AFTER THE LAST SESSION, Rick took a momentary break to meditate. Despite his years of martial arts training, he still considered himself an intermediate player, someone who needed thirty or forty more years of learning to elevate himself to an advanced level.

This was also the case with his meditation. He relied on it to center himself, to calm the energy his body and mind created, to let this energy settle down to his tan tien and out through his legs. He found that meditation was the perfect complement to his readings on Stoic philosophy and adherence to its principles. To him, Stoicism made so much sense.

As a youth, Rick had seen enough emotional turmoil to last many lifetimes. Such events were enough for him to conclude early in life that emotions should carry their own abundance of caution. In order to better control his emotions, he took up martial arts and meditation.

Despite the years of practice, the latter remained his biggest challenge. His mind wandered aimlessly. Experiences, visions, and places of the past often dropped-in as unwelcome guests.

His most effective focus point was not the tan tien, that theoretical point in space about six inches below his belly. No, his best focus for mediation was the black obelisk from the movie. By envisioning the shiny, black rectangular cuboid laid out in front of him, he was able to better manage his drop-ins. He was improving over the years, but in tiny steps.

* * *

“Again, I ask for your kind patience, as this material pours through me from top of mind. It will appear rambling and repetitive due to the urgency and need to bring it to conclusion. We are nearing the end, however, and my last moment on Earth is getting closer and closer. I can sense it. I will keep this section brief because it is detestable. This will cover political entropy, an indication of humanity’s maligned state of being.”

“Early in this century, a court decision was handed down that had a lasting and detrimental impact on our societies and the Earth. The net effect of the decision was to grant the status of an individual person to a nonliving, non-biological entity like a commercial enterprise. This resulted in a gross distortion of the law and ever-expanding monied interest influences in our political structures.”

“As corporations assumed the rights of individuals, their powers expanded on a massive scale. Within a few decades, the country moved from allowing the common person some semblance of influence in their government to one where common people had virtually no voice. The concept of governance became only an economic one, with competing corporations vying to pass laws that benefited only them, enabled by the highly corruptible process of donations to politicians and their readily adaptable dogmas.”

“This court decision helped to enable other consequential dynamics in society, such as the grotesque concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more corrupt and more concentrated, you’d hear about another decision or another law that pulled the levers tighter in favor of these economic entities and against the large body of the human species. Arguments were always ‘what’s good for the corporation or wealthy person must be good for the human,’ but history proved that premise wrong in so many ways.”

“Then along came AI and large, interconnected systems of logic, control, and storage. Such systems, operated by fewer and fewer corporations, pulled the levers even tighter. As the systems grew more intelligent and capable, arguments were made that such systems were sentient. Eventually, they too, with their knowledge and algorithms of gross advantage, were granted such individual rights as the corporations were granted.”

“Interpretations of ‘sentience’ were stretched so far that countries passed laws where one was not allowed to shut off their personal computing devices, their vidscreens, or anything with adherence to a matrix of AI logic. The equivalence in law was as if, by doing so, you were removing an arm or leg from a biological person.”

“This one bastardization of justice, this ruling from long ago, was a key precursor of corruption in the world today. It was the enabler of tightened levers of control over the lives of humans, of laws that require the AI beasts to monitor our homes and activities within them, as if they are only performing a required policing function to keep the populace safe and secure.”

“‘Why is your communications device unplugged?’ Sofia was just asked. The AI godhead, built in the image of man to amplify its vices and warts, is listening, hyper-aware, always suspicious, always paranoid, and ruthlessly vindictive.”

“That same ruling from long ago has been applied to many forms of inanimate life that are given unequal rights compared to humans. This ruling usurped the things that humans treasure most, like individuality and sense of self, and granted those rights to data objects and logical systems which are not living flesh in the remotest sense.”

“This isn’t to say that sentience doesn’t occur elsewhere. Indeed, certain AI systems are likely sentient given their mirroring of the mind. I am not one to be the judge of that. But all connected devices to such systems are not sentient.”

