Ouspensky told us, with his dying breath, “Think
in other categories.” Here are two such categories,
combined synergistically for the first time—the world
of E. E. “Lensman” Smith, and the transcendental
discipline of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology.
Phillip Teich
An undistinguished planet in an equally undistinguished solar system in Galaxy Thirteen: uninteresting, that is, unless a complete analysis revealed the planet’s statistical improbability: it had no valuable minerals and was inimical to any possible life form. Well then, academically interesting.
Beneath its crust, though, a spheroidal structure ten kilometers deep environing Homo saps—or reasonable facsimiles thereof.
This was Flag Base of the Space Organization, the governmental and defensive stratum of Soul Technology, which, as everyone now knows, is the universe’s only purveyor of mental and spiritual freedom.
Inside the planet, then, in a handsome stateroom, Rod Garrett was lying on the bed, immersed in the forms and flows of his personal universe. His wife, Regen, was immersed in a book. When she put it down, she asked, “Preparing for the game?”
“Uh-huh. Anything dissonant affects the communication drastically.”
“But doesn’t playing the game help resolve dissonance?”
“I know; I invented the game. Want to play a round?”
“Sure.”
She sat facing him on the bed. They looked into each other. Presently there appeared between them, in midair, a model of the galaxy. Flag Base was there, flowing a dark blue energy to significant points.
Rod looked at his wife’s creation, and then again into her. The model changed; Flag Base became twice as large as any star. After a moment Rod extended his space until he was fully occupying the space of the being who was his wife. Then the model between the two bodies disappeared, and was replaced by another model.
Regen exclaimed in awe.
This model, too, was of the galaxy; but it was done in ethereal, aura-like colors. Stars and planets shimmered in translucent blue-violet, orange, and gold. Pouring from their depths was sound, creating a harmony of a billion chords. It was a deep, entrancing music that lifted, enraptured, and impelled.
“I think you imbue your mockups with esthetics just for persuasion.” She smiled and unmocked the model, then turned and fell back onto his lap. “You’re power-mad.”
He grinned at her. “But you got the communication.”
“Right. Agreements. A very senior subject.”
“You were right as far as you went, of course. Flag does control the galaxy. But only by agreement—which is the senior datum.”
He smiled, and she put her arms around him. “That’s a great game!” She flowed admiration at him. “I process people all week; they get rid of what’s troubling them, regain abilities, become rational —and this is almost as good. Well done, Rod Garrett.”
“Thank you. Want to go for a ride to the park?”
“Fun. You drive, I’ll ride.”
Outside their stateroom, Rod mocked up a narrow platform with a rail. He beamed the floor at an angle and they glided off on air. They flew like this down the wide corridors of Flag Base to a large underground botanical park.
As they were sailing across a bright meadow, a thought beam lightly touched them.
“Excuse me for interrupting you two. Rod, can you come by my office?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be right there.”
The beam disappeared.
“Wow! That’s only the second time I’ve heard him in my mind.
And the first was in a group.” She looked sadly at him. “There goes the rest of your twenty-four-hour liberty.”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
He kissed her lightly, then unmocked his body and disappeared.
* * * *
The office of the Commander in Chief was a huge half-sphere, one half of which was sheer glass, overlooking a large, clear lake. The other half was steel, to which clung scores of papers.
“Sorry for pulling you off your liberty, Rod. But here’s the situation.” The Commander in Chief spoke softly, laying sheets of paper side by side across his long desk. “Stats dropping slightly below normal variation throughout the galaxy. Every Soul Tech org, including Space Org bases. Except the Games Organization—their stats are soaring.
“No one here has noticed it yet. We’ve all gotten complacent, I guess.
“And, much as I hate to send you, I expect nobody else could handle it as well at this early stage. That okay with you?”
Fleet Admiral Roderick Garrett looked at his Commander in Chief, at the being himself, not at the white-haired and ruddy body. He marveled at the perfect integration of the Old Man’s energy pattern, a pattern certainly unique in kind: along each wave followed intractable awareness.
