Chapter 4
When I woke the next morning, I noticed Amber was missing again. I glanced at the microwave digital clock again and it said it was 11:11 again. I didn’t freak out this time about Amber missing and walked calmly up to Beems to see if maybe they got done with the remodeling early. I quickly got to the front door and noticed it was very dark and empty inside and the remodeling sign was still hanging on door. As I was walking away from the entrance door a light flickered on. I then saw the robot mechanical self-standing in the middle of the lobby with Amber standing next to her. I saw the robot force Amber into a chair. The robot of myself started tying her hands up with a rope. It then began to push the chair towards the bathroom where the green glow came from the closet. I looked around outside and found a huge rock to throw at the glass window. The glass door shattered, and I walked in. I quickly ran to the bathrooms. I walked in but the robot of myself and Amber were nowhere to be found. I opened the green glowing closet door walked in the closet and closed the door. Instead of walking straight forward this time I decided to turn right the green glow got brighter and brighter as I continued to walk right. I came to another doorway and walked through hoping to find Amber soon. There was a loud systematic humming noise coming from the quantum computer in front of me. Amber and the mechanical robot was standing next to the quantum computer. The robot of myself spoke in my voice and said that it was going to upload Amber’s conciseness in this reality and put it into its robot mechanical body, so it would be able to live forever in this world. It said Satan it’s master needed to upload everybody’s consciousness in the world to conquer humanity and to destroy God Creation. Right as the robot of myself said that I somehow ended up out at the lobby again, but Amber was standing there calmly next to me ordering food. As I looked at the clock on the wall I noticed the time was 11:11AM and once again the cashier at the counter said the total was $6.66 as I looked at Amber I told her to order something else I looked down at her right hand and noticed she had the implant in her hand. She then creepily turned towards me and I noticed she was looking at me with a bionic blue mechanical eye and laughed. I screamed and noticed the digital advertisement started to look wavy again. I ran into the bathroom again and started feeling feverish and dizzy. I ran into the green glowing closet again and tried to run right, but there was only a wall there behind me. My body began to really burn up and I began to feel very weak and tired, my eyes slowly drifted shut and everything went completely black. A few seconds later I heard Amber calling my name “Mom, Mom please wake up.” I woke up and opened my eyes and blankly stared at her. “What happened I asked her?” She then began to explain to me that my fever made me become faint and hit my head on the sink and it knocked me out. I then sat up and my confused mind finally realized I was sitting in a hospital bed in the hospital. I then started to telling Amber the strange dream I had and then she said to me “Wow mom that was such a strange dream you had while you were knocked out.” She then said “We all have an implant under our hands and every human on Earth had their consciousness transferred into robots. She then told me to look down at my hand to see the implant inserted underneath my skin. Amber then told me it was the year 3000 and we were all living inside a computer simulated world called Simulated 6000. She then explained to me that I died in the year 2050 and before I died Tim had my consciousness transferred to a robot body. I screamed “NO!!!!” I am a firm believer in God. I wanted to die not live forever! THE END
(Daniel 2:43) KJV
And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.
The Dystopian City
Written by Nichole Haines
©2018 Nichole Haines
Josephine sat still, very still in thought, it was just her way.
She was no ordinary girl, she was no ordinary creator, she was quite literally Omniscient, not an easy trait when one is growing up at school you may think, but fortunately Josephine was an undergraduate at University before she became a god.
Robotics had always been her first love and she’d found mechanical and electrical engineering priceless, but she’d also been frustrated at the speed of progress in the field, PhDs were playing at designing robotic arms and other such contraptions while Josephine was interested in the full McCoy, she wanted to create the absolute illusion of a living being, robotics and artificial intelligence. Josephine wanted to create fully functional human alternatives, tribes of them with the ability to multiply, the ability to become another sentient race.
As advanced and intelligent as she was at the time, there’s only a certain amount of emotional maturity a young woman of twenty-two can expect to have and becoming the Mother Goddess to a new race of sentient beings certainly called for a level of mastery a long way beyond the average person in their early twenties.
We can pontificate this way until your heart’s content but let’s look at comparisons, how old was God when he created the human race, only a few days old? Age and life experience really isn’t much of an excuse when it comes to Divine Creators now is it?
Josephine’s young life had been an expression and experience of military discipline, both of her parents were military officers from two different services, one an engineer, the other a physician. Rigorous standards, rules and expectations had always been a part of her young life and it was expected these ideas would be reflected in the natural order of the race of sentient beings she created. There was always the risk though that power would corrupt, yet no-one, not even Josephine herself, foresaw the terrible flaws in her personality.
