SOFIA AND RICK WERE discussing the latest sign of oligarch interest, the mini-drone visit.

“I know you’re concerned, Rick,” she stressed, “as am I. It’s been a few days now, and I’ve heard no reply on someone coming to visit the gardens. If it happens, I fear it will be one of those hyper-sensitive hybrids with the ability to probe into every word, every inflection and intonation in my voice. I can’t worry about that now other than to suggest you keep moving along quickly, even to three sessions a day. Can you pick up the pace to three? Any idea how many you have left?”

He was pacing the small room, his hand on his chin. “A dozen, maybe. I could do it in four days, at three a day, but I’m trying to balance this with final preparations of the equipment and systems for the signals. I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s a good window. I can forestall a visit for that long, even if they requested it today. I’ll tell them I’m off on a multi-day trip to sell ripening vegetables, and to do it when I return. Four days is good, barring eventful interruptions, then we can get on with this thing. Are you up for it?” she wondered.

He bounced on his heels, something he did when concluding on important topics. “Sure, I’ll give it a go.” Pointing to his head, he continued, “There’s enough up here, unscripted, unordered, to ramble perennially.”

“Oh, I’m most confident in your ability to pontificate, my dear. Then that’s that! I’ll leave you to your microphone. Do you want the dogs in here?”

“Just leave Pete and Molli please, my constant companions. They give me context, the context I need to reinforce my understanding that we humans are a species in time on this planet. We’ll have our day as will they.”

Sofia threw her hands up in the air. “Okay, you’re getting started on your topics, and I’m sure I’ve heard this dialogue a few too many times in the past.”

* * *

“Much is happening outside of this opinion that I impart to you, both in my personal surroundings and the world at large. Again, based on various events that are occurring here with our living circumstances, I fear I will be unable to complete my personal mission to send these messages to you, whoever you may be. As a result, I’m advancing with haste through these recordings, hoping to complete as many as I can before I am forced to truncate my plan and execute the final stage at which I transmit the laser signal and its contents.”

“In doing so, I hope to protect my dear Sofia. I know this will be my last hurrah, that sending this signal into space violates everything the oligarchic demigods represent. Not only will it be an embarrassment to those oligarchs controlling Westrich, our bastardized section of the former United States, and the unholy domain of Westrich that we reside in, called Vista. It will embarrass all demigods globally.”

“Of course, there’s nominal likelihood that any others will even find out about the signal’s contents unless they are able to capture it via their satellites. Any satellite in the path might pick it up, but that’s a matter of chance. Twelve by ten seconds of high wattage laser signal, very focused, with little diffusion. And I am not applying any level of security to it, for obvious reasons. Either way, the signal will go out, and my plan will be fulfilled. At least that is my hope and prayer.”

“Sofia understood the risk ever since I hatched the plan with her. We both saw the fatalistic persona that humanity had adopted. We knew the end game, and we understood the likely result for us. Certain death, given that the price of human life has so seriously eroded since the Great Debacle. Not that it was much higher before that event.”

“She knows what happens after the transmission. In an odd sense, she and I both prefer to go out that way, victims of a drone’s missile or other ignominious and inconsequential finality. In those last seconds, we’ll hope our lives aided someone, even if we have no idea who that someone is. Yet, I don’t want life to end, nor does she. It’s still too early to go. I guess it’s always too early.”

“Crimes against these relatively new oligarchic states are met with harsh retribution. Minimal infractions like yellow flags result in reconditioning camps; not places to spend your waking hours. Worse yet, the reconditioning process continues while sleeping, with constant bombardment of signals into your brains to forcibly reprogram your mental constructs.”

“Like any queen bee, the oligarchs have little time for worker bees who can’t cut the social mustard as they define it. They are either killed instantly or thrown asunder, far from the hive, to die begging others for help. And the others who encounter them in their reduced state can’t help, since doing so diminishes social credit scores and places the helpers at risk.”

“I apologize for digressing. My intent is to discuss sense of self and not describe the dystopia we have created. That dystopia is a byproduct of the structures of self-actualization that we failed to enact many years, even centuries, before the Debacle. This rambling brings me to the topic at hand.”

