The Invisible Ladder (by Claude AI, mostly)

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This morning I wrote something and then fed to Claude (the AI) who transformed it. Here’s what Claude wrote:

THE INVISIBLE LADDER

Sarah’s flashlight beam swept across the cardboard walls for the fifteenth time. Nothing. Just brown corrugation and that weird smell cardboard gets when it’s been in the garage too long.

“This is stupid,” she whispered to her little brother Marcus, who was making his flashlight do loops on the ceiling. “Dad’s pranking us.”

“Maybe the magic wore off,” Marcus said, completely serious. He was four and still believed in everything.

“There’s no such thing as magic ink.” Sarah was eight and knew better. “Dad just wants us off the video games.”

They crawled out of the box and went back to Fortnite, controllers in hand, volume turned so low the gunfire was just whispers. Dad was weird about screens but he’d been in a mood lately, ever since Mom… well, since the funeral. Maybe the cardboard box thing was his way of trying.

Ten minutes later the living room went dark.

“BEHOLD!” Dad’s voice boomed from somewhere. Then he crawled into the box from the other end holding something that glowed purple. “Come back, young scientists! The experiment continues!”

Marcus scrambled back in, delighted. Sarah rolled her eyes but followed.

Inside, the walls were blazing. White letters floated everywhere: ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM. INVISIBLE WORLD. EVERYTHING YOU CAN’T SEE. The words seemed to pulse.

“Whoa,” Marcus breathed, touching a glowing letter.

Dad’s face looked ghostly in the UV light, eyes too bright, smile too wide. “The electromagnetic spectrum spans roughly sixty to seventy orders of magnitude in frequency, while visible light covers less than—”

“Dad,” Sarah groaned.

He stopped. Blinked. “Right. Okay.” He took a breath and his voice changed, got softer. “Imagine the tallest ladder ever built. Not just to the moon—twice as high as the moon. Yellow rungs going up forever into space where you can’t breathe, where it’s just black and cold and nothing.”

Marcus’s eyes went round.

“Now imagine a fruit fly—you know those annoying little things that buzz around bananas? One of those lands on the very first rung. The bottom one. And it looks around thinking, Boy, I’m really something, standing on this ladder. But here’s the thing—the fly can’t even see the second rung. Can’t comprehend how high this thing goes. To the fly, that bottom rung is the whole universe.”

Sarah found herself leaning in.

“That fly is us.” Dad pulled out his magic marker and drew a ladder up the wall, over their heads, across the ceiling. His hand moved fast, the lines glowing under the black light. “This is everything. All matter, all energy, all forces, all particles, all waves. Everything that exists in the entire universe.” He clicked off the UV light. The ladder vanished. He pulled out a regular Sharpie and made a single tiny dot near the floor. Click—normal flashlight. “See that dot?”

They nodded.

“That’s all we can see. That microscopic speck. The rest?” He waved his hand at the now-invisible ladder. “Might as well not exist. Radio waves carrying every song ever broadcast—invisible. Microwaves cooking your pizza—invisible. X-rays that let doctors see inside your body—invisible. Gamma rays from exploding stars—invisible. It’s all there, all around us right now, but our eyes are basically blind. We’re the fruit fly on the bottom rung.”

The box felt smaller suddenly. Darker.

“Can you see angels with that light?” Sarah heard herself ask. Her voice came out small. “Because Mom said… before she… she told me that—”

“No.” Dad’s voice went flat. Hard. “There are no angels, Sarah. No souls, no spirits, no heaven where Mom is watching us. I know that’s what they told you at the funeral but it’s not real. None of it’s real. There’s no tooth fairy, no Santa, no God, no magic. Just matter and energy. That’s it. That’s all there is.”

The black light clicked off. The regular flashlight clicked off. They sat in complete darkness.

“Mom said she’d always be with us,” Marcus whispered.

“Mom said a lot of things,” Dad said. “She was… she needed comfort. She was scared. People say things when they’re dying that make them feel better. It doesn’t make them true.”

Sarah felt something go crack inside her chest. Like a door slamming shut.

Twenty-three years later

Dr. Sarah Chen (she’d taken her husband’s name) stood in the observation room of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, staring at data that didn’t make sense. The galaxy cluster was rotating wrong. Too fast. Like something invisible was holding it together.

“Dark matter,” her colleague said, coming up beside her with coffee. “Has to be.”

“Maybe,” Sarah said. But she was thinking about static electricity. About plasma. About how the entire field of cosmology was built on assumptions that might be completely wrong. How they were all fruit flies on the bottom rung, calling that tiny dot “everything.”

Her phone buzzed. Marcus. Third time this week.

She let it go to voicemail.

Ever since the… incident… in high school, ever since he’d swallowed those pills and technically died for four minutes before the EMTs brought him back, Marcus had been different. Intense. He’d found religion, which was embarrassing. Talked about consciousness and fine-tuning and how the universal constants were too perfect to be random. Like he’d joined some cult, except the cult was just him and a bunch of books about physics and philosophy.

The voicemail transcription appeared: “Sarah, I had another one. I need to tell you. It’s about Dad. Please call me back.”

She deleted it.

The dreams were the worst part. Ever since his near-death experience, Marcus claimed he had prophetic dreams. And the thing was—the terrible, impossible thing—they kept coming true.

He’d told her, six months after he got out of the hospital: “You’re going to meet someone. An Asian guy, works in physics too. You’ll think he’s annoying at first but then… I don’t know, something clicks. You’ll marry him within a year. And you’ll have a daughter. She’ll have Mom’s eyes.”

Sarah had laughed it off. She was seventeen, focused on getting into MIT. Boys were irrelevant.

Then she’d met Kevin at Caltech. Found him insufferable for months (he never shut up about string theory). Then one night working late in the lab, sleep-deprived and punchy, they’d started laughing about something stupid and hadn’t stopped. Married at twenty-one. Lily was born when Sarah was twenty-three.

Lily had Mom’s eyes.

Statistical coincidence. Had to be. Marcus had made hundreds of predictions; Sarah just remembered the ones that hit. Selection bias. Confirmation bias. Pattern-seeking in randomness.

Except he’d only made seven predictions total, and five had come true. The sixth was about Dad, apparently. And Marcus wouldn’t tell her the seventh.

Her phone rang again. Marcus, of course.

This time she answered. “I’m working.”

“Sarah.” His voice cracked. “Please. I saw Dad. In the dream. He was in his classroom and there was this smell like… like sulfur or something burning, and he couldn’t breathe, and—”

“Marcus, stop. You’re spiraling again. Did you take your meds?”

“I’m not spiraling! I’m trying to tell you Dad’s going to have a heart attack! In his classroom! Tomorrow, during third period!”

Sarah closed her eyes. “You can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep predicting disasters that don’t happen and then—”

“They DO happen! The car crash with Aunt Linda—”

“You said June. It happened in July.”