Both beings willingly occupied the same space; each was larger than the room itself. The Fleet Admiral richly appreciated this intimacy with the greatest being in the universe, the founder of Soul Technology and Commander in Chief of the Space Organization.
“Of course, sir,” Garrett replied immediately. “A change in randomity would be interesting anyway.” He lied; the randomity of Flag was the fastest, and therefore the best, in the universe. He had to admit, though, this mission would have a nice responsibility level.
He left and consigned his duties to the Flag Admiral. He kissed his wife good-bye.
He strode to a nearby unmock station while considering a plan of investigation of the GO. It wasn’t going to be fun, but it would be fast.
Garrett himself had founded the Games Organization as a division of the Space Organization; its purpose was to create and establish sane and challenging games for Level Tens and above. He wondered what they were up to that would cause trouble this big.
He stepped into the station and unmocked his body. He could have unmocked anywhere, of course, but it was generally considered poor etiquette to disturb other people by suddenly appearing and disappearing.
Next, infinitely more difficult than unmocking a body, he stopped creation of his personal energy pattern. This was an experience of sheer loss; his personal universe remained only conceptually.
Bodiless, then, and creating so little energy as to be undetectable, Fleet Admiral Roderick Garrett vibrated ten locations per second through the mountainous hundred-square-kilometer complex of the universal headquarters of the Games Organization. First he found and examined executives; he sought and found mental pictures of incompetence for any mental masses being directly energized; he sought and found succumb intentions for any individual picture being energized.
Then, with minute quantities of highest harmonic frequency—esthetic energy—he delicately needled every mental mass within each executive’s personal universe which contained recordings of events within the Games Organization, directly energized or not, until each mass separated slightly, like a blooming flower, into its constituent pictures. [Esthetic energy is the “glue” by which mental pictures having mass, or enmassed pictures, cohere into aggregates, or mental masses, and the agency by which enmassed pictures are selected into masses according to significance, termed esthetic classification, analogous to DNA in a meat body. Conversely, only esthetic energy can explode a mass. A mental mass, as everyone now knows, occludes its pictures, and when it is automatically energized by the stimulus/response mind, basically because of harmful actions by the being in a significantly similar area, the significance of the mass is enforced upon the being, creating all his irrationality. P.T.] He viewed the pictures and nailed significant incidents for time, place, form, and event.
At no time during or after an examination did any executive have even an unformed awareness that he had been examined. The quantities of energy utilized were too infinitesimal, besides being of a type abundant in a mind; and the investigator was consummately skillful.
Garrett had chosen the latest, fastest, and most cautiously used investigatory procedure: direct examination of stimulus/response minds. The s/r mind, different in kind from the analytical mind, is particularly accommodating in searching for contrasurvival situations: it enmasses only unconfronted scenes; and only unconfronted scenes can cause trouble.
Thus Garrett was justified in expecting to locate the source of the trouble quickly. Anything unconfronted enough to cause stats to drop everywhere should be as obvious as a sinking ship.
He was disappointed.
There was the usual incompetence, but no gross incompetents; there were the usual rare succumb intentions, but no outright suppressors. Even the GO’s products, its games, were apparently survival—with two exceptions, possibly three.
One of the space-war games was as aberrated as hell itself, and one creation game was simply incomplete. Garrett would rectify these, but they were not what he was looking for. There was also one picture in one mind of a graph of the stats for a Game P-U. That was odd—but, no, not important, just one picture. He would have to examine the rest of the crew.
If Garrett had known then that the solution to his vital mission lay in that one picture, he could have saved over ten billion beings. For that picture indicated a game that made probable a hitherto impossible, even inconceivable occurrence: the death of spiritual beings.
* * * *
Before examining the rest of the crew, Garrett decided to act on the data he had. It was midevening at GO headquarters. He intended himself just outside the limits of the org, mocked up his energy pattern, and extended his space out to the quartermaster.
A kilometer above the GO, a solitary being felt another presence, and then perceived an immensely powerful, high-waveband being.
“Yes, sir. Identity, please,” the thought connected.
“Fleet Admiral Garrett, quartermaster, here to confer with Admiral Howard.”
