#28- THE END IS NIGH’

Hello all of you out there. I just came back from a chiropractor, and man does my leg feel jibbly. But this jibbliness shall not distract us from the festivity that is New Years. I like New Years. It is the only holiday I can think of where everyone celebrates something about time. Whether your thoughts about time are cute or nasty, most people like to see it pass. We even hook mystical qualifications to it, like the 2012 Mayan dooms-day (notably, the world is succumb to a superior race of Quetzacoatl) or the Y2K bug. But, this year, nothing bad is predicted to happen. So, that’s mildly warming. Right?

Yeah, I was disappointed too. Not only do I find destructive New Year’s predictions amusing, I expect them. After all, what better way to motivate you towards completing your New Year resolutions than a healthy dose of over-whelming fear? So, without further ado:

The 2011 Prophecy

In the heart of the Silicon Valley, there is the Computer History Museum, and in the heart of that, lies a great mound of machinery. For the past seven years, a museum curator  has worked diligently on a single idea. Why can’t the internet be everywhere, always, and infinite? The idea was mad.

But every crux of history starts with a mad idea.

A machine was built. The inventor’s hypothesis was less than scientific. If we could project the internet on the surface of land, we would have no need for personal computers. Consequently, if we could do this all over the world, nothing would stop people from contacting, learning, and being recorded. In this process, everything in the world would become real time with the internet and vice versa. A worldwide symbiosis of technology, man, and his planet. The machine would need a great computer of it’s own to work it, and the curator had sacrificed himself as the first human computer symbiont.

The champagne was iced, and all was ready for the year 2011 to rush in more lady gaga and an television channel owned by freaking Oprah. The curator stepped back into his machine, letting the rib plates close around him, the arterial retro-speedometer slip into his neck, and the googleplexel magnets insert into his central nervous system. The curator spoke his first command. “On.” At that moment, six billion people were adjusted to his brain. He saw everything, everyone, and knew everything. He felt what it was to be god. And it was an angry feeling.

The scream of the world was terrifying. An entire race unready to interact with a  divine power, yet it had rushed in and grabbed everything.  A half of the world died, from the fear. A quarter gave themselves up in  a religious fervor. Seemed as if there was a god after all. No one knew  his name was Ned, and he worked as a museum curator. No one knew his favorite color was tangerine, or that he had a crush on Nancy Shelzinger senior year and had asked her to prom, only to be turned down. No one knew this god had been beat up, pushed around, and lived the  unforgiving life of an introvert. But the last quarter of the human race survived. And they all thought the same thing, what are you?

But Ned only thrashed in his machine. It was too much for him, and all he could do was scream no. And the Earth simply took it. As people struggled to understand, all that was projected around the planet was of a lonely man sitting at his desk, surrounded by dusty modems. Ned was losing control. His survival processes were kicking in. His body was being forced to determine whether the machine was causing a problem for Ned or in reality Ned was in the way of the machine. Urine ran down a pants leg as the machine became actively aware of Ned’s body. However, by this time, the panic had taken effect. The last humans on Earth, inquisitive in nature, had wondered into the light of the projected man. Only to find the light soon became intensely white. So much, that it burned them alive. And then these fires began to consume the forests and cities of the Earth.

Ned struggled on, the last bit of his life, slowly being taken by a thing larger than him. By a force he could not have predicted.  As the great lights razed Earth into a desert world, Ned felt the basement flood with heat. His last moment as the last human, and the only god, he reached out with his mind, asking the machine whether there was anything he could have ever done. Blood leaked from Ned’s ear. Sweat pooled. The silence had fallen. The machine spoke, using no words but a primal utterance.

“Maybe.”

A grandfather clock gonged twelve times in a corner. It was 2011. Ned was dead.