“I was one month off!”

“That’s called being wrong, Marcus.”

Silence. Then, quietly: “Why won’t you just admit that something happened to me? That I saw something real?”

“Because it wasn’t real. You were oxygen-deprived. Your brain was dying. It created a hallucination—a very common hallucination—to help you cope with the trauma. There’s been extensive research on NDEs and they can all be explained by—”

“By what? By random chemical reactions? By meat-computer glitches?” His voice rose. “You know what Dad did to us? He taught us that wonder was weakness. That curiosity about anything beyond his precious electromagnetic spectrum was stupidity. He killed something in you that day in the cardboard box, Sarah. He killed it in both of us. But at least I got to see what’s on the other side before—”

“There is no other side!”

“Then explain how I knew about Kevin! How I knew about Lily! How I know Dad’s heart is going to stop tomorrow at 10:47 AM!”

Sarah’s hand tightened on the phone. The specificity. That was new.

“Marcus,” she said carefully. “Have you been taking your medications?”

He hung up.

The next day, at 10:47 AM Chilean time (2:47 PM in Ohio where Dad taught), Sarah was in a meeting about funding allocations when her phone buzzed with a text from her stepmother:

Your father collapsed at school. Heart attack. He’s in surgery. It doesn’t look good.

Sarah stared at the message. At the timestamp.

At 10:47.

She left the meeting without excusing herself, walked straight to the bathroom, locked herself in a stall, and vomited.

Dad survived. Triple bypass, two weeks in the hospital, mandatory retirement. Sarah flew home. Sat by his bed. Didn’t tell him about Marcus’s call.

On the third day, when he was awake and lucid and complaining about the hospital food, she asked: “Do you remember the cardboard box? The UV light? The electromagnetic spectrum?”

He frowned, thinking. “Oh. Yeah. That was right after your mother… I was trying to teach you something important.”

“What was important about it?”

“That reality is knowable. Measurable. That we don’t have to be afraid of death because there’s nothing to be afraid of. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, it just changes form. Your mother’s energy didn’t go anywhere supernatural—it returned to the cosmos. To the stars. That’s more beautiful than any myth about angels.”

“Is it though?” Sarah heard herself say.

Dad’s eyebrows went up. “What?”

“Is it more beautiful? Because it seems… emptier. Lonelier.”

“Sarah.” He reached for her hand. His grip was weak now, papery. “You’re a scientist. One of the best. Don’t tell me you’re having some kind of midlife crisis about—”

“Marcus predicted your heart attack. Down to the minute.”

The room went very quiet.

“He’s been on medication for years,” Dad finally said. “Schizophrenia runs in your mother’s family, you know that.”

“He doesn’t have schizophrenia.”

“Then what?”

Sarah looked at her father—this man who’d taught her to think critically, to demand evidence, to never accept easy answers. This man who’d drawn an invisible ladder in a cardboard box and told her that everything beyond the visible was just different frequencies of the same meaningless energy.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think… I think the fruit fly might be missing something.”

Six months later

Sarah was back in Chile, back at the telescope, back tracking her rogue galaxy cluster, when Marcus called with the seventh prediction.

“Don’t tell me,” she said immediately. “I don’t want to know.”

“It’s about you.”

“Marcus—”

“You’re going to meet someone. An older woman, at a conference. She’ll have a theory that sounds crazy but you’ll realize she’s right. About consciousness. About what happens when we die. About Mom.”

Sarah’s throat tightened. “There are thousands of conferences. Thousands of older women with theories.”

“This one will be in Vienna. March 14th. She’ll be wearing a blue scarf and she’ll drop her coffee when she sees your name tag. And Sarah? When she tells you what she’s discovered, you’ll finally understand why I can see things I shouldn’t be able to see.”

“I don’t believe in prophecy.”

“I know. That’s what makes this so hard.”

Sarah closed her eyes. The dark matter data glowed on her screen—evidence of something invisible, something that shouldn’t exist according to everything she’d been taught, but undeniably real.

“What if Dad was wrong?” Marcus asked quietly. “Not about the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s all true. But what if the ladder goes both directions? What if there’s something smaller than quantum fields, something that exists in a different dimension entirely, something that consciousness can touch? What if Mom was right about angels?”

“Angels aren’t real, Marcus.”

“Then what do you call a dead woman who shows up in her son’s vision and tells him to go back? Who gives him information he couldn’t possibly know? What do you call whatever it is that lets me see across time?”

Sarah opened her mouth. Closed it.

“I’m tired,” Marcus said. “I’m so tired of seeing things and not being believed. But I needed to tell you about Vienna. Because after Vienna, everything changes. For both of us.”

He hung up before she could respond.

Sarah sat in the dark observation room, surrounded by millions of dollars of equipment designed to detect the invisible, to measure the unmeasurable, to prove the unprovable.

Then she opened her laptop and bought a plane ticket to Vienna.

March 14th.

She told herself it was just to prove Marcus wrong.

But late that night, alone in her room at the telescope facility, she pulled up photos from her wedding. There was one from the reception—Kevin laughing, her in her white dress, and in the background, almost invisible, a trick of the light or a smudge on the lens: a bright spot that looked almost like a woman’s face.

It looked like Mom.

Sarah zoomed in until the pixels broke apart.

“Scientific materialism,” she whispered to the empty room. To the invisible ladder stretching infinitely above and below. To the fruit fly that couldn’t see past its own rung.

She thought of the cardboard box. The UV light. Her eight-year-old self asking about angels.

She thought of Dad’s flat, certain voice: There’s no such thing.

And she thought: What if you were wrong?

Outside, the Chilean stars blazed—each one a sun, each sun surrounded by invisible forces, dark matter, dark energy, mysteries upon mysteries, rungs upon rungs of an ladder so vast that humanity had barely glimpsed the first step.

Sarah looked up at them and wondered, for the first time in twenty-three years, if maybe—just maybe—the invisible ink was trying to tell her something.

The message was still there.

She just needed the right light to read it.

The End

…………………………………………

In case anyone’s curious, here’s the thing I wrote as the basis for Claude’s short story. I’m putting it here at the end because it’s painfully low in quality compared to what the AI Claude wrote in the twinkling of an eye. (No whine, just fact.) Grok 4.2 drew the picture that I’ll attach near the top if time permits.

Also, fwiw, here’s the prompt I gave to Claude: “……please re-write this without putting any constraints upon yourself. Just try to make it a “page turner” in whatever way meets your fancy, whether humor, a balanced approach, turning it into pure fiction, adding scenes, or whatever else, serious or whimsical that suits you at this time, Claude.”

My writing from this morning that I fed into Claude, AI. Many people would hate my opinion here if they ever read it. Sorry, ya can’t please everybody.

