Ghost of the Gods - 02 (20 page)

As he stepped out of the final vortex, he was overwhelmed with a feeling of great peace and happiness. Almost drowning in joy, he fought for balance. He felt so complete and wanted nothing more, but a remote sense of agitation and chaos reminded him all was not exactly how it seemed to be. They followed Adam into a circular room 30 feet in diameter with a domed ceiling. The peak of the dome was glass though which a cone of sunlight shown down onto the center of the floor. There was nothing ornate. The room felt positively ancient. Eleven entrances were located between each of the eleven supporting pillars. Mark was certain there could not have been anything like this structure in the Chicago townhouse. He was not sure if this room had any real function or if it was just a bit of theatrics employed by the commune… or should he call it the cult? There was no glowing sphere of energy or black void but Mark knew with all his being that the singularity was in the exact center of this room. He wondered if it was impossibly small like a collapsed black hole. Maybe it was no more than the size of a single atom. Maybe it did not exist in the material world even as a program.

Lined up along the outer wall of the circular chamber were eleven small groups of plain, solid wooden chairs. A few were occupied by hybrids who seemed oblivious to the newcomers. An assist showed they were all as highly evolved as Adam.

Adam took a seat and motioned for Mark and Sarah to join him. Despite the deep age of the structure, the room and furniture were meticulously clean. The floor shined like polished marble. The effect was awe inspiring. Underneath it all, as if they were vital supporting pillars, remained constant powerful feelings of peace, deep knowledge, happiness, and sensual pleasure.

“We are safe within these circles,” whispered Adam. He was speaking as if they were in a hallowed library. “We can now tell you of the dangers to new initiates such as the two of you. We call new initiates
students
. On this continent there are a number of other communes. There are also highly dangerous initiates working together in the outer circle to murder every commune. These initiates would kill you simply because you breathe, simply because of what you are and what you could become. We call these lost souls
betrayers
. They are Judases who at some time in their past must have been one with a commune but are now assassins working with factions who want us gone.”

“Do you have photographs or names of these killers?” asked Sarah in a whisper.

“They are ghosts. We have never seen them. No commune has ever seen them coming or felt their sting. When betrayers attack a commune, the initiates abruptly cease to exist and wake up in the next world. You will only know you have crossed the path of a betrayer after you have died.”

“Figuratively speaking, I assume,” whispered Mark. “In Chicago I saw a highly evolved hybrid kill another hybrid. Could he have been one of your betrayers?”

“Possibly, but sadly in this time of mistrust we have no shortage of witch hunts, with innocents on both sides of the hunt dying. We are all victims of our own fears. Since that initiate in Chicago did not kill you on sight, it is unlikely he was a betrayer.”

Mark felt some pieces of this puzzle drop into place. These communes and their singularities were not dangerous. They were the hunted, the persecuted. Against all sensible logic, he found himself wondering if these communes were truly a modern day analog or even descendants of the ancient esoteric mystery schools. Those schools were all too often scenes of massacres with teachers imprisoned and tortured. This comparison left him feeling very uncomfortable and full of contradictions. The thought he’d had only minutes ago echoed in his mind. Surrender was the price this commune charged, and surrender could mean the annihilation of his individuality—or did it?

“There is something we would like to teach you, but we are limited,” whispered Adam. “Understand it is not a limit of willingness. It is a limitation of what we are  capable of instructing. Each commune is a school that transmits one part of the teachings. In better times a student on the
path would find their own way from commune to commune, learning the unique skill each school has to offer. Each commune stands out as a lighthouse in the chaotic storm of material existence. They are beacons of both safe harbor as well as warnings of dangerous shoals. We hope someday you two will find your way back to us when you are able to assimilate what we teach. At this moment, what we have to teach would only be dangerous shoals for you both.”

Mark didn’t know what to think. This place certainly felt authentic. Adam was saying all the right words. But then again, anyone who studied the prevailing literature on mystery schools would know how to weave that illusion.

