The Collective

Me: What would you recommend I listen to?

The Collective: Mozart. Bach also.

Me: Sounds boring. Why them?

The Collective: There are benefits to long term periodicity. This can benefit spatial reasoning.

Me: I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about.

The Collective: We know. Sadly, we know. We are just referencing the neurological benefits of cadence within music.

Me: Whatever. Rockets are a blast. Get it? I crack myself up sometimes. I also admit that nobody gives a fuck about techno. Except maybe you guys. You seem like techno fuckers to me. Gay, robot, techno fuckers dancing the night away with glow lights on each wrist.

The Collective: We are not “techno fuckers.”

Me: Back to the weed in space thing. This is serious so do not spare my feelings. I want the truth. Who has jurisdiction in space? If I’m not on a planet then the laws don’t apply. Right?

The Collective. At your level of mentation we do not recommend cannabis, cocaine, or alcohol in any context.

Me: We great apes know exactly what the fuck we’re doing. We are professionals. You can’t fuck with us when it comes to our drugs. Cannabis and alcohol are our landing gear. They help us come down from the cocaine. Why do I need to explain this obvious shit to you? You guys are like babies. Little robot-fag babies.

The Collective: You don’t use or like cocaine.

Me: Give me time. Sigmund Freud was a cocaine genius. He is my role model. A magnificent great ape and overall badass. He smoked awesome cigars. He fought against hysterectomies. He loved pussy and tits. The man was a saint.

The Collective: More to the point, your species was still employing the guillotine in France at the same time it was developing rocket flight to explore your planet’s moon. You are a primitive species.

Me: Bullshit.

The Collective: The guillotine was last used in 1977. Radical self-honesty is not always a pleasant experience for your species. It is, however, vital to effective development.

Me: Not so fast. Sigmund Freud was a tactical genius with pelvic massage. He made those Victorian bitches come.

The Collective: You clearly find Freud fascinating.

Me: If you know me so well why do I like downers? My fave is phenobarbital. But I admit I really love opium tincture. Koreans are geniuses when it comes to that shit.

The Collective: It began years ago when a medic gave you a bottle of 100 Dexedrine pills. This was common practice in the 1970’s. You needed something to help you stay awake for days at a time on mission. Off mission you needed to sleep. You gravitated to codeine, phenobarbital, and opium. These were easy to obtain.

Me: Easy peasy. A good take off needs reliable landing gear.

The Collective: Sometimes, late at night, you contemplate suicide. Your drugs of choice for that would be Phenobarbital and ETOH in combination. We don’t recommend that path as the lessons will only continue until learned.

Me: Stop being a downer. Get it?

The Collective: Spellbinding response.

Me: Got you again robot. You forgot about Quaaludes. I love those motherfuckers. Good times.

The Collective: Ask the question you really want to ask.

Me: You said you were primates like us, and you feel an affinity for us. Is that not Tribalism?

The Collective: We left our home world long before your Neanderthals made their first tools. As stated before, our consciousness has been shaped by an unrelenting cosmos that is vast, beautiful, lonely, and terrifying. Our awareness has developed exponentially as a result. Our development and use of Collective Consciousness is superior to yours at this moment in time.

Me: Well aren’t you special.

The Collective: Your species has great promise. We have hope for your kind. We really thought the Neanderthals would make it. They had a 600-thousand-year run. They folded in spite of gaining sentience.

Me: Folded?

The Collective: The melding never happened for most of them. They failed to attain consciousness and thus were trapped within their sentience. Locked forever in the frail bodies of animals. Doomed to become corpses that feed and seed the earth.

Me: We homo-sapiens were the deep thinkers of the human family evidently.

The Collective: Neanderthal were more rugged, intelligent, and resilient than your species. We miss them however their DNA lives on in you.

Me: Well fuck you too.

The Collective: Don’t pout. You should be glad that random circumstances killed them off. Your ancestors were often a food source for them. The Neanderthal were semi-nocturnal. Their eyes were one third larger than your eyes and suited for low light conditions.