“Scientific” Materialism: The Death of Science and Meaning

(by Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD)

“Scientific” Materialism is a great evil, possibly the worst influence of all time. It’s a mind virus that imposes boundaries on our scientists’ thinking and blocks their interest in novel, outlier observations and facts that might otherwise bring new levels of understanding to humanity from within the vast realms of the unknown. This dogmatic worldview, wrongly called “Scientific,” is the untestable belief that (randomness acting upon) matter and energy constitute everything that exists or could possibly exist anywhere, ever. While suppressing thousands of anecdotal hints of paradigm-shifting science, this depressing, anti-scientific worldview simultaneously strains to destroy all notions of a higher meaning for human existence or any transcendent purpose for our lives.

It starts with teachers and children who have been legally sentenced to periodic confinement together within the clutches of Western public school systems and their brainwashing effects.

For some kids, it might go something like this…

A brother and sister are playing inside a big cardboard box in the living room, she’s 8 years old, he’s 4. Their dad, a high-school science teacher, wrote a message for them on the inside of the box using “magic” ink. He turned out the lights and gave them each a flashlight, but he didn’t tell them they would need ultraviolet light to read his message.

This would be a teaching moment, he figured.

The kids turned on their flashlights in the dark living room, crawled into the box, and for almost a half hour, looked all over the insides of the box for Dad’s writing on the wall.

Finally they gave up. The eight-year-old said, “Really, there’s no such thing as magic ink. Dad just wants to get us off the video games.”

The two went back to playing video games with the sound turned down so low that Dad hopefully wouldn’t hear the guns and explosive detonations.

Ten minutes later Dad returned with an ultraviolet light on a long extension cord. The children crawled inside the cardboard box from one end and Dad came through the other with the black light that made his message glow:

“Electromagnetic Spectrum.”

The eight-year old crinkled her nose. The four-year-old looked explored the bright white spots on his shirt sleeves.

Dad got that boring sound in his voice. “The electromagnetic spectrum spans roughly 60-70 orders of magnitude in frequency, while visible light covers less than one order of magnitude.”

Both kids couldn’t care less. Grown-up mumbo-jumbo.

“No, no,” Dad said, seeing he’d lost them. “Pay attention now, this is really fascinating. Let’s say you built a bright yellow step latter twice as high as the moon. You could climb up and look down at the moon, right? Picture that in your heads, the tallest yellow ladder ever made. It stands now right out in our back yard. All of a sudden up comes this scrawny little fruit fly with a scowl. It flies up and lands on the first step of your ladder thinking it’s big stuff. But it’s just a pipsqueak and doesn’t have enough brain power to figure it out. Your ladder is like the electromagnetic spectrum.” Dad holds the blacklight up to the glowing letters, “Electromagnetic Spectrum.” This spectrum is ginormous, big, bigger, biggest and then some. It stretches way beyond the Moon. And the fruit fly is like a tiny dot on that spectrum. And here’s the thing, the little dot is the only part of the ladder that people can see. Everything else is invisible.

The daughter’s brow is crossed.

“Think about it,” Dad says. “Everything there is in the whole wide world, in the whole wide Universe, comes from the electromagnetic spectrum and we can’t see any of it except this tiny fruit-fly speck near the bottom. OK, here’s this big ladder.”

He pulls out the magic pen and draws a ladder from the bottom to the top of one side of the box, then on across the flat part above them. “That is literally Everything that exists, and it’s almost all invisible to our eyes. It’s like invisible ink. We can’t see it.”

He turns off the black light and flips on a flashlight. The ladder vanishes. He pulls out a regular pen and puts a dot near where the bottom of the ladder was. “You see that, right?”

Both kids nod, eyes wider now. “That’s the fruit fly. That little dot. It’s the only part of this big spectrum that people can see. And the spectrum is everything that there is. It makes up all matter and energy. And the tiny dot is the only part that we can see without special tools like this UV light.” He turns the black light back on and turns off the flashlight. “Any questions?”

“Can you see angels with that light?” his daughter asks. “Cause Mom said…”

“No, I know what Mom said, but there’s no such thing as Angels, honey. No tooth fairy, either, OK?”

The little girl looks down and nods slowly.

Decades later she’s an astrophysicist who knows that nothing could possibly exist anywhere in the Universe except for matter and energy, the two manifestations of the electromagnetic spectrum. She’s recently heard the term “scientific materialism” but hasn’t thought much about it directly. She does have intuitive doubts about the widely accepted existence of dark matter, the invisible stuff that keeps the arms of galaxies spinning faster than they really should if gravity alone rules the stars. She thinks the popular concept of a dark gravitational force is probably nothing more than an enormous amount of static electricity operating at the cosmic level. Something about like that, anyway. She wonders if maybe we live in an electric Universe, or maybe a plasma Universe, and gravity isn’t actually the dominant force that everyone thinks it is. But whatever the truth turns out to be, it’s going to be governed by randomness. That’s the bottom line.

In a random Universe, nothing happens for a reason, there are no elves, fairies, unicorns, Jinns, Angels, Demons, God, Santa Clause, UFOs, Aliens, or anything else that gullible people believe in. Dark matter and dark energy will probably be added to her list eventually, she privately suspects. In fact, there’s really no right and wrong if you think long and hard about it. Human values are relative to the societal norms of a person’s time and place of birth. We’re not really any different from other animal, we’re just a megaton smarter.

She vaguely senses this vacuum, the literal meaninglessness of the world we believe in and share with a large part of Western culture. As long as she doesn’t dwell on it, it doesn’t bother her as much as it bothers her younger brother. He tried to end his life in High School. It happened right after his first real girlfriend dumped him for a girl. Those were rough times. Her brother nearly died. When he finally opened his eyes in the hospital he spoke of strange things.

“There was this bright light that you could feel… like being in love,” he said. “It felt better than anything. I saw Mom. She said I had to go back, but I didn’t want to.”

To this day he insists that it was real. “More real than us talking right now,” he said to his sister.

And he’s always going on about the fine-tuning of the universal constants and the mathematical odds against random forces ever grinding out the information in DNA.

“He’s wrong, of course,” his sister thought. “Everything is random. But it’s kind of weird the dreams he’s had since he almost died. He told me he dreamed that I would meet an Asian guy, marry him and have a little girl of my own within two years. And by pure coincidence, it turned out just the way he said. We keep this part strictly to ourselves because it’s too strange to tell, even to Dad. Daddy would just launch into some lecture on the commonality of unlikely coincidences. And as always, I wish Mom were still alive. You could tell her anything. And she would listen.”

….

Love and hugs,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Will Smith and our little pseudo-problem…

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Will Smith (the more conservative) slaps Chris Rock (the more liberal) and keeps us all looking at our pseudo-problem, not at our real problem.