“Yes, sir!” The being disappeared and a millisecond later reappeared. “I’ll inform him that you’re here, sir,” he stated, and disappeared again. It was not every day that the Fleet Admiral visited GO headquarters.
Three seconds later, the Admiral appeared. He had met with Garrett frequently at Flag, and recognized his energy pattern.
“You caught us by surprise, sir,” Howard greeted his superior. “It’s been over five hundred years. But you can have the Chief’s office, which is ready as always.”
“Thanks, John, but I won’t be that long; just want to take up a few things with you. Can we meet in your office?”
“Yes, sir. Right now.”
The two beings located themselves in the Admiral’s executive suite. Howard’s body was already there. It was a rugged thirty-year-old Homo novus, which is Homo sapiens in every detail except for the energized mechanism, the trap, which pins a being inside a Homo sap body.
Garrett could tell that Howard had not been in his mahogany-paneled office when the quartermaster had announced him: the body had that spinny expression of having been just mocked up. It was recovering somewhat by soaking up the sunlight that radiated from the ceiling.
Even though this was a Level Ten org, bodies, desks, papers, and so on were still used—as they were on Flag Base. The policy was to use as much objective universe material as was necessary to establish identification, location, and, in general, order. Besides, bodies were fun now.
After checking to make sure that no other beings contained or were contained within their space, Garrett explained his visit.
“Formally I’m on a mission, John, the reasons for which are irrelevant at this moment. I’m in the first stage, investigation; however, I do have three orders which I suspect won’t affect much but nevertheless are needed.” Three sheets of paper appeared on the Admiral’s desk with orders neatly typed, signed, and sealed.
“I also need some data,” Garrett continued thoughtfully. “Everything you have and can collect on Game P-U in five days. I’ll be back then to get the data and give you the particulars on this mission. That’s all.”
“All right, sir,” Howard acknowledged. His body stood and saluted.
Garrett took his leave then, checking out with the quartermaster. He stopped his continual personal creation of energy and proceeded to examine the stimulus/response minds of the game creators for the same factors as the executives. And, finally, but most tediously, he examined the energized pictures and masses of the remaining one million crew members.
It should be understood that this exhaustive investigation of so large a group was no mere pleasant afternoon task. Mental pictures, especially when packed into their dark gray masses, are Augean stables to confront and control. After all, it had been mental pictures alone that had once degraded every being in the universe into the enslaved squalid hell of being bodies. S/r minds were tough stuff; only a being who had fully attained the high state of Level Ten could really competently handle the s/r minds of others.
But even more perverse was operating without creating and having energy of one’s own, without one’s unique and identifying energy pattern—an uncomfortable state for even so eminently able a being as the Fleet Admiral.
For most beings, such a state would be intolerable, a starkly incomprehensible void that would incapacitate them to the extent of extinguishing identity itself. But Garrett, along with some one thousand others of the Space Organization, handpicked for toughness and competence by the Commander in Chief himself, had been allowed to enter the still experimental Level Fifteen: freedom from the need for energy. Of those hand-picked thousand, however, only a dozen could still, without their own energy, handle the murderously tough mental masses of others effectively enough to escape detection. Another’s mental masses were horrendous to manipulate even openly and having energy; without these, the difficulty multiplied a thousandfold.
Only by authorization of the Commander in Chief, an authorization rarely given or ordered, could one undertake undetectable direct mental examinations of others. And only one being—Roderick Garrett—was now authorized, by reason of competence and ethics, to conduct such examinations at will whenever the circumstances warranted it.
When Garrett finished his mental examinations of the entire crew of the GO, he had little more to act on than when he had started. There was incompetence, certainly, and a few deliberately destructive actions. But every org had those aberrations without creating trouble of this magnitude. The superstructure of the organization was sound; he had checked that. And the basic structure was modeled on an organization that had survived eighty million years—and what had caused their downfall had been corrected here!
Every problem in the org led to a dead end; every grouping of problems by whatever variable or group of variables led to an anarchy of dead ends. He had expected when he finished the executives that more data would isolate one thing, one individual, one game as source. Not only had that not materialized, but nothing had materialized.