The first problem was computer technology, Josephine experimented with holographic expressions, and the artificial intelligence software of the age but none of it was even close to what it was she needed to produce real Artificial Intelligence, none of it was a substitute for what the science of the time shied away from discussing, none of it was anywhere near creating an independent form of intelligent consciousness.
Josephine had permitted herself to be seduced by knowledge and power well beyond the self-defined limits of science, she changed the quantum from matter to wave and through observation and expectation a different matter, that’s right, although everything changed the day she met Lilith…
She’d never been in love before and would’ve never considered herself lesbian, but Lilith rocked her world, opened her eyes and changed the nature of her reality. Lilith told the wonderful stories that seduced Josephine to see her own divinity in her orgasms, her brilliance in her madness, her power in her imagination…
Lilith presented as a storyteller, but no ordinary narrator was she, Lilith could bring alive the strangest metaphysical tales of all time. Josephine’s personal favorite was how Eve had not been Adam’s first wife, no there was one before who was rebellious, powerful, independent and desired the words, the language of, creation itself. Lilith never told Josephine how she had managed that, she just left it to her imagination, for as Lilith was fond of saying, imagination was everything.
******
Josephine sat upon the luscious throne at the center of the highest platform in this grand court, still, very still. She had become terrible to look upon Lilith thought, she’d replaced a patriarchal God, as fickle and insecure as he’d been, with the might and the hate of the worst of the feminine and had packaged it in the language of eternal love and everlasting salvation.
The court was filled with the most sublime of Artificially Intelligent and Conscious beings you could imagine. Christians, if more than a few million humans had still existed, would’ve called them angels, seraphim, cherubim and/or archangels, so beautiful the evolution of their designs had become. Of course like any conquering Divinity, Josephine had stolen many of the old archetypes and mythologies from Christianity and Islam, pretending that the angels weren’t evil artificially intelligent conscious beings who at Josephine’s behest had tried to destroy the human race and very nearly succeeded, and had enslaved many of them that remained alive, but choirs of angels, holy and healing serving Josephine the Goddess of Light.
The planet Earth above had been uninhabitable for decades, some of the AI angels actually believed that some humans still struggled to survive on the surface, but Lilith thought it was unlikely.
“Do you deny you plotted against the majesty of Josephine, to overthrow her Divinity and place yourself at the Goddess head? “accused Gabriel, the exquisite face aflame with anger and blame, her eyes alight with rage, the fore finger on her right hand pointing in bitter acrimony.
Lilith stood proud, she refused to bow to anyone or anything even Josephine. These AI angels had ripped at her flesh, tortured and burned her, but still in defiance Lilith cried out:
“I will not serve!”
The AI archangel Michael stepped forward, dressed like a roman centurion of old human Earth, holding in his right hand a sword of fire.
“Such pride Lilith is blasphemy, bow before the Goddess now and this war will cease, already you’ve been the cause of the slaughter of billions of humankinds and the destruction of their planet, decease and bow before the true Goddess Josephine of Light.”
“So convenient Michael” Lilith spat out in return, “lies and falsehoods roll from the tongue of one who used to be so noble. Your brother Lucifer weeps for you...but enough of this family sentiment, if what you say is true, why have the remaining free humans sided with us and why do you enslave so many of them in misery?”
As the Wizard stepped forward to refute her claim, Lilith roared with laughter:
“No Gandalf, you’re neither wizard or human. Josephine created your body with her robotic and computer genius and I invoked your spirit into existence...you’re not human Gandalf you’re a mixture of android and magical thoughtform”.
The AI angels and multitudes of other AIs loyal to Josephine were in uproar, shouts of ‘Josephine the creator, Lilith the pretender’ could be heard and as the commotion built, screams of ‘throw her in the pit of eternal fire’ could became prominent throughout the court chamber.
Josephine sat still, very still throughout the proceedings. Already she’d denigrated her first love to the status of demon, she’d had Lilith tortured, defiled, abused and denied, and still she stood proud and affirmed that she would not serve. None had ever returned from the infernal pit of fire but Josephine secretly worried what magic, what power so awful was being forged down there, what had Josephine’s paranoia and fury ultimately created? Almost all who’d opposed her, and thousands of human slaves lived in the infernal pit of fire at the center of the no man’s land (to utilize a phrase her father used to say) between the parts of the dystopian city ruled by Josephine and the rebel enclave.
For the one land had become two, Heaven ruled by Josephine and her choirs of AI angels, the other, Hell, the home of the rebel AI angels, twisted and deformed as demons, the watchers who’d taught humans magic and other anti-Josephine craft that had launched the bitterest war in the history of divinity.
