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This is one in a series of short stories made available free of change at handwritten.atspace.com.
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Real Reality
by
Peter Thorstenson
New York, 2006
The darkness was total—no street lights, no illuminated signs. The power cut had turned off the dome of light that usually covers the city. Mark smiled to himself as he looked up. The protection shield is gone. There is no time to waste. With the help of a flashlight, he picked up some pillows from his bed and went out on the terrace. Carefully he arranged the pillows on the floor and lay down, facing the darkness. “Observatory enabled.”
“What are you doing out here in the dark?”
“Hi Ann, I didn't know you were here. Come!” He made place for her.
“Are you stargazing?”
“That is what normal people calls it.”
“What do you call it?”
“Research.”
“You could have fooled me—I thought you were looking at the stars.”
“I am.”
“And you call that research.”
“Of course. I have discovered something fantastic.”
“What can that be?”
“I don't know if I should reveal it. It's still in an early stage.”
She laughed. “You sound just like a scientist.”
“You don't believe me, do you? All right then, I'll tell you, but only on one condition. You have to promise me not to tell anyone about this.”
“You've got my word of honor.”
“In that case, welcome to my research team. To begin with, I will show you some dancing stars.”
“Ha, all movie stars know how to dance.”
“Do you see any movie stars up there?”
“But those stars can't dance.”
“Some can. That group over there, for instance. They twinkle each one of them, but sometimes slowly. When one goes off, another one goes on. It looks as if they move positions and dance around.”
“You are right. They can dance.”
“Now you are qualified for a real observation, but for that, you will need to use your special vision.”
“I knew it—you are playing Star Wars.”
“If you can concentrate for a moment, I'll show you there are no Star Wars.”
“What do you mean?”
“You will have to see that for yourself. Pick a star—any will do. Then move your focus point to somewhere beside it. That way it's easier to unfocus, because that is what you have to do next. Unfocus by relaxing your eyes, but keep on looking. You are now using your special vision. What you see.”
“Nothing really, just my eyes playing tricks on me.”
“What kind of tricks?”
“Eh, it looks like a huge spider web.”
“The star lines.”
“Star lines?”
“Yes, take a closer look at them, and tell me what you see.”
“The stars are tied together with thin, thin lines, but they are only visible for a short moment. Then other lines appear, but in different places.”
“Great.”
“They shot out of one star and hit another, and then they disappear.”
“You said it.”
“This was fun. Why haven't I seen this before?”
“You didn't use your special vision. If you focus, you can't see it, and if you don't focus, you see it, but you think your eyes are playing tricks on you, just like you said.”
“Well, now I'm sure I see the lines, but what do they mean?”
“To understand that, we have to think. What is it we see? It looks like someone up there turns on a flashlight for a short moment and then turns it off again.”
“I think it looks more like white laser beams.”
“You are right. What does that make you think of?”
“Star Trek.”
“Why?”
“They beam people here and there.”
“That was too easy, wasn't it?”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying that it's like Star Trek up there?”
“No, I think Star Trek is a bit like it's up there, but just a tiny bit.”
“Do you think they are beaming people between the stars?”
“Not between the stars—between the planets around the stars.”
“But that means there is life up there.”
“Sure, and a lot of it. Try to count the number of planets sending or receiving beams.”
“Wow, this is amazing. There is life all over the universe.”
“That's right. And here we are looking at their beams without anyone else in the whole world seeing them. We must be the only ones.”
“No, this is silly. It's impossible. Our eyes are playing tricks on us.”
“It's for real, Ann.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I have studied the beams for a long time. The way they shoot out from one star to another is a proof of some kind intelligence being behind it. Our eyes can't play tricks like that.”
“And what if it's true?”
“Then we have some new questions to answer like: What kind of life is it? Are we related? And why don't we know anything about the life out there? But we still have the old questions: What are we doing here? And why are we alive?”
“Have you found the answers?”
“I have, using simple reasoning.”
“Really? I'm getting curious.”
“Here we go then. The first thing we can say is that they are communicating in the same way. That tells us they are on the same intelligence level.”
“Yeah, otherwise the couldn't talk to each other.”
“Exactly. And since they talk, they must also look about the same, and have about the same interests.”
“Why?”
“What would they talk about otherwise?”
“Is it that simple?”
“I don't see why not. And if you assume that they beam people between the planets, then they have to have about the same living conditions.”
“If it is like you say, then they must look different to us, because we do not communicate with them.”
“Are you sure?”
“I just assumed we are not.”
“Do you pray?”
“Not very often.”
“But you do. What is praying?”
“You ask God for help or advice.”
“So, what are you doing?”
“OK, I'm communicating with God.”
“And who is God?”
“I don't know. Do you?”
“No, but I have a found out that the idea of what God is has changed many times through history. In the beginning there were many gods. They were described as being people who had the power over certain things. In Egypt the pharaoh was considered to be a god. In our days we have rock or movie stars who sometimes are raised up on pedestals as if they were gods.”
“So, we are back to the movie stars?”
“Yes, for you to understand the way we created our gods before and that they where people. Perhaps not normal people, but nevertheless people.”
“So, I talk to a person up there when I pray?”
“Yes, because in a way, you could say we were created by the people up there.”
“Why would they create us?”
“There are many reasons.”
“How do you know that?”
“It's just to put yourself in their position.”
“Oh, I see. Yeah, that's easy.”
“It is. As I see it, their world must be huge when you realize how many planets are part of it. Our world is limited to one planet, but theirs have no such limits. Their world consists of what we know as the whole universe. To keep a world like that in peace, it needs to be perfect. No room for foul-ups like here on Earth. One single mistake can ruin it all.”
“How do you know that? I mean they must be very intelligent.”
“Everybody knows that it is harder to rule a country the bigger it is. All super powers falls to pieces sooner or later. Just look at history.”
“Now, I understand what you mean. Yeah, their world must be perfect.”
“Yes, but the question is: How can you create a perfect world?”
“You have to remove all mistakes, all crooks.”
“That's right and one more thing—everybody has to work together as a team and pull in the same direction. No room for individualists.”
“No individualists? Then it will get boring. Isn't it them who color the world?”
“Sure, but not always using the right colors. There are ways to color the world from within a team, playing by team rules. The problem is that we don't have any team rules at all.”
“All right, so they have a perfect world up there with nice team players. But what does that make us?”
“We are everything they are not, we have everything they don't have, and we do everything they can't do.”
“You make it sound as if we are superior to them.”
“On the contrary. The Earth is what we ought to call hell. We steal, we fight, and we kill.”
“Haven't thought about it that way, but it's true. Why is it like that?”
“Because the Earth is their test track, well isolated from their own world. Here we can do everything they can't because it would put their world at risk.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We are them, Ann.”
“You must have hit your head.”
“Think. You are one of the leaders up there. You have a huge world to keep together. What do you do with all people who wants to steal, fight, and kill?”
“I would have to convert them into good citizens.”
“That's right. So, what do you do?”
“I see. I send them away to the Earth and let them steal, fight, and kill there until they get tired of it.”
“Hey, that was quite good. Not totally correct though. They are sent here to learn what is good and bad.”
“But how do they learn that if they are allowed to do bad things here?”
“The answer to that lays in what we really are.”
“Are we something else than human beings?”
“No, but what are the human beings?
“You tell me. I haven't got the slightest ...”
“We are machines.”
“Machines?”
“Yes, biological machines—quite sophisticated. We program ourselves to become perfect.”
“How?”
“By learning.”
“Learning to steal, fight, and kill. Is that to become perfect?”
“As machines we are as close to perfect as we can get, but our individual programs are not ready. We have to make that program ourselves. We have a built-in mechanism that helps us with the programming. That mechanism is called feelings. Our individual program is stored in a memory we usually call moral. The moral is a big data bank consisting of experiences and their feelings.”
“So, if we do something good and feel good when we do it, it is recorded with a good feeling.”
“That's right.”
“And if we do something wrong that we feel bad about, it is recorded with that bad feeling.”
“That's the idea.”
“But what if we do something wrong and feel good about it?”
“When we do something wrong, it is automatically recorded with a bad feeling, no matter what we feel. The same thing happens when we do something good and feel bad about it, but then it's recorded with a good feeling”
“So, you mean the killer will learn that it's wrong to kill even if he loves to do it.”
“He will. It's fool proof.”
“How about these serial killers. They just keep on killing for fun. They never seem to learn.”
“With time the recorded feelings will become strong enough to override the feelings they feel when they are killing. It just works.”
“How do you know it does?”
“Didn't you ever eat something you didn't like because you had to when you were small?
“Sure, I didn't like peas. I felt sick. I swore never to eat peas again.”
“Did you keep your promise?”
“A few years, but now I love them.”
“There you go. Your bad feeling were overwritten with good feelings.”
“Maybe you are right, but how about the killer?”
“When you do something wrong without knowing it's wrong, you feel good about it, don't you? But afterwards when you discover new facts about what you did, you feel bad about it. Why? Because it was recorded with a bad feeling.”
“But doesn't the bad feeling come when you discover those new facts—when you discover it was wrong?”
“No, you get the bad feeling, but you get it from your moral data bank, instantly. No one has to tell you it was wrong, you already know it.”
“Come on, Paul. You are making this up.”
“When you get the new facts you automatically re-evaluate the experience and compare it with the moral data bank, and when you do, you get the bad feeling. You might blush or if it's serious, even get cold sweat. To analyze the new facts you need to think, and to think is a slow process. You get the bad feeling directly without needing to think.” You don't start to think until after the feeling.”
“OK, maybe you're right. Maybe we are programming ourselves, but what for?”
“To work better and better, until we are qualified for a place in the team.”
“What team?”
“The one up there, where the real life is.”
“Don't you think that the life we live here is real?”
“I do, and that's the whole point with it.”
“I don't understand anything. Didn't you just say that the real life is up there?”
“I did, and it is, but I still think the life here is real. Haven't you heard of virtual reality?”
“Sure, it's a simulation of you being in another place in another situation when you really aren't”
“That's right. But that simulation is very limited because you know it's just a simulation. The result of the simulation may not be correct, because you do not take the same decisions as you would do if your life depended on them.”
“Are we just simulating life here?”
“That's correct. This is not virtual reality, but real reality.”
“It sure feels like I live here.”
“That's because you don't remember anything from your real life. Here your life depends on your decisions.”
“I don't get this. You said they created us, but still we are only simulating our lives.”
“To explain that, I have to explain the difference between our world and the real world. Our normal senses gives us an image of what our world looks like. They can do that because our bodies are part of this world and therefore well adapted to it. But there are other worlds, and I'm not talking about other places. I'm talking about parallel worlds or levels. The whole universe is built up that way. The Earth is completely separated from the world up there, and that is the main reason to we are here.”
“Yeah, they wanted their scum as far from them as possible.”
“True. They need to make team workers out of their people, so they send them here to learn. But they can't just send them here, because our worlds are separated. So what they did was that they created vehicles they could ride in while they where here. We are using those vehicles right now.”
“So, we are like a horse with a rider.”
“Yes, but the rider is not sitting on us, he is in us. We are perhaps more like a space suit than a horse.”
“But who is who? Are we the suite or the space man?”
“We are the space man. The suits are just suits, nothing more.”
“You look more than just a suit.”
“Our suits are at the same level as the animals. We have the intelligence, and we are the personalities. Compare a monkey with the human being. They look very alike, they have the same organs, their brains look similar, but the monkey is just an animal while the human being is the image if God. The difference is the space man.”
“Image of God?”
“Yes, ‘God created man in his own image’ it says in Genesis.”
“But that means we are God, because it was we who created man here on Earth, to look like we do.”
“According to the Bible you may be right. Do you remember what I said in the beginning, about having many gods. In Genesis it says: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’. There you see. Our god was not one but many.”
“Hey, it all fit's. How did you figure this out?”
“Research, Ann. Didn't I tell you?”
“You must have spent a lot of time on this.”
“I have, but not as long as it took to create man here on Earth.”
“Yeah, how did we do it?”
“It's called natural evolution. We planted a seed here and then we only had to wait. When the suit was ready, we put it on. That moment is also mentioned in Genesis. Before Eve took a bite of the apple, the snake told her: ‘Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’”
“Be as gods ... But then we are not real gods. We are more like farmer.”
“Yes, we only use the laws of the universe created by God, the god of gods, our creator.”
“That's what I thought. There is a real God.”
“There is. Without the god of gods, there wouldn't be any universe.”
“Who am I praying to then?”
“I don't know exactly, but I guess that everyone has some kind of support up there. Haven't you seen the divers with these huge diving suits. They always have someone on the surface they can talk to if they need help. We are in a similar situation.”
“But they know they have someone up there—we don't.”
“Yeah, that's the difference. You know what Jesus called his God when he was talking to him. He called him Father and Lord. Perhaps he really talked to his father, and perhaps his father was of high rank up there—maybe a lord.”
“I guess it's possible. And all this because of those star lines.”
“Yeah, isn't it fantastic—a whole universe at peace? A huge paradise right above us. Look at it, Ann. What you see up there is Heaven.”
 This story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License and copyrighted ©2005 by me, Peter Thorstenson. |