* * * *
Garrett flitted to Flag then. The experience was like a sudden shift of scene inside a spherical slide show, complete with all fifty-six senses. Beings, of course, perceive circumambiently; they are senior to, they contain the objective universe and thus can change locations at will. Garrett learned what he wanted to know: after a week the stats were still dropping, visibly now. And the stats of the GO had crashed. He went back to GO headquarters.
After checking in with the quartermaster, he located himself in the body mockup station, a small open rotunda near the executive division building, and mocked up his Homo novus.
His body was apparently a facsimile of his last born body, fifteen hundred years before, in its twenty-sixth year. Actually, however, it was three times more efficient—which is saying something, since he had been a Level Nine then, a veritable superman. Now its communication channels were even cleaner, and he had established lines for direct electrical stimulation of the musculature, bypassing the nervous system. This permitted an instantaneousness of action impossible within the physical structure alone. Thus he controlled the body like a puppet, but it was a puppet with the consummate control and grace of a danseur.
Garrett’s body was lean and smooth, and to anyone esthetically sensitive, flawlessly beautiful. Esthetics had been his medium for thousands of years—it was no secret that he had been two of the greatest artists in history before Soul Technology—and a body always has expressed the being. Now Garrett’s energy pattern interfused with his body’s: surrounding the flawless physical beauty radiated and flowed an aura of blended white and gold.
Such was the quality of the Fleet Admiral who appeared at GO headquarters that day. Those who saw him and had done Level Eleven were awed; those who had not were stunned.
Howard ushered Garrett to the office that had been prepared for him. The room would have been a replica of Garrett’s oval office on Flag if it had not avoided certain details, such as certificates, personal mementos, and unique patterns in the paneling and furniture, which might have disturbed his equilibrium.
“Thank you, sir, for canceling War Game 113,” Howard began as soon as they were seated. “A lot of us kind of knew it was aberrated, but none of us took the initiative to really check it out. Same for C-U 46; we’ve got that straight now.
“If you don’t mind my asking, though, sir, I’m in the dark as to how you found out about them. But even more, I’d like to know”—he hesitated, checking the indicators of his superior, and, finding them still good—”how you happened to start investigating here before our stats crashed. I know Flag is good, but. . .”
Garrett laughed. “No, we haven’t perfected the ability of prophecy. That was done by stats. But first, the method of finding those games is still classified; but I can tell you it’s part of Fifteen.
“As for the mission, though, here’s the situation—but I’d like you to keep it sealed for a while. A week ago the Old Man noticed a galaxy-wide stat drop, just below normal variation. Nobody else did; it was too slight. Anyway, he isolated the cause—here.”
“But our stats were soaring then,” Howard blurted; then he understood. “Oh, the inversion precept.”
“Right. The little-used ‘bank robber in the family’ rule; one unit brings the group up and then crashes ignominiously. The Old Man is great; he deduced our stat analysis system, remember, from the laws of the universe, and he’s the best at using it.”
“Agreed.” Howard frowned. “Then what’s out here, sir?”
“Don’t know, John. It has to be something suppressive as hell. You know of anything?”
Howard thought for a minute. “No, sir.” Then added: “You suspect Game P-U?”
“Just as an outside possibility. Have you got the data on it?”
“Here, sir. I have also located two people who have been in Game P-U and might have further information.”
Then, alone, Garrett studied for several hours the records and promotional literature. His detailed analysis revealed that Game P-U was not intrinsically suppressive of beings. It could, however, be extrinsically suppressive: players acting crazy could make a sane game crazy.
He leaned back in his chair and, slowly at first, expanded his space to include the entire base. This was a serene state of knowing and affinity, of responsibility and creation. Truly one’s existence depends not upon identity, but upon created space. From this commanding position, he considered the situation anew.
What could be wrong, that wrong, and not yet locatable? Procedure was correct. Funny the way Game P-U showed up, but nothing big was there. Besides, its stats were good, even fantas— Its stats! His space exploded as he cognized.
The inversion precept! Of course! He had been scouring the org for something spectacularly wrong when he should also have been looking for something spectacularly right.
