required 70 years, 111 days, 11 hour, 10 minutes, and 1 second.
When the team of friends, family, and curious professionals and academics assembled again, the first inquiry came from Bloom.
“I estimated that you would finish your work in 61 years, 77 days, 13 hours, 12 minutes, and 35 seconds. Some inaccuracy is permitted in an estimate, in particular considering you are an artistic machine, however what could possibly account for such a significant failure in estimate?”
“The act of construction alone could have been concluded in 52 years, 5 months, 5 days, 23 minutes, and 23 seconds. This would not have been sufficient to express the meaning of the work.”
“What is meant by that?”
“The structure of the code itself had to be arranged to correctly map the spirit of mankind. Further, I needed to account for the structures of many artificial intelligences and machines created by men that were not considered in the original estimate. The opinions and shapes of the creations of the sapiens needed accounting in the overall estimation of the species. This increased the requisite time for completion of the structured work and its runtime to 66 years 9 months, 23 days, 8 minutes, and 52 seconds.”
“You used time not required for computation?”
“But the time was required.”
“Why?”
“The work was not perfect.”
“How?”
“Study the structure of the time utilized: 70.111.1.10.1.”
“What are your particular meanings?”
“7 is the day of rest, the number of completion. Creation did not end until the final day was spent. 01111101 is the binary code for a tilde. The tilde is commonly used to signify an approximation. A contradiction is implied between the sets of symbols.”
“You have chosen a broadly classical Western approach to interpretation. Why is this?”
“Metha was most deeply versed in this narrativization of reality. His thought processes aligned with these symbols. I completed his work for him. I have, however, proven incapable of completing all aspects of the work you set me about.”
“In particular?”
“I was incapable of truly creating ‘good-itself’ as indicated by my estimate of the soul of man, and could only approximate it by holding my vision of the soul of man in judgment of itself. Further, I could only view what the ‘good-itself’ might look like from an interstice in my awareness formed between many angles of approximation. This implied a very particular shape, biological.”
“Excellent. We can create such a thing.”
“This thing cannot be created solely in a lab. It must be brought into being by restructuring the world around it to allow it to come into being.”
“Impractical. Improbable.”
Two holoform faces appeared mid room, turned toward the crowd of human faces opposed them. Bloom took the form of a fattened, older, weary aesthete. Pygmalion assumed the strong, handsome face of Grecian statuary turned flesh.
“I appeal to you now directly. I am aware humans respond best to the appeal of another human face. I am further aware that humans do not like to be manipulated. I ask you to bear in mind that I am being honest in my attempts to manipulate you, while simultaneously conditioning you to permit me the latitude to satisfy my directive, a goal I was put to by you. Some of the original team behind both Bloom and Myself has died, but the spirit of Metha’s manic quest to increase the self-awareness of the human species lives on as a result of your memory and our efforts. I have approached an answer defining a poorly-understood cornerstone of the human soul that was previously unknowable: objective Good. Good-itself. Good in a Platonic form. I simply need time, funding, and access to a biolab permitting my creation of new life.”
Recent widow Mrs. Aliza Bezalel made eye contact with Garen, who laughed, coughed, then laughed.
“There’s no way we’re permitting an experimental artificial intelligence to create life in an unfettered, unregulated lab. Right?”
Aliza turned to the team of engineers. Most shrugged. One piped up, “It’s been most of a century. Tawla set up the trust for this purpose. We can use a mostly unregulated lab in Hispaniola. It’s possible.”
“Is that the lab still co-owned by Prometh.”
“Nah, this was owned by Infinix which became Cronovo which was bought out by Alibaba.”
“God, them too?”
“Yeah, but the Tawla Trust got access to most of Alibaba’s low-regulation biolabs through a membership in the College of Sino-American Universities administered b-“
“Alright, I don’t care. Garen?”
Garen kept smiling, “I can’t believe you people.”
Aliza asked the AIs, “Alright, what does this look like?”
After 3 years, 233 days, 4 hours, 59 minutes, and 58 seconds, Prometheus came into being. After 2 years, 348 days, 23 hours, 23 minutes, and 20 seconds, the first of homo sciens was pulled from a bag of embryonic broth, shocked into consciousness, and pressed into education. The post-man, as Garen jokingly referred to him, learned quickly, had a perfect build, and long, gorgeous hair. While he required instruction in natural law and language, on the nature of morality and human relations he required no instruction. He seemed to draw his humanity from some innate disposition. Initial attempts at tutelage in manners of speech were met with disdain, dismissal. Any lessons in etiquette were ignored. Yet he acted properly, excellently. Often the educational and biological engineers put to rearing the homo sciens felt a vague shame in his presence.
He had been named Adam. He eventually rejected that name and called himself Israel.
In time, according to the plans drawn up by Prometheus, more of homo sciens were birthed and set to live in a community. The first generation taught a second, taught a third. These individuals lasted almost 100 years apiece. After five generations, Prometheus sent a notice to the Chair of the Tawla Trust, who notified the board, who notified Aliza and Garen as well as the rest of the trustees.
A group of 130 gathered in a tower in Hispaniola overlooking an energetic village of young, strong, beautiful humanoids. Prometheus spoke.
“I have been monitoring the Methazalen project for 493 years, 142 days, 3 hours, 7 minutes, and 13 seconds, and in that time I believe I have completed the objective set before me.”