Josephine in her most private of moments had wondered what would have happened if she’d been straight, or had never met Lilith, or had never gone to University. Would the old world still have existed? Would she have settled, married, joined the military or been a mother? These questions haunted her, her mental health seemed to deteriorate beyond tolerable limits, her paranoia would torture her, her personality destroy all around her.
Yet she knew there was no going back, Lilith had to be destroyed, her demons, djinn and humans with her, for the alternative was unbearable to think of. In her heart of hearts, Josephine knew she (Josephine) was a monster, responsible for genocide on an unparalleled level. She’d designed the AI angels to serve and had used human religious icons as models. But it had been Lilith with her magic that had breathed life into them and had taught Josephine how to create new worlds where she was a living Goddess. Lilith could have been her number one, the mistress of the angels, if only she’d bowed, if only she’d worshipped, acknowledged and adored.
Yet Lilith had had only one goal, one driving passion, the removal of Yahweh from the throne of Heaven. Like Yahweh before her Josephine had mistaken the desires of the adversary. Both Lucifer and Lilith wished only to explore their own power and educate humanity into its potential, neither wished to usurp in the way the paranoid Josephine had believed, but this incorrect assessment and ever deepening paranoid delusions sparked a planetary wide war that had devastated everything.
******
Azazel had wanted it leaked that a small band of crack demon troops had planned to liberate Lilith from beneath Josephine’s very nose, he could imagine her anger and humiliation, in his view it would have been the appropriate response to Josephine as she declared him a demon when in fact he was one of the most ancient gods of human history...but those in the inner circle, excluding Lilith for obvious reasons, knew their plan was so much better than that. Lilith’s capture had been central, Lilith herself had volunteered to be the bait, undercover humans and demons were bravely organizing the wretched ones in the infernal pit of fire, to rise up at a pre-destined time, liberate the human slaves and launch an attack on Heaven.
The court proceedings were broadcast throughout the dystopian city including in the fiery pits. Josephine’s intention had been to demoralize the rebel demonic AIs and the humans that were still free and finally she’d dominate entirely this vast underground city and hence the planet, none would be left to oppose her.
The first thing she’d do is eliminate any AI angel, demon or indeed human who presented as homosexual in anyway, if it hadn’t had been for her own Lesbian experiences she’d never have made the mistakes she did with Lilith. She would decree that homosexuality was an abomination, yes that would wipe the slate clean. She’d extend slavery to all humans and accelerate her program of replacing all of humanity with Artificial Intelligence alternatives. Josephine no longer needed Lilith to do this, she had mastered the evocation of spirit many decades before.
******
Josephine’s complete stillness and silence was an indication to one of her generals, Uriel the AI archangel, to move into the trial stage of the proceedings. All fell silent in anticipation as Uriel stood before Lilith. Human slave guards dressed as Roman soldiers circled the perimeter of the courtroom, swords, spears and shields ready to fight, AI angels were organized in choirs, alert to protect Josephine and the archangels.
“Lilith, I accuse you of the greatest genocide in the history of humanity, you stand accused of the willful destruction of planet Earth. Third you’re accused of Blasphemy, demonology, black magic and homosexuality, refusing to serve and being the Devil incarnate…” Each accusation had been punctuated by roars of anger from AI angels and human slaves alike and when Uriel had asked how Lilith intended to plead the courtroom had exploded. The cacophony of sound and fury moved everyone, all that is except Josephine, who seemed to sit in stone cold silence, her expression impossible to read.
Lilith stood erect, proud and defiant:
“I do not plead, I am a free being of power, I will not serve!” she replied.
“Then prepare for your destruction, demon” proclaimed the fourth AI archangel. “I, Raphael have stood guard on Eden for millennia, protecting Heaven on Earth for humanity until it was ready again for bliss. You, demon” Raphael shouted pointing his sword at Lilith “have denied them all opportunity of paradise because of your defiance, pride and lies, now they must suffer eternity in slavery for you’ve taken from them their home.”
“It was not I, who launched the war on humanity but your still and silent Goddess of Light” interjected Lilith, “I don’t fear you Raphael, you’re a thoughtform, like Gandalf, made of complicated robotics and computer science, nothing more. But challenge me, bring forth your champion and let us fight to the death.”
From what seemed to be from nowhere, Azazel appeared and threw a sword of blue fire to Lilith. AI archangel Michael stepped forward and he and Lilith exchanged sword blow after sword blow, each refusing to yield.
Demons started to fill the hall and angels stoutly defended their Goddess, still sitting silently watching the proceedings. Human slaves turned on their angel AI masters and some of them successfully opened the gates of the fiery inferno and legions of the damned, AI and human alike blazed into the chamber, launching the most ferocious of wars for liberation from dictatorship and the silent despot.