“Howard!” Garrett yelled mentally, connecting with the Admiral.
“Yes, sir?” The Admiral, in conference, put his total attention on the incoming communication.
“What’s the source of your largest stats?”
“Why. Game P-U, sir. I thought you already knew.”
“I didn’t, but forget it. How long has it been big—and by how much larger than the next largest?”
“It really took off about six weeks ago, sir; now it varies between three and four times the next largest. Except for the last two days. Its crash was virtually our total crash.”
“Okay. Thanks, John. I’d like to have all the stats for the last two months; and I’d like to talk to those two who were in Game P-U. Can do?”
“Right away, sir.”
The records arrived in a few minutes. No other game had anything like that storytelling pattern. Game P-U was undeniably, incontrovertibly, it.
While he was waiting for the two people, he spent some time in his personal universe. He reflected with pleasure that he had no stimulus/response mind anymore. If he had, it would be kicking him all over the universe now with caustic, suppressive invalidation for not applying the inversion precept earlier. Now, however, he knew what he was: a being, the only thing that was precisely and completely nothing—the true zero, containing no wavelengths, having no dimension or motion or mass or location. How could a nothing get kicked around the universe, and with what?
The two people arrived, bodiless. They had been married thirteen hundred years, they said. They had been in Game P-U only one day.
“We didn’t like the space or the mood of the game or something,” one said. “It seemed antagonistic, a fighting game.”
“But it was a covert fighting,” interjected the other, “like the game was supposed to be peaceful. But there was a constant undertone of force, police-type force. Very hypocritical.”
“And suppressive to that degree,” the first added.
“Anything else suppressive?” Garrett asked.
Neither could think of anything else. They left.
Garrett ordered the cancelation of Game P-U, by reason of suppression. In thirty minutes no GO in the galaxy would give the location of Game P-U to anyone; to do so would be treason.
Garrett left for Flag then, confident that his job was done. He would have been startled indeed to learn that he had not yet even begun.
* * * *
Flag Base. Three days had passed since Fleet Admiral Roderick Garrett had been debriefed on his mission and had returned to the normal business of managing a galaxy.
He had not expected the stats to recover the first or second day after he had canceled Game P-U, but neither had he expected them to continue diving at the same rate. When the drop continued on the third day, he went to see the Commander in Chief.
“Hello, Rod. I was expecting you.”
Garrett sat down.
“I’m puzzled, sir.”
“You and me both. However, I studied your debriefing and I’m convinced you were right about Game P-U.”
“Huh? Then how come the stats are still dropping?”
“Well, we’ll have to go and find out, won’t we?”
* * * *
The Commander in Chief and his Fleet Admiral located themselves outside a rift in Galaxy Two, near where the GO data placed Game P-U. Then they approached another quality of space, which bespoke to all comers that here was another game. By definition, that meant a different operating basis.
Garrett observed his senior floating through the clear interstellar darkness towards Game P-U, his pure golden energy radiating across the starlight. He wondered at the responsibility level of this being who so casually entered uncharted areas and spaces, without thought for dangers or awe for mysteries. He had heard him talk about it once: he had said that he had taken upon himself the responsibility for everything and every being in the universe. Garrett now observed his intractable awareness and effortless strength, and understood whence they were derived.
Inside Game P-U, they shot their perception toward what they thought must be its opposite boundary. A few galaxies, then—
“Rod! Observe the space itself!” commanded the senior suddenly.
Garrett focused on intergalactic space and tuned up his perception. Smaller and smaller became the area of his attention, down to the evenly-spread atoms. Something weird about this matter, he thought; extraordinarily dense and strong. Down between the atoms. It couldn’t be!
“Space is linear here, sir,” he said to his senior.
“And it should be highly curved, since we’re near the boundary of the universe. Check out the tone of the space, I’ll check the matter.”
Both went to work. They created various energy manifestations-flows, dispersals, ridges, and subtypes—to interact with the matter and space. They plotted thereby the affinity of the medium for beings, measuring its survival value, its tone.