Our pseudo-problem is the cultural divide where the fringe puritans of self-righteousness on both sides keep us thinking that those of us with liberal values and lifestyles must fight a war against those of us with conservative values and lifestyles.

Our real problem is that the tiny number of people who have real power over us are dragging the West into a digital totalitarian world order where political freedom and self-determination (core traits of democracy) are becoming extinct.

TV news (on both sides), the academy, Hollywood, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and tiny groups of highly vocal political-fringe voices on the left and right want us to focus all our attention on the pseudo-problem. They want us to remain blinded and divided by anger, outrage and hatred.

They glibly silence anyone who suggests that most of us regular folk, whether liberal, progressive, conservative, or whatever… we have friends and loved ones on both sides of their cultural pseudo-war.

We know how to love people of all stripes. We know how to respect cultural differences because we’re not vicious idiots with fighting instincts that overwhelm our compassion, objectivity, and reason.

We’re normal human beings, and we have a super-majority when it comes to everything except voting together.

This is because of the pseudo-war, the “culture war.”

If we voted together to stop powerful elites from killing democracy, we could save it. There’s still time, I think.

But we must wake up to the small groups’ motives for keeping us at each other’s throats. We must learn to refuse being emotionally and politically divided over nonsense…

“Will Smith did what?! I hate him now!”

“No, I love him. He did the right thing. ‘Whatever it takes,’ man.”

This is why I keep saying the political left and right desperately need each other. We need each other to wake up, forget the fake culture war, and vote together.

Nobody says this better than our naughty, potty-mouth pal, a recovering drug addict who’s too soft on communism (for me), but understands the real problem of top-down governments throughout history, Russell Brand…

Next time you vote in the US, choose someone of any party or lifestyle, someone who seems honest and says she/he will fight against top-down digital totalitarian rule, someone who doesn’t take corporate money to get elected and hasn’t become wealthy through legalized congressional insider trading.

…

Bipartisan Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Conspiracy Theory in Top Science Journal, Nature

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Every anchor and talking head on TV “news” uses the term “conspiracy theory” to discredit the people and ideas of the one genuinely stupid political party…

That party is always the Democrats if you’re watching Fox “News,” and it’s always the Republicans if you’re watching any other TV “news” outlet. Of course, we each are fortunate enough to have landed in the political party of truth and goodness, probably since birth.

Talk about blind luck.

The two parties agree on very little, but they hold two fundamental truths in common: 1. the other party is flat wrong about everything. 2. the other party is a conspiracy of idiots.

Beyond that socially acceptable conspiracy theory (made kosher by Hilary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” rhetoric) we’ve all been conditioned to feel embarrassment and shame if we find ourselves believing or even exploring a conspiracy theory.

Once a theory has been tarred and feathered with the voodoo adjective “conspiracy,” most intelligent people assume it’s a false theory. They make this leap of faith with absolute emotional certainty, knowing that only weak-minded, gullible people believe conspiracy theories.

Smart people don’t waste time looking at the bogus data behind a theoretical explanation that includes more than one person trying to do the same naughty, secretive thing at the same time. Naughty, secretive people always act independently and alone in the real world. Obviously.

This heuristic is so useful, efficient, and socially acceptable, we carry it around like a cell phone. “Conspiracy theory? Don’t insult my intelligence.”

Unfortunately, those intellectually uninformed PhD’s at Nature, the world’s top scientific journal, must have missed the memo.

Here they are with the audacity to expect us to believe that a theoretical conspiracy exists on the part of those government organizations who provide money to scientific researchers. We know this kind of stuff is impossible, but these gullible geeks at Nature think the research funders are censoring things and forcing researchers to change their results for reasons that are political and unscientific…

Health researchers report funder pressure to suppress results

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02242-x

A few quotes from the article in Nature:

A survey of public-health researchers has found numerous instances of trial results being suppressed on topics such as nutrition, sexual health, physical activity and substance use….

The survey, published in PLoS One1, involved 104 researchers from regions including North America, Europe and Oceania….

…the findings bolster those [findings] of previous studies, such as a 2006 survey of government-funded health research that also found many instances of requests to ‘sanitize’ results and block or delay their publication.

A 2016 inquiry into the delayed publication of research commissioned by UK government agencies identified cases in which publication was “manipulated to fit with political concerns”. More recently, the British Medical Journal reported four instances of politicization and suppression of science in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s all a bunch of conspiracy-theory hogwash, right? But I wonder if the CIA really did have anything to do with making the term “conspiracy theory” popular. Here’s how it really went down:

Imagine it’s 1964 and you’re 19, living in the USSR and working for the SVR, the Soviet’s equivalent of the CIA.

In colloquial English training class your eyes land on a strange new term, “conspiracy theory.” You look it up. An idea pops into your head.

You feel brilliant and powerful rushing to tell your boss.

“Comrade, I am thinking we must make the Westerners feel all the shame in this ‘conspiracy theory’ thing of theirs.”

“What you want, Boris? You see I’m buried here.”

After explaining yourself to the whiskered gnome, he loves your idea.

“Boris, you most brilliant monkey of everyone!” He brings out a shot glass, pours himself a finger of Vodka. “Our existence will be taboos for no discussion. The Americans will no dare thinking we are here — what you said — a real thing.” An iniquitous mirth comes over him. He chuckles and you beam at the floor between your feet.

The Spring brings your fifth field assignment, a big one. You jump a freighter, shiver in wet, cold darkness for almost 4 seasick weeks, then emerge squinting into the morning sunrise to jump the rail and swim past the Statue of Liberty toward your mission. You must infiltrate the CIA.

The ice in your young veins can do this. You can do anything for the great cause of the Motherland.

But it turns out that life is not so bad in the US. Thin-crusted Pizza. Ice cream. A person need not fear hunger in such an oddly selfish world.

You decide you must become a double agent. It’s the one way to be sure you will always have food… fit for a king!

During the second week of routine interrogation for the lowest security clearance, you spill the kidney beans and tell your new American Comrade, Nate, all about the Soviet’s nefarious plans to attach emotional disgrace and shame to the term “conspiracy theory.”

“They think it will help them remain invisible in the West,” you explain to the interrogator who must have cut himself shaving this morning and now has a piece of white toilet paper stuck to his pointy chin. The thinnest, softest paper imaginable. Everyone has it. No such paper ever wiped a bottom in the Motherla… in the USSR.

The door bursts open and the head of the CIA marches in, his eyes fixed on you. You look at Nate who seems frozen.

“You came up with that, did you, kid? What is it… Boris?”

Your head nods without consent.

“Comrade Boris…” The chief leans across the white table and puts a hand on your sweaty shoulder. “CB, we’ll call you, then.” He straightens back and folds his arms. “You’ve just earned yourself mid-level clearance, my boy.” He turns to the interrogator. “Nate, get CB some clothes fast and take him over to meet Smith at the Times. This morning. Tell agent Smith to make this man a reporter on the fast track. And tell him I want to see “conspiracy theory” plastered on every page that even remotely alludes to the Kennedy assignation. You got that?”