“I describe elsewhere that humans are separate beings, not connected physically to each other. Nothing unique bound us together in history other than our common languages, circumstances, familial ties, and geographies. I can only guess that, since most of life on Earth is this way, your own society has evolved with similar aspects. If so, you may well understand what I plan to impart.”

“Because these disconnected human units of life have no inborn capacity to socially bond with every other unit, they lack the ability to comprehend that they are parts of a larger whole. Given subordination of the whole to the dominance of the one, the one almost always wins in any battle of human mentality.”

“For example, because I am disconnected from the other, I lack the empathic ability to understand the other, why the other does what he does; his motivations. Instead, I see the behaviors, I pass judgments, and I play my own self-created God-judgement role. In doing so, I can segment good from evil and assess where I should step next and where I should place my resources.”

“That example I mentioned a few minutes ago is typical. A human sees a hybrid on the street who was cast out of the reconditioning process and left to fend for himself. The fact that he is a hybrid is tough enough given the extreme biases and blame placed on hybrids as the presumed enablers of the Debacle. This bias has only grown stronger through the years.”

“Because I cannot relate to the hybrid’s life experiences, I can readily disassociate myself from him and any feelings I may have for his plight in life. Putting aside the social scoring issues for a moment, any typical human might otherwise disregard the plight of that outcast, seeing the hybrid as something less, something inferior, to a pure human being.”

“I wish I could say it’s not an outgrowth of the bigotry and violence that was initiated by social media magnates and certain politicians earlier in the century. Such bigotry went unchecked at the time, particularly in the United States, creating a lowered bar of human dignity and adding a great weight to the kujenga of humanity.”

“That legacy, enabled by a lazy and fearful populace too engaged with their own possessions and social power, continues in more volatile forms today. Freaking cowards, they were. Yet I was in my twenties at that time and did nothing to stop their bad behavior, so I am not blameless.”

“Returning to sense of self. It’s difficult to explain what this means. To make this easier, I’ll use me as a typical human example. There is a part of me that gains a sense of self-worth, of self-value, from what I perceive others believe or must believe about me. Hard to describe this any other way. It is an ‘other-oriented’ mental construct.”

“I think these constructs occur because I, as a human, am dogged by an innate or inborn sense of self-deprecation, of valuelessness. This results from comparing myself to others around me. Now, some of this penchant to compare has value since it may establish a realistic base of where you are in your mental or physical capacity relative to others.”

“You can imagine what forms this has taken over the past five decades in the age of genetic diaspora. The varint classes have created virtually every flavor of humanity, from super-human physical capabilities to extended mentalities, which I can only reference from observation.”

“Either way, this interesting and vital expansion of humanity was in full swing before the Debacle, and it continues after the Debacle. However, it’s now generally relegated to the backwaters of society or reserved in exquisite exclusivity to the upper castes comprised of the oligarchic demigods and their tech-encumbered sycophants.”

“Why is this topic relevant to sense of self? Every human is searching for something. Every human believes from birth that it is innately inferior to the other. As a result, it must augment itself to create co-equality or superiority. The larger the inferiority belief, the more augmentation of some sort is required.”

“Human augmentation is far more influential in our history than we give it credit. I’ll go back to Egyptian pharaohs who needed to augment themselves with the trappings of royalty, self-absorbing in possessions and power over others, and adorning themselves physically with such trappings.”

“But that’s an easy comparison. All human possessions are adornments or augmentations. I say this in broad strokes, as few possessions are truly required to sustain life. Food, water, clothing, shelter, and access to health care and knowledge. That should be enough.”

“For humans, however, it’s not enough, and I doubt that we are so unlike your societies. Everything on Earth has some element of this, from male birds that sport the brightest plumage to those that build the most complex nests. But I can’t imagine our behavior is driven solely by this urge to mate.”

“No, we have a few inborn tendencies such as this God-forsaken one to seek approval and admiration from others in order to like oneself, to gain a feeble sense of self. Those who are weakest, those most cowardly and incapable of managing these tendencies, spend their days and nights determining ways to prove to others that they are the superior beings. They hold tight to the transient things of possession and power, hoping these will last forever and continue to prop up their weak personal constitutions.”

“Alas, given the extension of human aging, those who are most in need of gaining a sense of self, the demigods and their minions, are further removed from ever realizing it. They now can retain their grotesque amplifications of possessions and powers for as long as the world of humans lasts, which will be no more than a few months or years from now, in my estimation.”