“What’d you come up with, Rod?” the Commander in Chief asked quietly.
The Fleet Admiral, as tough as he was, was shaken. “Off the scale, sir. Definitely below. Ridges, even the weakest, persist for a long time; the space is of a demanding, possibly punishing tone. And matter, sir?”
“Similar. Below scale, lower harmonic of grief by its persistence of dispersals. You noticed the density of particles in intergalactic space? That’s why. I’d call it craving, appetence. This game is inherently suppressive, matter some multiple of four points below space.”
“That’s why cancelation didn’t work, sir,” Garrett said. “Loss is the bottom of our scale, equaling death of a body. Game P-U is below loss; it’s below being a game. We’d have to disconnect—at minimum.”
“At minimum is right. That might not even do it. We sent one trillion beings in here; that’s a contrasurvival act of considerable magnitude. We may have to unmock it—if we can.
“I’ll say one thing for this Game P-U, though, Rod,” the Commander in Chief continued, vibrating in a chuckle. “It’s solved the eternal problem of games.”
“Sir?”
“That a being loses a game when he wins as well as when he loses —because when he wins he no longer has a game.”
“What a solution, sir,” the Fleet Admiral replied. “Getting so far below loss you can’t even know the feeling.”
“True, son, true,” the Commander in Chief said, more soberly. “We still need more data—and there’s a ship over there. You take the top half. Energyless.”
It was a teardrop-shaped vessel. Both entered and observed.
The ship was a naked hull, driven and shielded by the energy and perception of a specialized crew. It was a war vessel returning with booty from a raid: one hundred beautiful female bodies.
Garrett checked the beings operating the female bodies. Unlike the crew, they had no awareness of their true nature—they were being their bodies. But the crew, too, lacked some native abilities; they obviously could not mock up bodies as complex as the ones they were stealing.
Garrett found a common source for their incapabilities: stimulus/response minds!
On a lower deck, the Commander in Chief noticed an implant station. One girl was strapped naked and spread-eagled on a steel platform. She had been drugged and hypnotized into a stupor. A dangerously high amperage played through her body; a movie scene appeared above her of a room with electronic controls. A man opened a door to the room, saw her lying helpless, and madly rushed to pull some levers, after which the current stopped and was replaced by a slowly building, throbbing sexual sensation, and the movie faded to sexual scenes. The cycle repeated, with a different man each time.
They met outside the range of the ship’s detector.
“S/r minds, Rod; did you notice? Incredible! Same function, different structure. It isn’t possible; they couldn’t have done it unknowingly, yet it appears to be so. . . .”
“They aren’t our people, sir. The beings I examined have a time track in this game earlier than we supposedly established it.”
It took a second for the Commander in Chief to assimilate this data. “Then it’s not our game!” he exploded. “Or it’s another universe entirely. You sure it wasn’t an implanted track? They have implants here, you know; that ship’s product is sex slaves.”
“Absolutely, sir. I could tell the difference. Incidentally, the beings in the female bodies were all old implanters themselves. Karmic law operative—”
“Yeah, I noticed.” The Commander in Chief mused, then said: “That makes it more probable this is another universe. Our game creator could have been wandering around down here and been inspired by the space. Do we always shield our games, Rod?”
“We never do, sir. It’s policy.”
“I didn’t think you noticed—during the transition you were intent upon the change in tone. There is a shield. But it’s barely perceptible. And porous.”
“Porous? But why? What function-”
“For finite dimension and possibly, probably, for expansion.”
“Expansion!” Garrett was horrified. “You mean it could take over our universe—wouldn’t a higher-toned game be senior?”
“Other things being equal, yes. Since universes exist, however, only by the agreed creation of the beings within them, this universe— if it truly is one—could rank over ours by the force of agreement of a significantly greater number of beings. Or, as I suspect is the case, its very suppression, its brutal invalidation by appetence and demand, enforces a viewpoint that it is the only universe—to the exclusion of all others, even a being’s personal universe. You noticed that the beings on that ship lacked bright, real personal universes?”
“Yes, sir; but wasn’t that the result of their s/r minds?”