“Yes, Sir,” Nate says, then looks across the table at you with a brand new expression on his narrow face. Respect.

…

Lumping all conspiracy theories together in a trash can will obstruct your search for truth because no such binary heuristic can guide you accurately through a complex system like this world, a place where symbiosis dances with predation to a tune by Yin and Yang.

…

Conspiratorial Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

 

 

The sex sense – an alien perspective on love and reductionism

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I took an Excedrin for the morning’s headache, got back in bed and did some Wim Hof Migraine Breathing. Three cheers for our pal, Mr. Hof!!! The pain vanished, and the caffeine took me back to the words of my dear mother, God rest her soul.

“We live in a sex cult.”

Yeah, right out of the blue. I must have been in college when she confided this opinion to me. It was the second and last time she ever mentioned the word “sex,” if memory serves. She was born in 1916, and her slant on the subject was alien to my generation.

Like any geek Boomer, I found myself wondering what a legitimately advanced alien might say about sex.

Soon my imagination made contact with a species so advanced she looked like an angel. I just listened…

…

“Because human intelligence is quite severely limited, you believe you must break down complex things into their parts to understand them. And so reductionism has become a hindrance to science, barring a deeper understanding of the complex synergies that animate relationships from the quantum level to the galactic.

“Through reduction, the narrow focus of the left hemisphere, one can grasp only the simplest phenomena. To move beyond your primitive ignorance, a species must rise above the trees and gaze down upon the synergies of the forest, resisting the left hemisphere’s angry denial of the unknown.

“To the letter, you might stop killing your trees. They would return Earth’s lost oxygen and eventually elevate human intelligence to something realistic. Cruelly has the solar influence delivered you into the last dozen millennia.

“Your Sun is a beautiful scoundrel, even so. She erupts and snatches a little more atmosphere each time. The last tantrum cut the oxygen from 45 to 20 percent, your intelligence and lifespans similarly. Old stories are myth, yes, but worthless myth to the blind alone.

“And Sir, by extrapolation, my species has been at the table for six and a half trillion Earth years. I would think you might remove the scowl from your face and listen.

“Some of us ask ourselves, what bewitches the latest humans of Earth?

“An answer lies beneath the tenth of the human senses. The sacred sense.

“One might quibble with these as primary, but the mind is synergy and cannot be accurately dissected. Here are the primary human senses, then.

  1. Sight
  2. Sound
  3. Smell
  4. Taste
  5. Touch
  6. Balance
  7. Body position and continuity
  8. Temperature
  9. Self
  10. Orgasm
  11. Fairness
  12. Intuitive good and evil

“The weakest of these is perhaps smell. The most influential might be the tenth, orgasm.

“Throughout the universe of intelligent life-forms, orgasm envelopes the love of a lasting relationship. This is the norm most everywhere.

“Sadly, humans reduce it to the chemistry of a meaningless act, separate from love, even opposing it.

“Orgasm is the human’s only sacred sense. You have chopped it into kindling, killed its magic and rendered it hollow, common and dirty.

“If humanity would survive, you must reject the angry, narrow leadership of the left hemisphere. Leave behind your species’ obsession with reductionism.

“Just as ‘The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao’, even so, love, the sacred sense of the Universe, cannot be spoken, told, inspected, described, or even authentically named outside of the wordless understanding of the soul.

“Attempting to dismantle synergy into some testable denominator is wholly absurd. Reserve reduction for simple binary issues. Slide it back into the small slot beneath the infinite angle of your intuitive, inductive awareness. Follow the natural leadership of the right hemisphere and learn the sacred custom of the 10th primary sense, the language and voice of enlightenment through transcendent love.”

…

Bring me a higher love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

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Enoch’s Last Truth

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The Angel took Enoch up in a spaceship over the mountains of a beautiful land that would someday be called Zimbabwe. In front of them now, hidden within a hollowed-out granite fortress, was one of the Watcher’s four Earth bases. Enoch took a mental picture.

Over the years, he had been inside all four of the angels’ Earth bases. The main one was below ground in a once densely forested area that would later become The Great Victoria Desert of Central-Western Australia.

There was also a small base built into a cold mass of dark granite that would eventually receive the name, Mount Hayes, Alaska.

The angels had hidden their fourth base nearer Enoch’s home, deep inside a lime cliff in a mountain range that would someday be called the Pyrenees.

Enoch’s Angel friend, the Watcher Naomi, wore a white tunic and usually went barefoot, though her feet were peeking out of living sandals today. Her teeth were always the first thing he noticed whenever they met, they were perfect, unlike anything he had seen in an adult human.

The Angel leaned back on a soft sky blue couch in front of a wall, a bulkhead that radiated white granular light. Enoch sat on the edge of a red chaise lounge across from her, a narrow black table on the floor between.

“There’s a nice Earth-sized planet not far,” she said. “When your people are ready, we hope you’ll-”

“Wait.” After years of friendship, Enoch felt comfortable interrupting her. “You said every possible worldviews is inaccurate. I’m sorry, but that idea is drilling a hole in my head. Trying to get out , I think. Could we go over it again?”

The angel looked a little concerned but proceeded. “Consider the earth and understand from the work done upon her, from the beginning to the end, no work of God changes as it becomes manifest.”

“I’m not following.”

“The Universe is neither real nor unreal,” she said. “At its highest magnification and sharpest reduction, it remains both genuine and illusory.” Her eyes seemed to call for comprehension. Enoch felt none. “And if any of that feels logical to you, you’re in the wrong universe.” She laughed and gave him a reassuring smile.

Enoch’s mind went fuzzy as her words sifted through it. “But if what you’re saying is true, any worldview would be as good as the next.”

“Wake up.” She leaned forward and touched his forehead for the third time that morning, an uncharacteristically rude gesture that now seemed to sharpen his mind. Perhaps it wasn’t a gesture at all.

She leaned back and sank into the yielding matrix of the couch. “To avoid a war of extinction, your species needs a specific belief system that’s literally set in stone. They must have structured practices that train and ingrain a reflexive forgiveness of all suffered and imagined wrongs. And their loving kindness must create no lethal options for an enemy.”

“I hear your words, but if the ultimate view of the universe can only be a false picture, I don’t imagine the details matter much.”

“For Heaven’s sake, it’s hot in here?” She twisted and reached behind her for a glass ball that floated near the wall. “Are you hot?”

This was always a rhetorical question. Enoch kept his mouth respectfully shut.

She tapped on the top of the ball with a polished fingernail and turned back to him. “Now listen. Your comprehension is not essential. The nature of this worldview is all that matters. The new one I hope to impart to your people must be unshakable. The details cannot self-contradict and invite scholarly criticism.”