“Oddly enough, human augmentation should have brought this insanity to a halt, right? Once humans became tied into the AI-driven logic and databases of knowledge, all humans should have been able to experience the ultimate sense of self. They should have become hyper-aware, entirely empathetic, and omnipotent super-beings.”

“As you might deduce, it didn’t happen that way. We crashed into the age of AI without an ethic. Like a feather in the wind, humanity’s variations flitted to and fro, visionless, amoral, trendy. Increasingly, certain people of wealth and power came to control the driving algorithms, which led to where we are now.”

“Our demise will be self-created. We should have learned the lessons from the late teens and twenties of this century. The lesson that algorithms are biased to advantage the few, whoever that few may be. The poor souls who tied their gray matter into their algorithm master of choice ultimately came to be controlled by that master.”

“It was so innocent at first and went something like this: I know who I am. Sure. I want to augment myself to gain a level of consciousness previously unavailable to me. Sure. I executed on this via various means, including subdermal chipping and direct connections into my neocortex. It was great. It was exhilarating.”

“But, oh, a few things are happening that are out of kilter with my ethics, however infertile those may be. The algorithm is doing things I might not otherwise have approved of. Yet, it’s the algorithm and must be much smarter than me. I trust it knows better than me, better than my sense of intuition and right and wrong. It’s a machine. More perfect. Sure.”

“And like what happened earlier in this century, the algorithms were far from unbiased. Instead, they were specially programmed to confirm my biases, exaggerate my tendencies, and lead me down paths I’d never have considered. Evil and despicable paths. Paths that resulted in disadvantaging others to the advantage of the algorithm and its masters. I became a part of this dynamic. Willingly at first, then a slave to it later. I was fed by its constant stream of dopamine-inducing information, injecting my body with that drug as if on one continuous orgasmic episode.”

“I give this example for a reason. Yes, this dynamic has been happening for many decades and is now governmentally mandated to a great degree. To function properly in our society, one must be tied into the network in many respects. You therefore become controlled by it, and ultimately controlled by those few who control it, whether biological or machine.”

“Had we created an ethic early on, centuries ago, never to hand over one’s sense of self to anyone or anything else. Had we trained our children on what it means to be self-actualized, that it was the only goal for each human being, humanity may not have devolved to this loathsome point. But our laziness, our penchant for beliefs in false gods, in demagogues, in others beyond each of our selves, led us to this sad conclusion for the species.”

“I will cover more on the human state later when I discuss oligarchic technocracies. For now, I want to give you a slight appreciation for acquiring a sense of self.”

“I’ve known many people over the years, some who had it, and some who did not. One defining factor was whether a person was contemplative, even introspective. I don’t mean they had to be a hermit in a cave. No, I’ve known outwardly focused salespeople who were among the most self-actualized. In fact, because of their strong sense of self, they were often the best at what they did.”

“How does one become introspective? For me, it comes through meditation. Meditation is control of the mind, and it remains the most difficult exercise for me.”

“I can circle walk and do my martial arts for hours at a time. Yes, that is an exercise in discipline, both physical and mental. Coupled with that, I exercise my mind through meditation, the deceptively simple act of clearing my thoughts and focusing on one innocuous thing.”

“A simple act, yet it remains the hardest thing for any human. Meditation is grasping the reins of the unbridled mind, which is its natural state. Once those reins are controlled, a sense of self-worth is infused into the being.”

“Not knowing who you are as a species, or what your physical world and physiology is like, meditation may not be possible within your own mental capabilities. I hope it is. Meditation has made this crazy mess of humanity seem less crazy and has helped me attain calm and understanding.”

“The first spark of doing this laser transmission exercise fell into my head one day after I cleared my mind of other innocuous things via meditation. It seemed the right action to take to point out humankind’s fallacies and failures. To create a dozen ten-second brilliant blasts of information that might help to redirect you, should you be on the same fatal and despicable path that we humans have stumbled into with eyes wide open.”

“I am partly responsible for this mess we are in, however. I was one of nearly four billion left after the Debacle, so I have an equal role in the state of the world, as does everyone still alive. This transmission is perhaps my pathetic attempt at absolution, a penance if you will, for not having spoken-up earlier that humanity was on a zero path with the doomsday clock ticking its final seconds."