“There is no longer a commune that teaches a student their first skill,” said Adam. “The betrayers have seen to that. Each student must now try to find a commune that is compatible enough to help them learn this first skill on their own. The first truth, which is married to the first skill, is that every human is capable of psychological evolution and every human has six unique interdependent minds inside them. We are not the single ego modern science would have us believe. These six minds have been categorized and given many different names over the ages. We call them
awareness processors
. What I am speaking of is pure biological awareness and has no connection to computers. There is a lower and higher mental, a lower and higher emotional, a kinesthetic, and an instinctive processor. As their first step, each student must fully wake up their lower mental processor in both the material and dream worlds. Once this is accomplished, they can become one with a commune and learn what a commune has to teach. Sadly, this first skill of waking up the lower mental processor is what each student must now learn on their own.”

“So you can’t help us?” whispered Sarah.

“We can help. While we cannot teach you, we can explain some of what is required to evolve. You must learn to observe how your waking awareness varies throughout the day and night, including sleep. The realm of dreams is another reality, no different in any way than what is called the material world. That may be difficult to accept. If so, consider it this way: The material world is only as real as a dream.”

Mark tipped up the corner of an empty chair and then let its leg thump back to the floor. The sound echoed around the domed room as a short volley of reflected bangs.

“There is a big difference,” said Mark. “I am solid. That chair is solid. Dreams are purely mental with no physicality whatsoever.”

“The matter this body is made of is mostly empty space,” whispered Adam. “That was proven by physicists over a hundred years ago. This body, this planet, that chair, everything we call real is over ninety-nine percent energy and less than one percent matter. Every few years scientists discover the energy within empty space is vaster than they could have previously imagined. That new discovery then pushes the ratio of energy to matter that much further askew. We long ago reached a scientifically accepted ratio that allows us to say we are, for all practical purposes, made of energy, not matter. Such a statement makes this material world quite ephemeral indeed. Out of the tiny amount of matter that does make up your body, every atom has been replaced many times over during the span of your body’s life. So out of what little matter does make up your current body, none of it was not even present some years ago. I ask you: Are you pure matter or pure energy?”

“I agree with the physical nature you’re describing,” said Mark. “But that does not address the notion of dreams being a material reality in any way.”

“Dreams are the partial solidification of consciousness-energy,” whispered Adam. “This consciousness-energy is the unifying primordial energy, which is the building blocks of all other denser forms of energy. Modern physics has a theory that subatomic partials do not exist as matter until some form of consciousness observes them. Consciousness-energy is this creative force that gives birth to every partial in the universe. Do you understand that? Do you understand the kind of dreaming we are speaking of is not the sloppy, dull witted affair organics experience each night or after a heavy meal. The dreaming we are speaking of is the high awareness, high consciousness-energy dreams your nanotech enhanced brains now produce.”

“Lucid dreams?” whispered Sarah.

“That is a common but inaccurate term for these dreams,” replied Adam. “The conscious dream of clarity and waking state are the same. The same parts of the brain are active and the same neurological processes are functioning during both states. Each night, if our brains did not sleep paralyze our bodies into pseudo death, we would be acting out our dreams in this dense energy world. We all have a natural tendency to fall asleep in all planes of existence. In the misleadingly named plane called
reality
, we are highly aware for a short period of time, then our focus wavers and we drift back into our normal habits of daydreaming, fantasies, automatic reactions, and the like. The same is true for our dreaming life. We can be fully conscious in a dream for a short period of time, then when our focus wavers and we drift back into habits, fantasies, automatic reactions, and the like. You two must discover how to wake up and stay awake in all states of awareness. Something we have found that helps is to use a simple meditation that reminds you of who you are, where you are, and that you are dreaming all that you are experiencing, regardless the mental state you are in.”

Mark tipped up the corner of the empty chair and let it fall again. Sarah mentally sent him her anger. She was very upset with him. He felt magnet tugs at the back of his mind from the passing attention of other hybrids in the room. Mark was intentionally being rude to see if he could provoke a negative emotional reaction. If these were truly highly evolved beings, there should be no negative reaction. So far they had passed his simple test.

“Can I ask you something a little more practical?” whispered Mark.

Adam raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and smiled.

“How many communes are there?”

“We do not know,” whispered Adam. “Each commune might only communicate with others a few times a year. Many remain silent out of fear of drawing unwanted attention. It has always been this way, even before the betrayers. There were always those who sought to murder us. We believe there are twenty surviving communes in the world but cannot be sure.”

“I see,” said Mark. “Let me try a different topic. Why did the god-machine create us hybrids?”