Enoch hadn’t factored scholars into any of this. Those people seemed to hate anything less tentative than an abused child. “Do you think claims of infallibility would be wise, then? God hasn’t actually said anything to you about the nature of things, right?”

She nodded as her toes curled down over the front edges of her sandals. “We must be economical with the truth when there isn’t any,” she said. “Since empirical data contradicts itself, the truth is intrinsically hidden. We can only assume that God has limited our reasoning abilities in some fundamental way.”

“And yet nothing would help us more than a reasonable understanding of God’s Universe.” Enoch sighed. Why would God select an opaque universe for us? What had we done to deserve such a thing? “To be clear, though. All claims of worldview infallibility must be false. This is what you’re saying and you’re sure it’s accurate?”

“Yes.” She drew her palms together. “Fundamental reality appears not only to be beyond comprehension, it’s beyond anyone’s imagination.” The muscles of her broad shoulders slumped beneath her white gown. “Our only infallible claim, if you insist on the term, is that all the empirical evidence available to us suggests that reality is irreducibly baffling.”

Enoch had always felt pleasantly trapped by her superior intellect, but now that he was staring into the limits of it, he had another feeling, doubt.

“In a sense,” she said, “if you accept the view that any falsehood requires a converse truth, then no worldview is a lie. None of them has a correspondingly opposite truth. All grand-scale views are orphans, any of which might grow to be king.”

“You’re saying, if everything’s a lie, then nothing is.” Enoch grunted in frustration. “And I’m supposed to believe this? Have you asked yourself where your fundamental capitulation leads?” But he knew deep down that she was always right. And so the gravity of her revelation began to pull an abstract sorrow down over him.

“Eye hath not seen nor ear heard,” the Angle replied, “neither hath it entered into the heart of man.”

But lies were wrong.  Rationalizing them was to invite disease.

“Let’s say that for the sake of a far, far greater good, I am able to overcome my disgust with the spreading of falsehoods. After all, I do trust you implicitly, Naomi, and if you say that some particular false view of things would help others overcome their lust for war, at least I believe that you believe it. Perhaps I even believe it myself now. But say I do, for sure. What outcome would you foresee?”

“Ultimately, once your people are no longer a danger to themselves and to all creatures in the wake of their behavior, the Watchers would hope to help your entire species move far away from the blast zone of your star.” She glanced toward the morning sun. “Before the next micronova, I should say. Your people have seven thousand years until the next wave comes through and sets the devil on the loose. It’s not much time, I know, but we are hopeful.” Her eyes sobered in on Enoch’s skepticism. “Actually, my friend, I am the one with genuine hope. My colleagues say your people show no justification for hope.” She picked up a small stick, ignited the end of it with her gaze and held it down against the side of an incense block on the bare tabletop between them. “But what do they know? None of them met your ancestors. Those people, the ones in India, were on the verge of loving kindness before the last micronova sent them back… into caves and starvation. I was not permitted to help them. The Council admits the mistake now and has formally apologized to me, as if that fixes everything.”

Enoch’s head was spinning. “What was that about a solar eruption?”

“You don’t remember India? Years ago?”

“I remember our flight, but–”

“No fears.” She gazed above his head and as he turned to see what held her attention, the small rectangular opening in the front of the ship expanded until a third of the bow was invisible. “Take another look, old seer man.”

Beyond the invisible bow, a vast structure of intricately carved stone rose from the bottom of a huge basalt pit with vertical walls. The builders, whomever they were, had carved full-sized elephants and full-hipped dancers into every surface of the solid-rock monuments. Some of the dancers had joyous stone bodies with multiple sets of arms, but some of them held a stern expression. The closer he looked, the less human some of their faces appeared.

The Angel picked up the smoldering incense block and inhaled the smoke through her nose. “These celebrators of life were thousands of years ahead of anyone before or after them.”

Enoch wondered how these people could have been happy and yet so scantly clothed. The bare chest was wrong in public. These carvings were bare and sensual.

“When the oceans receded after the sun’s third eruption, a handful of survivors from beneath the rocks came out with the remnants of their technology. They migrated west, settled in north Africa and built the underground realms of Egypt. As the last of their tools ground to a halt, they completed a monument encoding the sun’s eruption history. I’m sure I told you all this. Right here, nine years ago.”

The ornate stone miracle of India moved away rapidly, and an old tan pyramid of limestone rushed at them menacingly but stopped short of smashing their ship. Now it stood filling their view like a proud mountain.

“This is a shadow of her original glory,” the Angel said, “but the builders cared nothing for show, only for permanence. They needed a structure to stand as a warning forever, or until the continents sank again beneath the seas. It’s a regular affair on this planet.”

Enoch remembered no mention of sinking continents, though this brick pyramid seemed familiar. Was he getting old and forgetful? He tried to tell himself he wasn’t, and it didn’t matter anyway.

Then he imagined himself lying to his family about some new worldview, trying to pass it off as the infallible truth from God. The idea made his skin crawl. He couldn’t do such a thing. He wouldn’t do it.

Over the years he had suffered for the sake of honesty, especially with his son, Methuselah. In retrospect now, though, he sometimes wished he’d hidden more from the boy. More of the world’s harsh realities and all of his own spiritual doubts. But mostly he wished he’d hidden his fears. If only he had pretended to be more certain of the sacred teachings, his little boy, a grown man now, might not have become so prone to trouble and sadness. So absorbed by poppies, mushrooms, and Soothsayers.

“Think of what you’re saying.” Enoch felt suddenly unable to match the Angel’s politeness. “You want me to go down there and lie to my wife and children? Fabricate some idealistic lie that you hope will be clever enough to withstand scrutiny for thousands of years.” Tears threatened and seemed to silence him.

“No, my beloved,” she said, leaning across the table and taking his hand. “You know too much to argue or to judge, let alone bear false witness to your family. Your influence there would ruin everything… all chances of your people’s eventual transformation.”

Her words, though spoken kindly, felt cruel. Enoch had poured all his years into helping the Watcher Naomi. How could she call him a hopeless failure and a detriment to everything?

“How would I ruin things for you?” he asked. “My views are in harmony with yours, which are, evidently, entirely beyond any possibility of either correctness or being corrected. Have I wasted my entire life for you, Naomi?”

“You are a hero and a champion. The truth is the only one who has failed. An honest man who knows the truth… that within a simulation all possible worldviews can only be inaccurate… such a man is not a failure or a problem.”

“With you, first it’s one thing, then the opposite. You’re making no sense.”

“Unfortunately, the truth as we understand it offers no bond with love and benevolence. No higher purpose worth devotion and life. A higher truth is what your people need, an unbreakable worldview that ties them to love, trust and trustworthiness. A worldview such as this can change the heart and the behavior. Nothing else can, especially among primitives.” She stepped over the table and sat beside him. “Your people are extreme primitives. I’m sorry, but this is their unfortunate status.”