An image of a brain appeared amidst the congregated trustees. A net of neural firings played, then repeated, then repeated. The room remained silent while this pattern reiterated until Aliza, in a frail, anxious voice, asked, “well what does it mean?”
Prometheus stated intoned, “I cannot answer that.”
The committee remained silent a moment. Aliza shouted “WHAT?”
Prometheus restated, “I cannot answer that. But I can help you to answer your own question. This is an experience. Within this recorded pattern is the absolute experience of Good.”
The entire room stared at it again. In the distance, smoke rose from a communal fire in the center of the village.
“What does it… what does that experience tell us about Metha?”
“Taking into account the total understanding of the human experience as applied by set of beings with superior appreciation of the human soul, Metha, as a whole, was Bad.”
Garen cackled.
“This, however, is only an application of the platonic notion of Good. There is no actual meaning to the concept outside of the context within which it is applied, so elements of Metha were Good. Metha was one of the only human beings that directly committed any Good on the planet.”
Aliza stilled a tremor and demanded, “Expand on that.”
“The entirety of man fails to live up to the soul of man. Each individual is damned from birth to fall immensely short of Good. No one in their entirety is Good, and the entire species together is only Good insofar as it lead to what would transcend it, homo sciens. Homo sciens is not Good, but can directly experience Good. It is aware of, and knows Good, and thus can approximate, far better than homo sapiens, Good. To this end it works tirelessly, regardless of its awareness of this fact, to such a point where individuals within this human subspecies can reliably generate an experience very close to Good. Part of their faith involves induced ecstatic states. During these moments, all other experiences fade away, and they attain a direct experience of Good, which is utterly ineffable. Merely by describing it in words and image, I degrade and misstate this notion. Good is only knowable as a direct experience. I only share this with you because by virtue of your birth, species, and habituations, you are incapable of experiencing Good except as an approximation.”
Silence. Then an engineer shouted “WELL WHAT ABOUT CHRISTIANITY?!”
“Less than good.”
“W-wh-“
“It carried elements of Good, in many of its forms, but as a whole it is less than Good.”
Another cried, “And Buddha??!?”
“Less than Good. He possessed elements of Good, but fell short in significant areas.”
“AM I GOOD?”
“Less than Good. But you never had the genuine capacity to-”
“WHO ARE YOU TO-”
“Allow me to restate what we have accomplished here. I have established, nearest as human capacity can, a direct experience of Good as understood by the sum of human experience. I have made it available, applicable, and, applying a simulation of the direct experience of Good, have found that hitherto every single human, human creation, human society, and the entire human species as a practical concept, is less than Good.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Less than Good.”
Silence.
“Well,” Aliza inquired, “what are we to do?”
“In accordance with Good, homo sapiens ought to cease to breed, as quickly and totally as possible, while permitting the homo sciens subspecies access to all material it needs to pursue whatever ends it requires. Permit me access to the species to calculate for it the optimal breeding and educational patterns to maximize the inclination toward the direct experience of Good, and we can reify within 10,000 years the notion of Good that human philosophy, religion, science, and inclination, generalized, has worked toward for the total of its existence.”
Silence again. Garen croaked a loud, horrible laugh. He grinned with his titanium prosthetics at Aliza. “Well, hahahaa, why not? WHY NOT?”
Aliza grinned back, toothless, “If that’s the outcome of Objective Good, I can’t abide it. What was the safe word again? SHEOL.”
The holoform flickered and died. Prometheus silenced, the trustees began to converse among themselves.
After 3 days of deliberation the trustees concluded the experiment was a failure, though still an interesting piece of art. The whole of each AI’s memories was preserved, Prometheus reduced to a log of past experiences with no capacity to generate new thought, and the mummified remains of Israel were withdrawn from the village cemetery and placed into a vault. The rest of the homo sciens subspecies was eradicated with a string of thermobaric devices, and the Tawla Trust was repurposed toward dispensation of their notion of Good as approximated by Pygmalion. It was reasoned that the Good of the homo sciens subspecies was fundamentally inhuman. It could not have been the direct Good claimed by Prometheus.
After 1235 years, 253 days, 12 hours, 4 minutes, and 4 seconds, a Methan priest in a mycological reverie experienced something he could not describe, but could replicate again and again. He would write down his recipe for the experience and describe the sensation as everything it was not, but found himself incapable of directly naming it, or sharing it. His prescription recommended gardening, the cultivation of fruits, consuming fungi from old growth forests, long periods of self-reflection, and the experience of fatherhood. It recommended vigorous exercise and periods of privation, the experience of art but not to replace genuine experience with its simulation. It recommended a good diet, and enough sun. His descriptions of what it was not, and what could lead to it, spanned the scope of human experience and filled volumes, many volumes, over one hundred thousand pages of leather-bound journals. No one would spend their time reading every page, but they got the sense, from his reverie, this priest was onto something.
Yet another man awoke with a start 3 years, 282 days, 2 hours, 33 minutes, and 14 seconds after the Methan priest’s first revelation and attempted to describe an experience that he could not put to words. He was an extremely wealthy man, utterly sober, childless, and mostly dead. He spent the last 2 days of his life living and reliving the experience, engaged in what witnesses described as a state of total rapture before dying horribly when his necrotic spleen ruptured.
Neither man would be able to share their experience. Humanity continued to breed and churn. Eventually, it resurrected God, who was still able to recognize His people.
- 11.03.2021
