The ghost and the machine
A Short Story by Jon Rappoport | nomorefakenews.com
Image by Anthony Freda | anthonyfreda.com
Instantly, 90 million invisible electromagnetic arches sprang up out of nowhere across America.
The arches spanned highways and streets and roads; airports, train and bus stations; government buildings; office skyscrapers, malls, plazas; military bases and police stations; houses, apartment buildings, hospitals; national border crossings.
These arches hummed quietly with energies that “represented” three central ideas. The energies were translations of those ideas:
GIVE EVERYTHING TO EVERYBODY ALL THE TIME;
OBEY THE GOVERNMENT;
BE HAPPY.
Through an ingenious series of algorithms Dr. X and his team developed, every human who passed under the arches was read and probed, to determine whether he/she resonated with those three fundamental precepts.
Every human was subsequently labeled with AGREE or DISAGREE, as a final judgment.
The DISAGREE persons—their names and personal information—were instantly registered at an NSA facility in the desert outside Las Vegas.
Surveillance on them would be stepped up. In many cases, they would subjected to forms of electronic harassment.
For the first month of the new program, Dr. X and his people were jubilant about the results.
Everything was working smoothly.
Then, on the 41st day, something happened. A man walking along a road outside Santa Barbara, California, passed under an arch and …the DARPA sensors recorded nothing.
They didn’t record AGREE or DISAGREE.
Impossible, but true.
“How can that be?” Dr. X said to his team. “It’s one or the other.”
Three days later, a preliminary assessment of the man came back to him:
“This person appears to exceed all the parameters of our system. He’s essentially a ghost. He operates on ‘other frequencies.’”
Dr. X pondered the implications.
“This man,” he wrote, “neither assents or dissents from the three basic precepts. He has no humanity. He’s his own kind of machine.”
The order went out, and the man was arrested in his apartment and brought to a testing lab in Bethesda, Maryland.
Dr. X oversaw multiple scans done on his brain. They revealed a number of extraordinary and unprecedented patterns.
After a few sleepless nights, Dr. X came up with a revolutionary idea. This man could become the template for a new human. An “entirely dead but alive” model.
If every person on Earth could be electronically adjusted to resemble “the ghost” in all ways, there would be no need for surveillance or harassment. The whole planet would live as docile specimens forever, under the leadership of the chosen one.
It took six years to convince the major power players to go along with the plan, but the payoff was so great, how could they refuse?
And so, on July 4, 2056, after a) the invisible arches had been extended to every corner of the world, and b) the output of the arches had been altered radically, so they would change the brain activity of every human at a deep level, to match “the ghost,” Dr. X clicked his mouse for a second momentous time.
Except that…he and his colleagues had made a grievous error.
The man walking on a road outside Santa Barbara, the ghost, the non-responding “dead man,” was not dead at all.
In the lab in Bethesda, they had tried to make him talk, but he wouldn’t utter a word. They didn’t want to coerce him, for fear that they might injure his state of mind. They wanted to keep him in a pristine state so they could study him further.
But the man was being silent because he was utterly uninterested in his captors. He wasn’t addled or ill. He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t cold. He wasn’t a criminal.
He wasn’t brainwashed. He wasn’t under some spell. He wasn’t a machine.
He was of a quality that had long been forgotten.
He was merely free and independent, going his own way, as preposterous as that might seem.
And so when Dr. X clicked his mouse for the second time, he triggered billions and billions of buried memories in billions of people.
Memories of being free.
The response to this was uneven, to be sure, but the net effect was the explosion of what later came to be called, “an era of fertile chaos.”
Life was never the same.
Control was never the same.
These two sentences are engraved on the headstone of Dr. X who, after his suicide, was buried in a field in Kansas.
***
(The ghost and the machine reprinted here with permission of the author.)
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