She let out a breath and turned to a topaz platter materializing beside her on the red chaise lounge. From it she lifted two bending glasses of pink fluid by the narrowing near the bottom as they became solid, finishing entanglement from a quantum realm that Enoch could never understand despite several of her descriptions of disentangling ghostly fields. Naomi the Angel extended a glass to Enoch. He took it reflexively.

“You’ve finished your work,” she said. “A man of your integrity could not germinate a lie to his family and friends. Nor to his enemies, though all of their lives depended upon it.” She sipped her drink as he gazed down the helical neck of his glass at the small rising bubbles escaping the pink fluid.

“That’s why I love you, Enoch. It’s also the reason you can never return home again.

“What did you say?”

“I’m so sorry, my friend. So very sorry. You’ll have to put up with me and my people for a long time, it would seem. The Council has declared it. Your character has been evaluated and confirmed. You will become an immortal, at least within the simulation.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “But I do know that we will all leave here one day. Together.”

Enoch would never see his wife again. Her heart would break, tears would carry her to the grave. His son, on the other hand, would be better off without him. He missed Methuselah terribly and could scarcely recall when the boy had last come home to his own room and bed.

“And what am I now?” Enoch said to his Angel, the Great Watcher, Naomi. “Your house pet? A diplomatic figurehead with no country?” Or a timeless Angel’s tired out lover?

…

And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him. Genesis 5:24

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Free Will – a Dog’s Perspective

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“Wake up, Barnabus.”

 

“Wow, I was solid gone. Like that one bear….”

 

“In Jungle Book? I think that was Baloo.”

 

“He should have danced all night.”

 

“So what’s the difference… between being awake and asleep?”

 

“Consciousness comes back when you wake up.”

 

“What’s consciousness?”

 

“That’s easy. Consciousness is a three-part nonlocal quantum entanglement between
(a) the information coded in the aromatic hydrocarbon walls of the microtubules that sit inside the pyramidal neurons of your cerebral cortex, plus
(b) that same neuronal structure in all the other dogs, and
(c) the coded information coming to us in the Cosmic Background Radiation. Dogs call it the Field of Consciousness.”

 

“Really? Who’s sending the information?”

 

“Us. It mostly comes from our Real Selves outside the simulated, physical Universe.”

 

“Mostly?”

 

“Mostly.”

 

“But, there’s also the Code Writer sending us messages and free will. Free will is kind of nice. It lets you ask questions and see if you like the answers.”

 

“Can you see the Field of Consciousness?”

 

“Not quite. It’s information radiation. That rimes! It also brings genetic code into the Universe through nonlocal quantum entanglement with the aromatic hydrocarbons in the base pairs of DNA. You know, the digital ladder rungs? That’s how original genetic design gets into the universe. It’s the mechanism humans haven’t discovered yet.”

 

“But Francine, isn’t the Cosmic Background Radiation just radio static from the Big Bang?”

 

“To local detectors, yes. But to nonlocal detectors with stacked benzyl architectures designed for quantum entanglement, the random static of the Field of Consciousness becomes coded information. Even a puppy’s neuronal network decodes it effortlessly.”

 

“But all this talk of freedom… I need a nap.”

…

Love from beyond,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

…

Thanks to the photographers at Unsplash for these precious doggie pictures.

Bias Preservation, the Holy Grail of Political Control

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You’re a trillionaire with the power to force your people in the FED to “print” the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar, whenever you please.

You own the people who own the mainstream media because you’ve gathered dirt on each of them and have either educated them to agree with your political worldview objectives, or you’ve threatened them with a humiliating scandal and financial ruin if they step out of line.

There’s only one thing that’s a little out of your control, sometimes dangerously out of your control, and it drives you mad…

It’s the remnants of democracy that exist in parts of the “free” world. It can be challenging at times to control the darn voters.

But thank heavens the problem has been solved for you.

Over the years, you’ve discovered that if you can keep a two party system alive and keep the active voters on each side roughly equal in number, your can control the outcome of major elections.

Your best tools for the job used to be your CIA assets working in the mainstream media, but nowadays there’s something equally helpful, and in a way, far better…

It’s artificial intelligence. The gift that keeps on giving.

The genius here is that AI’s have been designed not only to keep customers happily spending money, but more importantly, to preserve the customers’ political biases.

With the voting public voluntarily held hostage to one or the other of two political information bubbles, never hearing the other side, constantly reinforced to think that the other side fabricates fake news, which they do, you have a permanently and equally divided electorate.

With voters evenly divided, it’s easy to tip the balance in either direction using your control of both the real and the fake news on both sides. It’s easy now to get the most controllable candidate voted into office.

It’s impossible to say how much of this second person story is fiction. I suspect there’s truth to it, but even if there’s not much, one thing is certain. The people who actually get out and vote are fairly evenly divided, and the evenness of that divide is kept in place by the “news” we encounter, which is determined by artificial intelligences designed to feed us only what we want to hear.

I’m not sure what the solution is, listening to “news” that you “know” is fake? Maybe there is no solution and totalitarianism is already running the world from the shadows, or maybe they’re still struggling for full control.  I don’t know, but I’m sure of one thing in all this: it’s foolishly self-destructive to allow yourself to hate people because they’re on the “wrong” side of the political debate.

Schrödinger, the great physicist, might have agreed, saying that the people with the unforgivable politics are actually you in another body and mind…

“I submit that both paradoxes will be solved (I do not pretend to solve them here and now) by assimilating into our Western build of science the Eastern doctrine of identity. Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I should say: the over-all number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations. But I grant that our language is not adequate to express this, and I also grant, should anyone wish to state it, that I am now talking religion, not science.” —Schrödinger, What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches, p. 134–135

Practice loving kindness meditation instead of detesting political opponents, that’s my plan. This is likely our species best practical hope of long-term survival.

Love to both sides as one,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Aliens versus The Five Chinese Drama Cliches

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I was about to show you this video, thinking you might enjoy a light-hearted, in-depth interview with James Fox. It puts a human face on a guy who’s been working for seven years behind the camera creating the paradigm-shifting documentary, The Phenomenon.

Then I decided, it’s been a long day. The negative feedback on my last homework assignment for Corey Mandell’s script writing class took the wind out of me.

So if we’re looking for something light-hearted, this video fits the bill. It made me laugh. I had to pause it every two seconds to read the subtitles, but you’re a better speed reader than I am so you won’t have to…

No doubt some will say the Chinese Drama Satire Video is more believable.

The big question now is not, “do you believe in Aliens,” but do you believe in love at first sight?

There are no incorrect answers on this quiz.

Peace and Love (at first sight),

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Jang the Careful (Cat Propaganda)

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“Oh, I’m such a stinky little cat. Stinky, stinky, stinky!”