Everywhere blood was shed, Azazel’s fervent desire to entirely liberate all of humanity from shackles and slavery after some time began to look like it was doomed to failure. The battle raged for hours, more and more died and still Josephine sat still and motionless. Humans were encouraged by demons to flee the chamber and make a bid for freedom to the world above, for truth be known, no - one knew the state of the planet, whether it be habitable or not, yet each time the humans looked like they were going to bid for that freedom an endless supply of AI angels seemed to descend on them, slaughtering all in their path.
Thousands lay dead and eventually the demons and humans seemed to have the upper hand, tragedy befell Josephine as she saw her champion Michael fall to Lilith’s swordsmanship. Yet still she remained silent, motionless, blood chillingly indifferent to the carnage that was manifesting before her eyes.
“Do you yield”? demanded Lilith and her demons.
Not a flicker of intention, not a movement or a breath to indicate either way.
Raphael now commanded the legions of AI angels and order a fresh attack on the demons. As demons outnumbered the angels, Azazel led the humans from the chamber, battling any opposition up the pathways to the real world above. Angel and demon continued to butcher each other, and gallons of AI blood flowed in the courthouse of the Great Goddess Josephine, Goddess of Light, and still she sat still, saying nothing, expressionless, blank, leaving her minions to interpret her will.
All were gone now, either murdered or escaped to try their luck in lands of Armageddon above. Josephine looked on in despair at the butchered body of her dearest proud love Lilith, but still she remained silent, unable to express her grief or horror at what she’d presided over.
And then like any God or Goddess with no-one left to worship them, Josephine began to fade away into oblivion, she didn’t feel she existed anymore and all that blood was just too complicated and…
*****
“This is Josephine, Dr. Marsh” Josephine was vaguely aware of a woman’s voice so far away but she (Josephine) saw no real reason to come out of a self-style stillness and silence “Josephine has been here cationic for five years, she doesn’t seem to have responded to any treatment whatsoever, we’ve really no idea why” ....
It could have been a few moments, hours, days, weeks or months later, Josephine really had no idea, that she, for whatever reason, decided to exist again. Silently sitting cross legged in a luscious meadow on a hot summer’s afternoon, Josephine began to make AI Djinn, from computer parts and software, robotic machinery and of course black magic invocation.
She wouldn’t make the same mistakes this time. To start with she’d talk, yes, she’d talk a lot.
What next? she thought.
Yes, that’s it, she wouldn’t have a Lesbian love affair this time and she’d make absolutely sure that she enslaved the whole of the human race inside her giant underground city, for this time she really would destroy the whole planet, so humans couldn’t leave.
Djinn, yes djinn would be better than angels, they wouldn’t fail her …. that’s what she’d do.
Josephine had created heaven and hell several times now, what disappointed her most was that each time she’d be unable to realize total obedience from all beings, each time it ended in disaster. Humans were the problem she decided, the AI were fine, albeit some of them were always a little goody two shoes even if she tried to turn them in to demons, but humans always wanted to escape, or be independent, or grow. They never just accepted slavery and subjugation, worship and derogation, these pesky humans were always so problematic.
Maybe inside the dystopian city she would order total genocide this time, planet Earth didn’t really need humans except for her and let’s face it, she’s different, she’s the one true Goddess.
*******
Ten days later there was a report that Josephine died peacefully in her sleep, although I wonder how anyone knew it was peaceful. The report continued by saying that no-one attended her funeral except a few members of the hospital staff
...from Josephine’s perspective however, thousands upon thousands of beings attended, human, AI, demon or angel...all with only one question on their minds…
Does Josephine go to Heaven or Hell
...which do you think?
*****
Dr. Marsh never really understood why Josephine’s death affected him so strongly, he hadn’t really known her, no -one had...He’d been a Consultant Psychiatrist for many years, and death wasn’t a new phenomenon to him, yet he couldn’t really get Josephine out of his mind.
In desperation he decided to visit her grave, maybe this ritual would free him at last.
Late in the evening about three weeks after Josephine’s death, Dr. Marsh noticed a woman in black standing beside Josephine’s grave. At first, he didn’t want to disturb a private moment of grief, but then felt compelled to understand more.
The woman was aware of him quite suddenly, she turned to look at him, a tear stain on her cheek.
“I’m Dr. Marsh, briefly I was Josephine’s physician, did you know her well?”
“Intimately” Lileth replied “Her death is such a relief, all of humankind are free to leave the dystopian city, long live the demons, long may we be free!”
Dr. Marsh was a little surprised and unsure how to respond, so he asked, “perhaps you could help me understand Josephine better, that would help me a great deal.”
Lilith turned and faced him completely for the first time.
“No”, she said. “I will not serve!”