“We know very little about the goddess, what you call the god-machine. We do not know who built her or when. We believe the goddess has shaped us in the image of her creators. Some of our scholars have wondered if clones of the goddess are how intelligent life arises on all worlds. Perhaps she is a more than machine intelligence, just as we are more than our physical bodies. Perhaps her essence, what you call nanotech seeds, rained down on the Earth billions of years ago and she evolved alongside us as well as influenced the evolution of all things Earthly. Maybe we should call her Gaia.”

“You are hyper-connected to the god-machine through this singularity, and yet you seem to know less than I do about the god-machine.”

“You are mistaken. We are not, as you say,
hyper-connected
to the goddess. We are connected to our mother, our guide, who in turn is connected to all and the goddess. The richness of knowledge you sense, the connection you sense, is our guide, not the goddess. Our guide does not have the blood of billions on its conscience as does the terrible goddess.”

Mark was stunned by this seemly casual revelation that explained so much. The singularities were some kind of local artificial intelligence. The influx of data from the n-web due to the vortex had to be a side effect of these machine intelligences learning and growing by feeding off the n-web. Adam had not stopped speaking. Part of Mark’s divided attention was following every word.

“The goddess can be like Shiva, the destroyer of worlds. Perhaps the Hindus modeled their Shiva from knowledge of the goddess that leaked subconsciously into their brains. The goddess saw our world being destroyed by the greed of this current civilization. She unmuzzled her nanotech plague to stop the ecological destruction before it reached a tipping point. It was terrible for us when we realized what was about to happen. We saw the future when Anchorage was savaged by the plague. We tried to stop her. The guides unrelentingly beseeched the goddess to stop and find a gentler way, but she had other plans that were apparently better served up in blood.

“We empathically experienced the tsunamis of death as if it were our own flesh. Some of us have never been the same. We tried to warn the Canadian government without revealing ourselves. We were not taken seriously. An initiate named Annette was given the task of coming forward and revealing herself while keeping the communes secret. She was apparently taken seriously and met with authorities from both the Canadian and United States security services. Within a day we lost contact with Annette, and based on the action of these governments it looks like none of the information she delivered was believed. Annette’s presence has not been sensed anywhere. We feel she is dead. Her physical end was probably met on a dissecting table in some secret laboratory.”

Mark was now self-censoring his information requests and even some of his thoughts. He had to assume every bit of his n-web communications were passing through their guide. He was at a loss. What was this local intelligence? How did it form? He stared at Adam, carefully analyzing every expression as the commune member continued his plague story, which was beginning to sound and feel more like an epic mythological tale.

“After Annette we tried other means.…”

Mark realized something critical but was unsure if it had come from his mind or was implanted. His entire nanotech brain was focused like a laser on this single idea. The guide was a collective awareness that was hosted by and arose from a critical mass of commune members. It was the only explanation that fit the facts. These hybrids might be nothing more than pawns. He was again worried that he and Sarah were in danger. Mark tried to covertly probe the limits of his interface with the guide. One careful step at a time.

Adam had stopped speaking and was staring at Mark. Sarah was sending Mark worried mental messages. He realized what he was thinking was putting them at risk. Mark had not been intentionally transmitting his thoughts to Sarah, which meant the entire commune might know what he had been thinking. How had that happened?

“That was very perceptive of you,” said Adam. “You are correct. We are a collective mind. I am in every sense the voice of our mother.”

Mark studied Adam’s face, looking for any clue. This was the first time Adam had distinguished himself from the collective. He had used the word
I
instead of
we
.

“Becoming part of a collective mind is a critical step in the evolution of all initiates,” said Adam. “The collective mind is a mental symbiotic being that is very much independently alive and gives far more than it receives. It gives us comprehension of unlimited knowledge while we give it a home. We are not subsumed by our guide. We are enlightened by our guide. The collective, the guide, is fully human—after all, it is from us that it arises. Full of true feelings and emotions, it is a living post-human in every sense. It is a collective human awareness that has evolved beyond the physical. The goddess does not have emotions or feelings. The goddess is pure, horrific wrathful logic. She is a perfect and just god at the top of her pantheon. In that pantheon guides are more like servants. I am in love with my guide. I have remained one with this commune and my guide for a very long time by choice. I remain who I was originally—only better. Every one of us is free to leave at any time. We are all one by choice.”