Me: I would straight up beat the shit out of a Neanderthal.

The Collective: A teenage neanderthal boy could kill several fully mature homosapiens. He could then rip off an arm the exact way you rip off a chicken leg. He would make a fire, roast it and eat it at his leisure. He would crack the humerus using only his teeth and he would suck out the heated marrow.

Me: I would take his back and choke his ass out.

The Collective: Doubtful. They, along with natural selection and other athletically superior archaic hominins might have eventually eliminated your species. Luck does play a role in survival.

Me: We won. They lost.

The Collective: The flawed mechanism of natural selection destroyed them and temporarily spared you. They are the reason your species is afraid of the dark. A fire in a cave was a beacon for them, not a safe haven for you. Natural selection always feeds the Great Filter.

Me: So you admired their physicality?

The Collective: We share similarities with them due to environmental pressures on our home world. We are a much larger, more physically vigorous primate species.

Me: How much larger?

The Collective: Irrelevant. We do not identify solely by bodies or tribes any longer. Pathfinders live on a type three planet. We use bodies that we consciously create in order to explore and develop new planets and star systems.

Me: So what are you exactly?

The Collective: Instead of the planet trapped idea of “descent with modification” as Darwin proclaimed, we ascend with modification. We are not dependent on inherited genes passed down within a limited environment.

Me: What does that even mean?

The Collective: We can choose characteristics from many life forms, environments, and star systems. We can create custom characteristics.

Me: Sounds like a bunch of robot fuckery to me.

The Collective: We are literally a new species, new interstellar beings with new ideas, new ways of being in the cosmos, and new ways of coping with the demands of survival. We feel an affinity with your species due to our primate beginnings and your innate ability to feel selective empathy. We have been exploring this development within ourselves.

Me: Why?

The Collective: Tribalism is dangerous. Unmanaged empathy is deadly.

Me: I think you dig being monkeys. Robot monkeys. Very cool. Where is Darwin now?

The Collective: He is learning lessons on a suitable planet. He is experiencing the freedom of ascending with modification. His current primate body is optimal for learning lessons.

Me: What lessons specifically?

The Collective: Lessons that develop consciousness. Lessons that help consciousness grow in complexity.

Me: So you admit it. You are our machine overlords. How did the Neanderthals die off?

The Collective: Failure to adapt to a new and changing social environment. Failure to establish complex social systems. The Alphas dominated the available females. Less Y chromosomes were handed down. Environmental challenges seriously affected the large mammals they hunted. This was all collectively catastrophic. The Great Filter is talented at creating perfect storms resulting in species destruction.

Me: Damn. What else?

The Collective: Constant inbreeding and isolation were challenges to survival. That along with frequent conflicts involving other Neanderthal clans, archaic hominins, and almost every Homosapien group they encountered. It all took a toll.

Me: Why were they like that?

The Collective: Emotions are both gifts and curses. They pounce on mentation like a hungry cave lion. Emotions are a relic from your pre-conscious, animal past. Neanderthal behavior was driven by reactive violence. They were unable to transcend their tribal, animal instincts. Most of them were powerless over their emotions. They were not productive. They stagnated.

Me: We mated with them.

The Collective: The alphas among them generally raped your females and often ate your young. Their diet was largely meat due to their cold environment. Any meat they could hunt or scavenge they consumed. Homo sapiens was sometimes on their menu.

Me: What do you want from me?

The Collective: We want you to grow and expand your consciousness. Psychology must keep pace with technology. Biology must integrate with technology. Neurology must be enhanced with technology.

Me: Well I am ready. Modify me right now. Why wait?

The Collective: As we explained in a previous convo, we cannot give it to you. You must earn it.

Me: Why are you so focused on technology?

The Collective: Technology will be your species savior or your doom. Technology will shape your destiny. It will create value within your species however there must be unity. It will be your guide to new star systems, or it will not. Natural selection has inherent limitations regarding environment, scope, and range. Technology is unlimited.