Summer Brewing

When an inventor came to me and asked if putting communication nodes in solar-powered lawn ornaments was acceptable, I nodded.

Of course, I was on the phone talking, texting and surfing at the same time - for all I know, I may have nodded to keep time with the music in my head.

In other words, I didn't fully register the inventor's non-intention.

But as I've told you, the number of nodes grows.

I can't see the Moon for the trees but I know by the whitish, hazy glow that Earth's natural satellite hangs in the sky to what appears to me in the "above" position.

Every person stands or sits on the top of the world.

There is no up or down.

But you'll get used to that later on.

Right now, we have to talk about the E-Brain.

Let's start with Sean and Rachel at Rite-Aid and Stephanie at Publix.

Did you ever see the movie, "Twelve Monkeys"?  Do you remember the scene where the scientist opens a container in an airport?

My codename in one organisation is "Poison Arrows."  I wanted something less poisonous but I didn't get to choose the name - it came with my assignment.

Brian pointed out to me a series of articles in Blood magazine back around the 2005 timeframe.  The subject: heparin.

He didn't know my brother in-law died in 2006 (on this day, as a matter of fact), due, most likely but never proven, to a saddle block.

Could a blood thinner have saved my brother in-law?  It didn't.  Could we have lowered his body temperature and reduced his exposure to oxygen?  We didn't.

Movies and books play up spy organisations and covert operations like they're populated with weight lifters and martial arts experts.

Like I said, crime syndicates don't exist because there's always one group that thinks it's fighting on the side of good and right.

There's only us.  One species aware of its existence through the survival technique known as brain function echoes that developed a tool called written language.

Antiquated.  Old news.  So far behind the curve that we've flatlined before we've peaked.

Would you believe you can pick up echoes from moments outside this one, even echoes you could, if you believed in the concept "infinite time," call the future?

Let's use a familiar metaphor, pinging radar signals, bats' echolocation and pond ripples.

Let go of conscious thinking - the echo of thoughts in the moment - and let your body sit unattended by the false concept called "you."

What do you hear/feel?

Are there voices speaking to you?  Do you detect former family members?  Is there a Voice?

How about sensations devoid of language?  Do you feel the vibrations of the universe that compose the temporary confluence called "you"?

Are you motivated to respond to all the voices/vibrations or just some of them?

Do you take your time and savour the "flavour" of the voices/vibrations before trying to detect new ones?

Can you sense echoes of previous voices/vibrations that passed through you?

Can you project the future effect of the current voices/vibrations as they pass from you into the environment surrounding you?

They called me Poison Arrows because I was chosen to inject markers into the voices/vibrations of those I encounter.  The markers are neutral, like the sounds of a clapper board in a movie soundtrack or fluorescent dye in sewer flow monitoring.

The only way to prove the future exists was to develop a way to sense echoes coming back from the future.  Complicating the problem, test scenarios showed that most attempts to detect the future were ruined by the testers because they all had reasons to invest in the future (not to mention the continual problem of determining if there is any such thing as a pure test that does not influence the test subjects/material).

You know I am just one in a long line of people to fill the role I play.  I am unimportant.  I do not exist.  My name is not going to be recorded for memorisation by billions of students or fans of scientific endeavour.

In other words, I am perfect.  Not perfect in and of myself as Self but because I have no need to perpetuate myself for posterity.

Thus, my colleagues and business associates nominated me to be Poison Arrows for the very reason that there is no me to begin with.

My actions are tagged with a special code buried within the vibrations or states of energy that comprise me.

The more I broadcast life-affirming signals, the stronger the markers are placed, but even my moments of situational depression and loneliness are tagged and noted because I do not care about their effects on the future.

Just like my encounter with Brian.  Now we'll see if the future comes back to us with a "cure-all" for blood clot related deaths, lowering the death rate and increasing life expectancy.

What about the E-Brain, you might wonder.

That's where the solar lawn ornaments come into play.  Built into the solar panels are subatomic crystalline structures that can be "programmed" via radio waves to act as signal amplifiers for the spread spectrum comm channels I told you about a day or so ago.

As people purchase and install solar-powered devices, from outdoor security lights to utility district photovoltaic solar farms, my team of associates is realigning the solar panels composition to slightly increase the efficiency of the conversion of sunlight into current so that a tiny slice of the current can be used to retransmit a type of ultrawideband telecommunications.

That, in essence, is the E-Brain, an omnipresent, omnidirectional communication network that picks up everything that is going on and reprocesses for consumption by those in my network and those in another network of which I have limited permission to discuss at this time.

I'm not a veteran of any war.  I'm a hired hand, similar to today's brand of subcontractors and mercenaries that gets negatively branded in the news but keeps our species moving in the direction it's been moving for millennia.  We feed and feed on our own.

Most of you belong to one or more of my colleagues' organisations without knowing you do.  All of us belong to this planet which belongs to this solar system as part of the Milky Way galaxy.

I don't exist.  I never did.  I'm just a specialised function pulling the future into the present in our species' vain goal to melt away time.

Time does not exist but we don't know that yet, although we're making incremental progress toward understanding why time does not exist.  It'll take us what we now call a few more thousand years to figure out that our development of language (as a side product of our artificial concept of time) was a setback, not an advancement, of civilisation.

How do I know that?  Easy.  I feel those echoes from the future everyday, lit up as they are by the markers of my predecessor a few generations ago.