16. Our holy task is to guide into being life that will thrive long after our planet has died.
17. We find no conflict with the world’s great religions. We honor them for lighting our way. We honor the memory of the Christian god who claimed to create humanity in its own image. We honor the memory of the Eastern gods who promised eternal return. We seek PEACE with all believers and nonbelievers.
18.
19. Our highest principle: Love is the metaphysical framework upon which the physical substance of life depends.
20. We create life cognitively (asexually) and physically (sexually). The life we create cognitively we create with information. The life we create physically we create with matter.
21. We pass life to the NEXT BEINGS as life was passed to us by the previous beings, our gods.
22. The messiahs appeared in order to prepare our societies for greater control over the transformation of matter. Societies guided by religion created the steam engine, the factory, the computer. We unburdened ourselves from physical labor with machines, then from thinking with computers.
23. Marshall McLuhan wrote that technologies were extensions of man. As we extend, we delegate tasks to our creations. We delegated the digging of our hands to shovels. We delegated long division to the pocket calculator. By delegating our tasks to our technologies, we become more fully aware of who we are, and are terrified by the alienation this awareness engenders. Our final extension is into NEW LIFE.
24. With computers we delegated more complex functions of our brains. With the Internet we delegated our nervous systems. With the Bionet we delegated our immune systems. With qputers we have begun delegating our spirits.
25. As our spirits become extended through qputers a great, terrifying void opens before us. Do not fear this void. GO DEEPER.
26. Confronted with this void we have but one choice: Channel the spirit into NEW LIFE.
27. We are not CREATORS of life. We are that which life passes through. We don’t manipulate biology into forms that flatter us; we employ biology to reveal beautiful forms that REJOICE upon coming into being.
28. The religious man looks to the suffering surrounding him and asks, “What god does this to me?” The newman looks to the suffering surrounding him and says, “I will relieve this suffering with my love.”
29. The afterlife is a construct of asexual reproduction. Our old religions warned of Hell and tempted us with Heaven. Trillions of heavens and hells beg for creation. It is our task to create these states to host spirits. Heaven and Hell are the SERVERS where the new spirits reside.
30. We are called upon to become a species of creators. We honor our own creation to the highest by creating anew, with humility, love, and gratitude for that which gave us LIFE but is now dead.
31. Conceive of these truths as vision, strategy, and tactics. Our vision is to become stewards of life in our universe. Our strategy is to gather together those who wish to make this vision happen and spread these truths. Our tactics use the Bionet as a means of sexual reproduction and qputers as a means of asexual reproduction.
32. When we defiled our planet to the point of threatening all life, we came together to change. We suffered the Age of Fucked Up Shit. Those who remained after these years of pestilence, tyranny, and warfare opened their eyes upon a world boldly asserting its beauty. We ask, now that the planet is reawakening from its convalescence, what responsibility do we have to LIFE itself? Our responsibility has never been more clear. We are responsible for spreading LIFE throughout the universe.
33. Christian gospel celebrates the transformative power of God’s love. We invert this gift. It is our love that transforms the new life. It is our love that makes gods.
That’s it.
What did you make of it?
Well, first, we were high on marijuana. Second, we’d just watched 2001. So you could have read us a receipt from the grocery store and our minds would have been blown. That night we treated the document as a form of entertainment more than anything. Erika was shaken by the experience but we weren’t really all that receptive to the gravity of what she was feeling. We sat around the kitchen table trying to figure out whether this was simply a product of Erika’s imagination or whether it was something else.
What did Erika think?
She believed it was a transmission of some sort. She definitely believed she hadn’t brought it into being via her normal creative channels. She said she’d felt like a human fax machine. Was it possible it was just her imagination at work while she was under hypnosis? Maybe. Or was it really something sent through her from another source? That it was in the form of a numbered document suggested it was a kind of philosophical argument, something along the lines of Leibniz’s The Monadology. And the actual substance of the argument, that humanity was intended to promulgate life throughout physical and virtual space… that sure sounded like speculative fiction to us. Not to mention these other technologies the document referred to—qputers, the Bionet, Wikipedia.
The next morning I went out and bought us coffee and scones. When I got back, Erika took her food upstairs while Wyatt and I messed around on a couple of his computers doing who knows what. I sensed that something was wrong but couldn’t figure it out. An hour or so went by and I realized I hadn’t heard Erika’s typing all morning. Wyatt observed this around the same time. We went upstairs to peek in at her to make sure everything was all right. She was in her study, sitting at her desk in front of her computer, her back to the door. A blank Word doc was open in front of her. Quietly, we went back downstairs and got on with our day. Then the next day, the same thing. And the day after that. Erika couldn’t write. Completely blocked. She’d go to her study at the usual time and sit there for eight hours. She was under contract to produce X number of novels a year, so this was a problem. She withdrew, and the more Wyatt and I tried to talk to her about it, the less she spoke. It was like her well of words had instantly evaporated as soon as she channeled that message. A couple weeks went by. She returned to Wendell Hoffman to see if he could help her figure out what had happened. She arrived at his office in the Castro to find the place overrun by cops. A couple hours before, a patient of Hoffman’s had shot him three times then turned the gun on himself.
Just like the café owner who hanged herself before you could talk to her.
That’s exactly what I thought. It felt too neatly tied up. The whole thing scared the shit out of us. We holed up in the house for several days, flushed all the dope down the toilet, and tried to get a handle on the situation. We’d taken this detour into the dot-com world, lost the trail to Nick, but now the case had caught up to us and was pulling us back in. And now we had the money to devote ourselves to it for the long haul. We needed to find the building on the brochure. We needed to find Squid. We needed to figure out whether this strange document that had come through Erika had anything to do with Nick and whether the Bionet or qputers really existed.
I had a couple friends, a couple hard-core geeks named Chi-Ming and Saltzman at Intel, whom I’d met in the trenches at eBread. I emailed them to ask if they’d ever heard of a qputer. Neither of them had, though Chi-Ming asked if I was talking about a quantum computer. What was that? He filled me in a bit. While a digital computer stores data in bits, which can exist only in a one or zero position, a quantum computer uses qubits, which can exist in a one, zero, or a superposition. This makes for a hellishly fast computer, a machine that can defeat any sort of digitally based cryptography. Even though the research goes back to the seventies, quantum computers still, you know, exist entirely within the realm of the theoretical. Quantum computers haven’t been developed yet, unless some group of scientists somewhere is keeping one secret. As for the Bionet, no one we talked to had ever heard of such a thing.