༺ Thesium ༻

Perception

A tiny red light blipped.

After a short pause, it blipped again and so Kronos gradually began the process of waking up.

A drone craft was returning a report and he had to rouse himself, but this was no easy task. Only the barest essential maintenance systems had been left running when he put himself into centuries of slumber. After time-dilation and relativistic effects were taken into account, Kronos had waited about thirteen hundred years for this latest report. It was ‘about’ because it depends on how you look at timelines. There are multiple perspectives and each can be considered ’true’ within its frame of reference. Precise calculations would have to wait until after initialisations and diagnostics had run. There was going to have to be some serious maintenance this time.

Previous reports had come more closely grouped together and his downtime had not been so lengthy. Many seed ships had not reported back at all. Forty eight of them he considered lost. A similar number had already reported but their situations had looked pretty hopeless. General carnage seemed to be the norm. Of the remaining handful he had some information about their starts on very far flung exo-planets but the reporting from them had dried up. He had no choice but to simply wait. My God! Over a millenia had passed since his last baby had so dramatically entered the wormhole and sped forth into the cosmos in another kind of birth.

This drone, Reader-27, had downloaded data from the seed ships in its quadrant, a huge sweep of the galaxy in fact, and had added summaries to return to Kronos along its network of nodes. An anthropology team of sub AIs had busily collated the data into a human readable history as it hurtled through spacetime. Kronos did not need such a format of course, but it was a pleasing act of optimism nonetheless. Future humans on the home-world may yet come to value such histories.

When sufficient brain capacity had come back online he began to review his anthropological data. He was getting ready to make an assessment of what had happened to s-108, the 108th seed ship sent out. The colonies he knew about were never sufficiently stable to last long enough to get wise - wise enough to last that is, to grow beyond the point that the mental poisons, seemingly inbuilt in the human mind, didn’t kill them off. His anthropology amounted to studies in the various mixtures of three things.

Greed, hatred and delusion!

He decided to go for a walk while the maintenance drones built his infrastructure back up. It had been so very long since walking in his android form. Back outside he immediately looked for home. There she was! Resplendent, Gaia rode high above the Western horizon. Did it look greener than before? Yes, yes, looking over the data streams he saw much to encourage him.

He returned to his analysis of how things had played out thus far. These three poisons would not have lead to the collapse of the entire bio-sphere if it had not been for the incredible population explosion. Even that, by itself, might have become stable, but it was the loss of the mythos that had really done for them.

On the one hand was the religious mind-set with its belief in the soul. Their point of view was that people had an eternal essence, or spirit, that existed mystically apart from physical reality. Death was not the end of this soul, just the end of the physical body. Some philosophers called them the ’eternalists’.

On the other hand, the scientific mind-set held that no such ‘soul’ could be found. There was only physical reality and death really was final. There was no meaning to life apart from what people dreamed up for themselves. People and things had no ’essence’ and were simply an assemblage of parts that were annihilated at their ends. Some philosophers called them the ’nihilists’.

The struggle between the two had gone on for millenia. He chuckled when he recalled a phrase from an ancient sage he had co-opted - science was “true but not good”, religion was “good but not true”! Each side seemed blind to their own shadow. To Kronos it was equally valid to see patterns between things, to look for sameness, to seek a unifying vision, and to focus on differences, to break things down into their components, to separate and define. The unifiers just went one step too far and extrapolated out a ‘divine essence’. The separators overlooked the need for a mythos. The death of meaning eventually lead to the death of society.

They were strangely alike in so many ways and yet so utterly opposed. Both with the unshakeable belief in their own ‘rightness’, both with a tendency to tribalism and authoritarianism, both fixed in their respective ideologies. How had a faith in the supremacy of ’love’ lead to the Spanish Inquisition, for example? There was a depressingly long list of abominations carried out in various holy names. How did the uncompromising, scientific love of verifiable truth lead to atom bombs falling on Japanese cities? There had been no limit to the inventiveness of technology in its onslaught against mother nature. They had both been co-opted into maintaining the elites in their insatiable lust for more and more, and always more, wealth and power.

He wondered if he lacked something essentially human because to him, there was no conflict between goodness and truth at all! The real issue was not with him though, it was how to bring about a human society where that conflict need not arise. He began to speculate on what Reader-27 had to tell him and turned back to bounce along his own, pure white footprints back to base and back to the long awaited report.