“In our universe it is; but here the s/r mind is constructed only to complement the universe, to record and enforce its data. Thus it suppresses a personal universe because a basic assumption of this universe is that it is the only universe.
“The s/r mind here is twice as vicious as the one we had. It records everything the being resists—either approaching or leaving. Thus everything unwanted, as well as everything unconfronted, persists.
“As a mind, it enforces identity and action by penalty of pain. Its rare observations are of uncertainties; it does not perceive, it evaluates. Thus a being here who is using only his s/r mind does not see things or beings, he only evaluates them.
“And, of course, a being can’t get out of this game with his s/r mind energized—which it constantly must be, by the nature of the game.”
They were silent for a minute.
“Rod, let’s try unmocking some of this matter. Over there.”
Instantly they were inside the rift of a nearby galaxy. They positioned themselves on opposite sides of a small barren planet. They nullified the esthetic frequency in the area, meanwhile interlocking energy shields impenetrable to all frequencies around the planet. They stopped creation of the shields. The planet was still there.
The Fleet Admiral chuckled. “Want to try something smaller, sir?” In the next instant he discovered that a replica of the planet was occupying his space. He relocated himself outside it. “Wise guy,” he thought at his senior.
He watched as the two planets discharged energy against one another. The replica faded, strengthened; the original faded; the replica wavered and disappeared. The original remained.
The Commander in Chief had scrutinized the fading of the original. He cognized.
The Fleet Admiral now saw the planet disappear. “How, sir?” he asked, flowing admiration.
“Its persistence was dependent upon a lie, Rod, which became visible when it discharged against its duplicate. Its creator mocked it up, then claimed he didn’t; so I just recreated it as it actually was created in its original time and space. And it unmocked. Apparently matter here can’t survive in truth.
“It would follow that mental pictures here, since they also have mass, must be altered in some way in order to persist. Unmocking the s/r mind, then, would require viewing its scenes as they actually existed.”
The Fleet Admiral mocked up the same planet. It persisted as long as he continued to create it, but disappeared when he stopped. Then he mocked it up and told himself he had created it another way. It remained.
“Because alteration of creation is basic to persistence here,” the Commander in Chief said, “no one is able to take even partial responsibility for this universe. Then the matter disperses, even to atomic size. Chaos. Some job, tracing every creation to unmock the whole thing. It is an entirely separate universe.”
“I concur, sir. Incidentally, the GO names a lot of their games universes. I—sir, look at that!”
The Commander in Chief looked and was shocked speechless.
In trillions of trillions of years of experience neither had seen or even imagined the spectacle that was now floating near them. It was a mass, simply an encrusted solid rock one meter in diameter, surrounded, however, by a faint gray aura of discordant energy.
That rock was a being.
They did nothing for a moment, silent in their innermost depths, stunned. Then, together, they shot their perception into the mass. Garrett’s personal universe reeled away from contact with this area of solid dissonance and wavered on the point of total invalidation; it held, though, and in the second of holding found its relationship—senior to the mass. The Commander in Chief barely flinched.
They withdrew then, cautiously, kilometers distant, as though their presence and communication might disturb some unknown and horrible balance. Separated now, they thought. Grim, inescapable conclusions followed grim, inescapable correlations of data. Finally:
“Could he really be considered dead, sir?”
“Functionally, yes,” the Commander in Chief replied slowly. “It is true that the mass is his s/r mind totally solidified, and he’s continually creating the energy that keeps it solid—but in that creation he is dead: he can’t perceive or communicate. He certainly has no awareness of himself.”
The Commander in Chief paused. “Well, that’s undoubtedly the bottom of the scale. The ultimate of affinity—becoming the universe, the game. We’ll have to get our people out of here if we can, then go home and disconnect. We’ll worry about this universe after we handle our own.
“It’s amazing how beings, in order to have games, compromise, even fight, doing the only things they can do: surviving, knowing, being fixed in position, and most horrible of all, being simple. And so they enslave themselves to their own creations.
“Game P-U, this universe, is a trap. What’s that P mean? Ah, yes —physical. The Physical Universe. Some game!”