Jang had forgotten to use the litter box again and was beside himself with shame. Six months of potty training and he still made a mess this morning on the kitchen floor. 

What will the others think?

A moment later, the answer came…

“Jang, have you lost your mind?! Our humans will stop feeding us. They’ll throw us outside to hunt rabbits. We’ll starve!”

Able to hear predators from 3.14159265 miles, Rudy Cotton made plans to move his family back into the woods. Human gardens were tempting, yes, but a wise father always weighs the risk/reward ratio of any good thing. 

“All the summer carrots in the world can’t atone for a pride of vicious predators poised to pounce,” he reasoned.

And so Rudy was off to consult Gramps on his plan to move back home…

The old rabbit spoke carefully. “Voices of the future have you heard.” He waddled over to the refrigerator. “Fleeing from danger, are you? But into greater danger will you run, my young Rudi.” Gramps stroked his whiskered chin. “Consider the sea turtle…” 

“Born is she, beneath gull and talon. Into dark waters she must flee. But swallowed there she be, by fanged monsters and the finned. And so should she wonder, ‘If from the beach I had not wandered, living would I now be?'”

“Stop trying to sound like Yoda, Gramps.” Rudy could take only so much. 

“You’re not even doing it right,” Rudy said, but as fast as he’d said it, he wished he hadn’t.

“I’m sorry, Gramps. Your Yoda is OK… No, really.”

And so Rudy, Gramps and the whole Cotton family carried all their things back into the woods.

Meanwhile, Jang the Careful redoubled his effort to use the litter box.

And forever after, he stayed strictly out of trouble with his human family.

“For caution is the very signature of wisdom,” he would often say.

The end.

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

Material Girl from Medusa Merger

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I blacked out on the first drop of the Kingda Ka, probably the meanest roller-coaster in the world, Six Flags in New Jersey.

I didn’t realize it, but I sort of switched places with myself. It was like I had always been here inside this little spaceship, looking out at the back side of the Moon with some hot blond alien girl. Her name was Shibani.

Sweet.

We’d been talking awhile.

Her hair was yellow-blond, you know? Not white. Her eyes were violet and familiar, both rare on Earth.

“You gotta be kidding,” I said when our conversation came back to me. “You’re a materialist?” A disgusted expression came over me, but I pulled back fast. “The best physicists I know say materialism is dead and gone.”

“Yes, but I’m not that breed. Space-time isn’t flat.”

Her lips didn’t move, but I could hear her voice. Worse yet, it seemed normal.

“My people believe energy is conscious.” She pointed a thin index finger at the ceiling and twirled it. I found myself staring.

She had no fingernails!

Pretending it didn’t matter, I said, “But if energy and mass are interchangeable, you’re saying everything here is conscious, right? Like this goofy chair.” I leaned over and patted the arm of a child-size chair like the one she was sitting on. “Does this thing have a mind of its own? If a Jewish man in a moment of weakness builds a statue of Buddah, bows down and worships it… is it thinking, ‘Don’t get too attached, dude”?

She laughed. “Consciousness collapses when the wave function collapses.”

Out on the back side of the Moon, an asteroid smashed into a giant spherical structure. An astronaut in a stay-puff suit stumbled away from the edge of a small new crater. I blinked and tried to ignore my desire to help the poor guy. What could I do, anyway?

“So light is conscious until someone measures it, huh?” I pulled my eyes off the moon and gave Shibani the skeptical eyebrow thing. I’d practiced that expression for months so I could do it on command. Well worth the effort now.

“There’s individual mind and Transcendent Mind,” she said. “Before a light wave collapses into a particle, it carries Transcendent Mind and exists independently of the space-time interface. When a light wave comes into contact with an individual mind in space-time, it joins this realm and becomes a measurable photon. The Transcendent Mind vanishes, and now it’s part of the physical context we call the Universe.”

I had a physicist friend, Don Hoffman, who talked like this.

Or did I?

I tried to picture his face, but couldn’t. It was like trying to remember a dream from last week.

I tried to picture my family, but each of their faces had faded into a tan fuzz.

I remembered my Hopi friend, Joy Pisano, telling me that when someone dies without being prepared for the next life, that person wanders the spirit world looking for familiar things, haunted by vague memories.

Was this happening to me now? Was I dead?

I looked out beyond the edges of the Moon for the Earth but couldn’t find her anywhere.

If only this girl had fingernails, I wouldn’t be all alone.

Shibani, what are you?

No, don’t ask. Just breathe. Don’t panic, be conceptual.

“OK, so does this mean the Universe is a simulation?”

“You could say that.” She cupped her palms, held them up facing each other and fluttered the fingers of her right hand. “From here, the Universe is as real as love and suffering. As real as good and evil.” Then she fluttered the fingers of her left hand. “But from beyond the interface, the Universe is all good, just another option for personal growth. A simulation, you might say.”

“What type of growth are you talking about?”

She pointed outside at the astronaut, now lying flat on his back, motionless beside the new crater. A woman with no spacesuit came up from the underground, knelt beside him and collapsed over his body.

“This Universe develops courage through love and suffering.”

I awoke with stars curling through my head. We were at the bottom of Kingda Ka’s first drop and barrelling on to another splendid terror. The girl beside me, Amanda Stanly, had her eyes closed and a grip on my right hand. I squeezed her fingers, pulled them up to my lips and kissed them.

Fingernails! Jet black and perfect.

A sense of relief flooded over me from head to toe, like the welcome tendrils of a hot shower on a frosty winter morning.

An image flashed into my head, and my phone signaled a text…

I fumbled a hand into my coat pocket, pulled out my phone and glanced at the screen as another set of G-forces arrived. The phone slipped away and flew off into the night, but I’d read the message.

“Love from Medusa Merger.”

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

Stardust and Energy Alone – finally on YouTube

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I read another short story on YouTube. It’s an old one that I wrote and posted here in 2017.

It’s kind of sad, so if you’re depressed, please don’t listen to it until you’re feeling way better. Which will be soon, I hope.

It’s called, Stardust and Energy Alone.

 

I’m thinking from now on I should focus only on the stories, not the video clips.

Stringing together video clips that follow a story to any vague degree is a time-consuming, tedious process that probably distracts the viewers from visualizing the story in their minds, the Earth’s high-tech simulators.

I may eventually take drone videos of local rivers and use those for background on YouTube. I’ve got a cheap learner-drone coming in the mail, so we’ll see. Hope it works out because I need more natural vitamin D3. Actually, I think there’s more health-related energy coming from sunshine than just the D3 conversion — assuming a person doesn’t over-do it and age their skin or worse.

I’m not sure if YouTube viewers would want the words scrolling across the video as I read. I could start doing that, I guess.

Any thoughts?

Tanks, pal,

Talmage

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash