Wherever You’re Atman
… or learning what’s already known …
Next you’ll discover the soulscape is far larger than you imagined.
And yes, inhabited.
Did you arrogantly expect that the entire universe was waiting upon man to arrive?
Well, in a sense, that’s true. Our cosmos is but one of trillions spun off by a single fertile singularity, whose daughter black holes spawned countless more baby universes, each of them exploding and inflating and cooling into billions of galaxies, which in turn made their own black holes and more singularity-spawned universes, and so on … . Among all those experiments, intelligence surely occurred, though far less commonly than you imagined.
Even scarcer still are creatures made of earthly flesh who look up at the stars and covet them across huge gulfs of empty space.
Most exceptional of all are those who find another way, bypassing cold vacuum, uncovering shortcuts to far richer fields. Exceptional almost to the point of uniqueness. Hence the vast emptiness of what Maharal dramatically called the “spiritual plane.” A deeper continuum, made of stuff more basic than energy and matter. A frontier he meant to stride upon like a god, using all that raw material to cast paradise in his image.
Oh, you are rarities, you hot-souled humans. So flawed. Wondrously bright. It’s a privilege to watch as you begin to waken. As you start to choose.
Have you begun to suspect who and what I am?
This voice that you mistook for a guide … you’ll soon notice that “I” never give commands, or even suggest very much. For the most part I only foresee, comment, and predict.
No, I’m not your Virgil. No mentor or font of wisdom. I’m your echo, you-who-were-Albert-and-more. A way to remember things that you haven’t yet learned. One of many conveniences you’ll soon grow accustomed to, where paradox is a normal fact of life.
Back in the ortho-moment—still moving forward in jerks and sudden stops—events will soon be coming to a head. Just three more swings of Yosil’s pendulum while the glazier stores energy, preparing to burst forth whether or not a human imprint gives it personality. Whether or not a city full of dying souls awaits to feed it, in an orgy of necrophagia.
What, you still care about that? Very well then, let me predict that you will go back again to nudge events a little more. Go ahead.
You will find the green Albert who calls himself a “frankie” … what’s left of him … less than an hour before the ortho-moment. Yes, right over there. Moments after his arm was snapped off by the closing scooter-canopy, sending him plunging through the roof of Yosil’s cabin into a debris-strewn living room.
He might use a little encouragement at that point. What approach will you use?
Will you scold him for lying there in the dust, watching the Harley fly away, feeling defeated and ready to expire?
Well, then, try imitating my vatic tone, then listen as the green reacts!
Except that Clara will never get to hear the whole story … and now the bad guys will win.
Aw, man. Whatever nagging inner voice had to put in that last bit? What guilt-tripping nag? If I could, I’d tear it out! Just shut up and let me die.
You gonna just lie there and let ‘em get away with it?
Crap. I didn’t have to take this from some obsessive soul corner of a cheap-model golem who was misborn a frankie … became a ghost … and was about to graduate to melting corpse.
Who’s a corpse? Speak for yourself.
Stunning wit, that triple irony. And though I tried hard to ignore the little voice … my right hand and arm moved, lifting slowly till five trembling fingers came within sight … . Then my left leg twitched … . Reacting to imprinted habits a million years old, they started cooperating … .
Oh well. Might as well help.
The bedraggled greenie moves! And just to be sure, you’ll nag him again during that long drag through the grotto, then climbing the dark stairs, and so on.
Just don’t exaggerate the importance of your badgering—or the reification triggered by your presence as an observer. These things matter far less than physical action in the “real” world of cause-and-effect. The green might have made it entirely without your/my/our interference!
No matter. You will do this and it will aggravate him. It may help save a million lives, and divert the Standing Wave toward a different destiny. So by all means go ahead.
Now perhaps you will also go back a few hours, to a moment in Pal’s apartment, whispering for the green to turn his head and listen at a crucial moment. Perhaps … oh, of course you will.
You always meddle at the beginning. It is part of learning. Becoming.
Back in the ortho-moment—another pendulum swing has passed, like the ticking of a titanic clock. Surprising resonances perturb the amplified Standing Wave, raising concern in the two stalemated combatants. Probability amplitudes are collapsing like quantum dominoes all around.
Their battle is over. It’s out of their control now.
To Yosil, the news is calamitous. The germ missiles may not launch
at all! No viral rain of death virus to mow down millions and feed the glazier beam when it arrives. Hovering above the city, it will harvest only a trickle. The few thousand who normally die each day will discover an afterlife unlike anything they were taught about in church! But Yosil despairs that such meager reinforcement will never give the glazier the boost it needs to become a spiritual behemoth, capable of bending the soulscape to its mighty will.
The other personality—once rooted in Albert Morris—had succumbed to Yosil’s dream, adopting it as his own. Can he now accept it’s over and choose a more modest goal?
Others plunge into this fray.
While the glazier builds toward ignition, the organic body of realAlbert sways along the axis of the beam, like an anchor dragged by a rising storm—
—as Ritu and Beta arrive with arms outstretched, united in purpose at last, bent on pushing him aside, or worse.
I know you’re curious to probe Ritu’s complex, tormented soul. By all means, use the new powers of perception. Soon you’ll see the crime that set her tragic tale in motion …
… the reason why her syndrome so resembles and exaggerates the very same one suffered by Yosil.
Not genes alone, but also a trauma they both suffered long ago, when a doting father tried using clever new technology to encourage and spur his infant daughter’s developing brain, by imprinting talents from one loving soul to another.
Like playing music for a fetus in the womb—that is how poor Yosil imagined it—a harmless gift from one generation to the next, alas, before anyone understood about subjective uniqueness and soul-orthogonality. Before the dreadful harm was widely known. Before such things were outlawed.
Tragedy can have its own triste beauty, evoking tears or laughter. This one rippled on with gorgeously transfixing horror worthy of Sophocles, across years wracked with silent remorse, obsession, and pain.
Yes, you’ll pity them. From this new perspective, you will commiserate, dwell upon, and share their agony.
Later.
Others plunge into this fray.
A spiral-patterned golem charges through the opposite door, shouting about betrayal in terms that only a multibillionaire would use. And you have to hand it to Aeneas Kaolin. (You will hand it to him, I predict.) It took ingenuity that no one imagined him capable of, to penetrate the many-layered disguises and defenses erected by a family of brilliant paranoiacs. Yosil and Ritu and Beta underestimated him. So did Albert Morris.
With a little more time … or if he trusted Morris enough to confide and ally with him from the beginning … Kaolin might have made a difference. But now? Even as he raises a weapon, shouting threats and demands to desist, Aeneas clearly knows that it’s too late.
Same with the warriors now arriving from the military base, bursting through that dark tunnel under Urraca Mesa. Armed, armored, and representing the wrath of abused taxpayers, it is the cavalry at last—pulverizing Beta’s rear guard to reach the high parapet and gaze down on all of this. Among their weapons are cameras, beaming images around the world.
Light cleanses. The World Eye was supposed to prevent all big nasty conspiracies and mad scientist labs.
It very nearly did.
Maybe next time it will.
If there is a next time.
Has anyone noticed the alignment yet?
Like a superheated, pressurized mix of air and explosive, the amplified Standing Wave has grown beyond containment or forbearance. Nor can you retard the advancing ortho-moment any longer. The time for meddling is about to end—
—as Kaolin charges toward the red mirror
—as Ritu and Beta plunge toward the gray
—as soldiers throw themselves courageously over the balcony on ropes made of living clay
—as realAlbert lifts his eyes … the only one who seems, quite suddenly, to know what’s happening.