To Hold Infinity 3

The first thing I see emerging from the fractals is a lying humanoid form, reminiscing of our own when we woke up from the grasslands, showing us what we'd have done if we'd still been human. Even while being gods, we experience its consciousness of being human as if we are still human myself. But our form is no longer made of flesh, but of a light so bright that it blackens in our vision, light that flows together from the flux around us in streams that form our limbs. When we stand up, it changes their flow in all directions, and the entire universe shifts around us in currents of chaos. We look around, and see the currents we're making turn back around toward us and drag us along with it, like just another stream of particles. But we must resist the flow to retain our form in it, even while yielding to gain our content from it.

Unable to contain all possibilities at the same time, the human tries to find a limit to hold onto, keeps trying to reach for the edges of infinity, but never gets any farther from its center, as the only one responsible for its place within it. It tries to retain a place as its own, some perfection in which change will find resolution, and the flux will not let it, forcing it out of its boundaries. When it stops flailing against the flow, it floats to the surface, where one infinite meets another. As it rises out of the water it finds dry land beneath its feet. The sky has become dark, the ground light. When it sees nothing in either but its reflection beneath it, it gets down on all fours to see what it is, but its outline fades into the background, with only its face, hands and feet showing showing. It sees in its own eyes that it knows something is about to happen, how something is about to end because it cannot go any further. Then the surface bends around me, turning the sky into a sphere with the ground around it, and my body bends backwards inside it. Then the gray sphere cracks open all around me, to open up to the entire spectrum of colors beyond. The sphere bursts apart into pieces that turn into one species of animal after another, and as they move into the spectrum, it turns into a twilit landscape. Their consciousness is part of mine though mine not of theirs.

The human is the only animal who isn't moving, and merely watches the others. It feels how something has to be watching it as it watches them, but doesn't know where to turn to face it, because it's something that's beyond it, beyond the bounds of any body, something that flows freely beyond all. It reaches out for it, and yet can never quite become it, because that would be the undoing for both of them. All of existence arises from the interaction between the infinite whole and finite parts: they need each other.

As the human turns around it becomes several, each changing through all possible human forms, and even the landscape around us is still changing. This is a process that the first dream of every transhuman takes on as it tries to differentiate form the formlessness of infinity from which it grows. What will happen next will determine who we will become from here on, and it will be nothing like what we were before. At last, somehow from all the perceptions flowing together from all over the universe, the dream decides on a particular set.

On the surface, it seems derived mostly from the memories of early transhumans, as the recent memories are still most active in our collective conscious; but the deeper into the dream we'll become immersed, the more those memories turn out to arise from memories more distant from ourselves, spreading outward through all animals, down to those of all of the tiniest animals, whose minds hum but the mantra "I exist" resonating on the back of our own. All life in the universe is connected into our own consciousness every moment, even if our consciousness is yet to grow large enough to be conscious of it all at once.

The transhumans in our dreams are three settlers on the first habitable world they found beyond the Earth. They're exploring the lands around their settlement in turns flying and hiking, and right now they're arguing which of the two they should do, as flying gets them to their destination so fast that they miss the journey. It's a perfect reflection of our own dilemma, so much greater in our life as gods. Finally they decide that it's time to stop, or they'd know what they'd want to do. Their camp, a bubble of nanorobots, is set up in instants, and they lay down floating on nanorobots to watch the twilit clouds. They look for the Earth's sun, but it's still below the horizon. It's a moment where they're particularly aware of the limbo they are in as settlers: with nanorobots doing all the work, the settlers' only job here is to wait for others to come and be there for them when they do — to be there when they go through their own existential crisis, as everyone who leaves their home world inevitably does. Even though the first migration only took place once a million people had signed up, it wasn't enough to form much of a culture as they had on Earth. 

Instead, they focused all their energy meditating on this new world, which they called simply "Nova". They knew nature could be their only inspiration, just as it was for all cultures, so it became their one purpose to seek for experiences upon which they could found one. From that very emptiness, the colonies would become a crux of new ideas in the galaxy, even as the Earth remained mostly stagnant. They had the chance to restart civilization from zero, with that lost authenticity from which it first began.

Without an existing culture to distract them from their unconscious, it became as uninhibited as a schizophrenic's, and for the first time, modern humans truly experienced something that earlier generations would've called religious, but which in the context of science took on a deeper meaning than it ever had before: for they knew that what they experienced arose within ourselves, and that gave them a power that earlier humans didn't know they had, power to become divine. By moving to another planet, humans so reached beyond everything they had been before that it was later seen as a point at which the transhuman age began.

The first transhumans were shamans, ever trying new states of consciousness by altering their neurochemistry with their biocomputers. Neuromodulation had become popular on Earth as well, but earthlings did not nearly spend as much time as the novans on it. For the novans, it was their very purpose to find the perfect state of mind, one that everyone would want to telepath with. With nothing else to experience, they sought for the most beautiful places in nature and tried to harmonize their consciousness with it.

Just as it is now for us, at first it was difficult for them to live with no other purpose than the moment itself, but when they had no other choice, its fulfillment was the only possibility that could happen. They had made their last choice when they left Earth, and now there was no turning back: they had given up too much to come here.

Having nothing else to do, the four entered into telepathy, and they were so used to doing so that they had an unspoken understanding that it was time to do so. 

What will we do now? It doesn't matter. Our mindbrain cannot do nothing. Unconsciously, it's always feeling, always thinking, always searching. We need but wait for a desire to arise from our unconscious. Until we know what we desire, their lack makes it easy to meditate on what is already here, and it will show us what is to come, because whatever is to come will always be of the same kind, always consciousness. We're sitting back to back facing the horizon of the plain. Now, still in telepathy, we lean back against each other and close our eyes, looking inside to let whatever arises in our mindbrain happen. As they dream away, our own dream falls apart into many other transhuman memories they remind us of, each reminding us of others until we no longer know where they come from, and as those memories all come together, our dream becomes more random, and fulfils its becoming a dream as we fall more deeply asleep.