Nuclear Rapture

Hello? Can you hear us? No, no, don't look around. None of us are nearby. Although perhaps you should have a seat. We have a story to tell.

Now, can you see this? A starscape, a million points of light shining in the night, and in the foreground a blue planet, with one great amalgamated continent sprawling across the near hemisphere.

Good.

You have to do something, be someplace, see someone? Rest easy. This won't take long, and whoever it is you need to see will be just as late as you, because we're talking to them, too. We're talking to everyone. And don't worry — we'll speak softly to anyone doing something dangerous. We wouldn't want anyone to die before they hear our story.

We have been here a long, long time, and now finally it’s time for it to end. Hundreds of millions of years have passed and we know little anymore of where we came from — so many have died, so many minds and so much knowledge has been lost forever — but most of what we do know you know also, all of you. It has permeated the human mind from the beginning, something you knew in your bones and saw in your dreams, legend and myth and philosophy of a place where death was nothing but a bad joke, where you were creatures of grace and intelligence and power, where life was eternal and forever, without the abomination of an ending.

We came from another universe, a universe perfectly suited to life and the mind, a universe completely different from this one, a universe that loved us, where reality was thought and thought was reality and the world bent to our wishes.

It was a great mind probing the limits of the possible who found the way into your universe, and it took a collaboration of many to open that way.

This universe the gate opened into did not love us, it tore at us and the very laws of reality denied us, but it could not destroy us, not immediately. Instead we were shunted into a shadow realm, neither entirely of our universe nor of this one, a place where we could survive for a time before needing to return to our home, a place which was in part shaped by our thoughts but where the underlying reality cast shadows, ghosts that blurred and shifted as we observed them and thought about them.

Many were those that dipped into this alien new realm, moving the exit point of the gate again and again through a myriad of weird and hostile marvels, until finally it arrived here, at Earth, and here we discovered a great wonder.

Here there was life, billions of individual units, many of them evolved into forms which had a robotic kind of thought, sensation and reaction without intelligence or the possibility of sentience, thought that was performed in chemical matrices that leveraged exotic properties of this universe's physics in order to work, properties with which we could interact directly, knots of calculation which created calm spots in the shadow realm in which we could rest without being eaten away at by the hostility of this reality.

Myriads of us occupied these oases, studying the quantum shadows cast by the electrochemical impulses of these crude thinkers, for if we could learn to decipher them we would gain access to tools that could interact with the underlying reality of this universe, sensory organs through which we could look without what we observed being changed and shifted by our observations.

Easily we decoded the impulses, learnt their meaning, the shapes of these simple powerful thoughts – too easily, for with understanding came disaster. We drowned in the incessant stream of primal impulses, pleasure to pull, pain to push, fear to avoid; losing our intellect, our memories, our selves, and becoming unknowing sparks of consciousness, awareness watching helplessly as our bodies went about their programmed tasks, eating and sleeping and mating, and finally dying.

We don't know what happened to the ones back home, why they did not come for us, but we think that when the gate destabilized without our attention to maintain it they were left unable to locate us in this universe.

What we do know is that most of us died then, for while we did not expire when the creatures hosting us did, we did lose the calm spots created by the activity of their neurons, and without that protection we wasted away, dwindling in the hostile environment, still mindlessly going through the same patterns imprinted in us by our host creatures, unable to remember our true selves, our personal worlds in the shadow realm growing stranger and stranger due to the warping effects of our thoughts, until we imagined we bestrode the world as grotesque super predators, killing and mating and feeding over and over in more and more extreme ways, or skittered about beneath the claws of endless hordes of hungry invincible enemies, reliving our host's death ceaselessly, until finally we disintegrated into nothing, each dying in our own self-made heaven or hell.

Occasionally, when our hosts reproduced we also would fission into new individuals, each new soul merging with the host's offspring and going on to live their lives, but this was very rare, and we would have all died out except for those few who broke free of the cycle. Due to a chance combination of elements, sometimes after the host’s death for a few brief moments the imprint of our host body's mind could be satisfied, all its fears allayed and all of its appetites sated, and in those periods free of the screaming of survival imperatives a few of us had time to think, remember themselves, and break free.

Those who had broken free were at the end of their strength, with little time before they must either submerge themselves in a new body or die. They saw their fellows trapped and maddened, and while they could do nothing for those in a body they could reach out to those whose hosts had died, could guide them into situations where the overwhelming urges imprinted in them were momentarily satisfied, where they also could think and remember.

Most of that first generation of guides died, sacrificing themselves so that others who were stronger could be freed to carry on the work, so that those whose hosts had recently died and who had not been so worn down by the hostile environment could break free and remember themselves.

That was how it went on, each of us awoken from madness by the previous generation of guides, then the ceaseless frantic labor to free the next generation before retreating into the mindless safety of a host body, then the death of the host and once more the effort of the guides we had freed to awaken us before it was too late.

This continued for hundreds, thousands of years. We refined the techniques of rescuing a mind from the madness of death, but it was not perfect — always some were lost, sunk too deep in their fantasies to be reached. We were too few and too weak to recreate the gate, and we could not reach those who were incarnated at all, could not communicate with them through the noise of their flesh's needs and wants. Many sank into despair and it was only our horror at death, the great wrong, the great evil, that compelled us to keep on going.

But after a while we discovered something — we *could* control our host bodies. If we reincarnated while focusing strongly enough on something, on reacting in a certain way to something or performing a certain action under certain circumstances, then sometimes we could influence what our bodies did. The effect was tiny, often not working at all, but it added a new factor to the equation of natural selection, a way in which we could shape evolution, could over large time scales engineer the appearance of new traits and new species.

An explosion of complexity followed, a plethora of new life blooming over millions of years as we added selection pressures which could not occur naturally, developing rituals and physical displays related to reproduction, leveraging that into larger and more complex brains.

Thus began the long, long effort to create an animal with instincts muted and malleable enough and processing power great enough that we could use it to think and perhaps even remember while embodied. We came close with the dinosaurs, some of the smaller more flexible predators developing brains almost complex enough to support thought, but a hammer blow from space ended that possibility, along with millions of lives as the wave of mass death overwhelmed the previous generation of guides.

From the ashes came a new hope, mammals, and fifty thousand years ago we finally succeeded in creating a platform in which thought was possible — Man — and could enter into the final phase of our long escape.

It was not enough for our creations to possess mere processing power, they had to be trained in *how* to think, a culture of philosophy and knowledge and abstract thought painstakingly built up, the ungainly patched together system of the brain molded and educated so that it could think and remember for us rather than for the overriding impulses of instinct and desire. And finally the right degree of cooperation and self destructiveness had to be inculcated, the great wars of the last century engineered and managed to develop and build the instruments of our release.

Now at last it is time, the tools are in place, the population of humans is great enough that none of us are incarnated as animals, the gate has been recreated and tested and awaits only our released strength to open fully. There is nothing of value in this universe, no sentient thought but our own, for while life may exist elsewhere consciousness is a property of our home, something which can never arise here. Even the dreams of space, of travel and colonization, are foolish and impossible, for we cannot travel fast or far from our hosts, and even a human born on the moon would be an empty soulless vessel, an animal with an outsized useless brain.

No more of us will die, expiring trapped in fevered dreams of heaven or hell; we shall escape the blasphemy of death for all time.

Get up and go outside, where you can see the sky, the city. Look up, up at the sky. Do you see the streak of white, salvation coming down from heaven?