So What You're Saying Is... Part III

BARBARA: Defragmentation won't take more than a few minutes, so quit whining about it.

ROBERT:: Quit whining? You're going to relieve us of our belief in God because that was some sort of slip up on your part... and life before limb is all you can say when I ask just what the hell you mean by defragmentation? Quit whining? Do you have any idea how people are going to take this news.

BARBARA: Robert, you need to understand that people aren't going to get that chance.

ROBERT: Why the hell did you pick me, another random journalist out of the thousands who descended on Sheboygan, just to tell me that I'm not even going to tell the people this? None of it makes sense!

BARBARA: Listen Rob, you know how a doctor will tell a kid to look at a poster of a kitten or something right before he gives them a booster shot?

ROBERT: Oh dear God I don't care for where this is going...

BARBARA: Frankly, we asked you aboard under false pretenses.  Admittedly, we chose you because our initial reads did show you to be a bit more integrally connected to the noetic strata of your species.  That and you look nice in a pair of chinos. But it isn't your work that got you inside the krillia field.  We needed a single subject to prime the defragmentation process.

ROBERT: Oh shit.  I knew it was something like that.

BARBARA: See.  Now you're being a big boy.  If we had asked some bible swinging fundamentalist aboard their internal psychomimetic architecture would interrupt the signal.  Yours didn't.  Which is good for everybody.

ROBERT: 'Didn't.' Well that's past tense.  I'm not quite sure how we've passed that first hurdle where you use me as some kind of test monkey.

BARBARA: Robert *sigh* what you should know at this point is that you came and left, properly defragmented days ago.  This conversation is taking place outside the body you think of as yours.  This you, the pre defrag Robert Mitchens, is just a recording. A copy of a pre defrag human.  We need you to sort of 'take the pulse' of the noeto-mimetic strata of humanity as the process sets in.  Without a persona recorded and suspended in a coherent phase stasis we can't connect and calibrate our work.

ROBERT: Dear Lord...

BARBARA: There.  That sort of response is indicative of the kind of mimetic atavisms we keep seeing.  Here you are, an irreligious man, an agnostic, yet, when confronted by the possibility of losing your personal attachment to four dimensional sensory input, you panic.

ROBERT: Well, I'd be remiss to say that you've trapped this me in a sort of limbo. This is a kind of balmy Hell, even though there is lemonade. Do you realize that?

BARBARA: Of course! But try to remember that you, the real you who is still out there exploring and living out his timeline, is very much free.  'You' are just a shadow of him, a transparency.  Don't get so upset, there isn't anything that can change that.

ROBERT: So you're telling me not to panic.  You've got me trapped in what appears to be a small parlor in a victorian home with a lovely view of Lake Winnebago having a chat with a disembodied voice who calls herself 'Barbara' for the rest of eternity and my best bet right now is to stay calm? Are you serious?

BARBARA: Robert, my 'species' is significantly more advanced than that of mankind.  The difference in evolutionary progress between humans and squid is roughly equivalent to the distance between my kind and your own. You won't even know the difference once I'm no longer speaking with you. It will be just like a deep sleep.  When I return, you will only remember as much of this chat as I choose you to.  It's not eternity, it's just another night.

ROBERT: Well, that's a relief, Plato was right once again.  May I ask how things are going back on earth, assuming I'm not there... or anywhere really?

BARBARA: Things are picking up, finally.  The nonsense bits of delusion and dissonance that individual members of your species have been carrying like viruses are more or less scrubbed out, and the empathic channel throughput has multiplied tenfold.  On the whole we've got you out of the woods.  I think your kind will come through it with only a few million more casualties.

ROBERT: A few million more! What are you saying? Millions more?  How many have died in this, this, this genocidal surgery of yours?

BARBARA: Oh don't misunderstand.  We aren't killing anyone.  These are people killing one another as the effects of dissonance stripping leave them essentially psychotic with wayward zealotry and homicidal indifference.  It was already going on.  Do you think the past hundred years of war and genocide was normal?  No, Robert, we're just streamlining that process, believe me, half as many will die doing this our way. And in the end the planet will actually survive the evolutionary step you have been faltering at for about two thousand years.

ROBERT: You didn't answer my question.

BARBARA: Bob, about six million are dead or dying right now.  The process should be over in another five days.  If it weren't for us, you shaved apes would have done yourselves in and taken ninety percent of the Earth's biodiversity with you. You would have set the planet's evolution back another one hundred and ten million years.  Think about that.

ROBERT: You make it all sound so quaint.  A few million dead.  Am I out there somewhere, dead or dying?

BARBARA: You are doing fine. Now get some rest. Good night Robert.