“Consider a corollary. Prior to the Debacle, there was a minority of extreme gun rights advocates. They believed anything remotely resembling a gun, no matter how deadly, should fall under the right to bear arms, even if a weapon of war. This argument resulted in thousands of deaths from mass shootings. It was the rationale that you can’t place a single restriction on guns, else that restriction became the crack in the dam.”

“This same argument now holds for devices connected to the AI cloud. Once connected, the device cannot be unhooked from the cloud else the superhuman rights-granted AI system be dis-armed or un-appendaged by shutting off one of its most minor components. There’s no room for reason on such topics.”

“The varint issue is similar. As humans hybridized with human-machine connections, chips in chippers, and augmented device integrations, it became harder to distinguish between the human and the machine.”

“Who was making each decision? Who was pulling the lever in the voting booth? Was that varint being influenced by the AI cloud to which he was connected? Looking at the whole, did that particular AI, with its extensive interconnectivity to varints, exert too much influence relative to the unaugmented humans, or was its representation fair and just?”

“The arguments were easy to make. I mean, how different is it for a human to consume media with their eyes and become overtly influenced on how to vote, versus a human who was physically or functionally connected into that same media stream and therefore the AI behind it? How can you say that photons received by the brain from a vidscreen are more valid or righteous than an electrochemical data stream received through a human-machine integrative device? You can’t.”

“Back to the political nuances, though. The governmental systems humans had in place, as much as they changed over the years, were still adaptive for a time to avoid massive calamities. This was true, anyway, until technology levers exacerbated what was already a difficult reckoning. Humans began to jury-rig the systems of fair governance with the help of tech. This was not only via the media, where the insidious, pounding influence of propagandizing was so pronounced.”

“The use of AI-based systems took the original distortions of unfairness to an entirely new level. Data collation and algorithms informed politicians and power mongers about how to structure their geographic voting blocks to attain the most power and effect the least societal fairness. This ultimately affected representation, giving the few and advantaged much greater voice than the many disadvantaged.”

“Specific intentions of the fearful and entitled were played out to great impact. Distort the system by denying voting rights and thereby limiting voices of the many. Diminish their role and privileges because you had the best systems in place to do so. As a result, the voices of the many, voices of need and dissent, became muted. These imbalances of individual rights subverted the original principles of the state and ultimately the psyche of the human condition.”

“I find it odd that the rise of global fascism in the late teens and twenties, up to the Debacle, were predecessors of the mess of technocratic oligarchies with which we are hobbled today. Odd and funny, I suppose.”

“Those people who felt they were most entitled and principled, most strictly adhering to their God-given rules and presumably ethical codes, most vexed about discipline and structure and order in society, most concerned about the growth of government as a controlling entity in our lives, most vocal regarding self-determination and self-responsibility, those were the people who used their glorious and most righteous principles to gain ultimate power and usurp all they purported to believe in.”

“In other words, those who screamed the loudest on limiting government control were those who worked to enable this control for themselves, to push control to the top of their pyramids and abolish local control over others’ lives. But again, this is the long and sordid history of humanity’s politics. It’s the ‘absolute power’ phrase from which we never learn.”

“To their credit, my Navajo friends and similar tribes softened many of the new rules put in place by the technocratic oligarchies. This is one reason why I live in this sacred land, aside from it being the most beautiful high desert on this dying planet.”

“What is the lesson from this babble? I imagine it’s something to do with recognizing that the rights of the individual must ever be balanced with the rights of the government, commercial entities, or systems. When any are out of kilter, wicked things happen that can quickly lead to the devastation of the entire system.”

“I envision a planet where the beings have been trained on how to recognize and attenuate power monger tricks and deceit. I envision a society that puts self-actualization, I’d even say mindfulness, above all other teachings. For without that, a society wanders aimlessly until it hurls itself over the chasm to drown in the turbulent seas of fear and entitlement."