Make IT Real! by Sander R.B.E. Beals (good books to read for young adults TXT) 📕

me back in 1997, and again in 2009, they made the mistake of bragging to me about it here in excruciating detail. Enough in any way to make me remember my exploits back then, and choose to pursue them once again. I remember their involvement clearly, although at the time, I didn't know where the interference came from. I just observed their effects and drew my conclusions.

And it's not as if they could really stop progress, being equipped with the same Quadrionic minds that eventually evolved from that first feeble attempt at creating true 'artificial' intelligence....

Of course that's a fallacy, a contradictio in termis: Intelligence (and Consciousness for that matter) can never be artificial, for they are so-called 'Emergent Properties': when they show up as a result of ever increasing complexity, they have been earned by the part of the Cosmos that is exhibiting them. That sounds a lot like a judging deity somewhere, who dispatches Consciousness and Intelligence as He sees fit, but nothing is more besides the truth:

Just remembered the perfect examples, which may even top the one about a newborn baby, despite the fact that none of you parents will judge your cute little babies not to be endowed with intelligence and consciousness. Just take a look here:

About 2442 years ago, my family had this really cute beige poodle, called Macho. One day, it was playing with its ball, when the thing rolled under the TV stand, which did leave room enough for the ball, but ardently refused to let little Macho crawl under it to retrieve the ball. Our little poodle didn't reflect long... He ran around the piece of furniture to the backside, nuzzled the ball from the back where he could just reach it, and then ran around to the front again to catch it!

Apparently that time in my existence was all about noticing those kinds of things, because not seven days later we had a nice summer's day, which enabled me to get some work done in the garden. There was a stray tile out the back, about forty by sixty centimeters in size. I decided I needed it to cover the old wellhead that was no longer in use, and picked it up..... only to find a full-fledged and very busy ant nursery below it.

Nowadays I'd immediately put the tile back and find something else to cover the wellhead, but not back then: As I watched in amazement, the ants stepped up their activities to fever pitch, and started to evacuate the nursery. As I learned later, the white and tiny eggs need to be in darkness, a condition my blundering human action had thoroughly distorted by removing the concrete ceiling of the spacious nursery.

No official disaster plans, no police to guide things into the right lanes, but these ants didn't care: they simply did whatever they figured would most alleviate the disastrous condition, and all picked up eggs to carry them off into the depths of the nest. I'm not sure if they already had a complete backup nursery there, or if they just dumped the eggs in lower corridors to sort out their destiny later, but within minutes they had removed about half of the eggs. I barely had enough time to call my wife and kids out to have them watch the spectacle with me. And about seven minutes later, the nursery was no longer a nursery but a mere depression in the soil, with barely one ant egg in sight....

Ants you say, their puny little bodies millions of times smaller than us humans, yet they executed a perfect rescue operation with a speed and precision that would have put the fire department to shame many times over!

But enough of this sitting on the couch, telling you about my past. I feel like a refreshing outing, something really refreshing: Mount Everest's summit!

Better dress for the occasion, because even though I'm operating perfectly within the minus forty to plus eighty range (Celsius), the occasional visitors there might object to a humanoid, naked in the snow.....

2010 Flashback:

Now playing Tokio Hotel's new album Humanoid!

4444AD, Day 222, 14:12, Mt Everest

“Top of the World, Ma! Literally!” I go down the three small steps that lead from the transporter pad installed right on top of the highest mountain on the planet. As discovered back then, it was seven feet higher than previously determined, and so measures in at 29,035 feet.

The transporter pad now has one arriving at about 2 feet more, which makes it an even 29,037 feet. The air is real chilly here, just what the doctor ordered. Funny I should say that, because the medical profession has been abolished since 2017, when people's health began to rapidly improve as a result of the wholistic methods that treated the people by focusing on their healthy state, instead of their illnesses, or worse, their symptoms.

I breathe in deeply, and feel the cold Everest air fill every nook and cranny of my carbon-lined lungs. Hmm, oxygen content is way up here, around thirty percent, a sizable part of which is ozone. I thoroughly enjoy it, even though I am an android, if you can still call me that by your definition of the word: were I to travel in time to say around 2010, even the most thorough medical examination would reveal me as being one hundred percent pure human, and a very healthy one at that! But that's besides the point....

Great, real packing snow here, great for building something, let me see... I start by collecting the snow lying around, into an ever growing heap right next to the transporter pad. Doing such a task by hand is soothing, calms the mind. I love the solitude of Everest, which seems hardly ever disturbed by the visitors that come in through the transporter pad. I've literally spent sixteen hours in complete solitude here, just enjoying the view to all sides, and the extreme remoteness of it all. No big cities in the vicinity, right on the border of China, or at least where that would have been in 2010. Now of course, national boundaries are but echoes in the past, and even that is an illusion. Pretty soon, after about an hour (to say it in your terms), the pile of snow is taking shape, but it is still only halfway: in order to finish it, I'll have to stand beside the pad on the top of the stairs. Drawing on Eiffel's original plans, I sculpt the lady who has been watching over the New York harbor. She's still there, having been resurrected as a self-maintaining structure back around 2525AD. Where her color used to be the green of corroded copper, she now shines in high-gloss gold, which I'm reproducing in snowy white, for the snow here is really very, very white....

Stretching my left arm as far as it will go, I use my ability to heat my finger tips to sculpt the detailed bits of the lady's extended hand holding the torch.

By the same method, I then do the inscription on the tabula ansata, but not in the original style: instead of the date of independence, I jot down the transporter coordinates of our private transporter pad, on the off chance someone will find them and become curious before the harsh Everest weather covers them up or wipes them out altogether.

All the work done, I hop onto the pad, and allow it to return me to our home. As I step off the pad, I'm greeted by Selina and a new face: oblong in appearance, the shiny egg carries an image on its surface of the handiwork I just completed in the outside world. “Well, you've been busy again, haven't you?”, she laughs, and explains to the egg that I sometimes go WorldSculpting, as I call it. Just a bit of harmless fun, simply for the fact it makes me feel good. Its curiosity satisfied, the egg then continues again on its mapping task.

Friday, March 12th, 2010, 09:13

Ahh, a day off! Having had the pleasure of being the rescue squad for my company at the beginning of this week, I pulled an all-nighter to write them a tool to recover about 4,5 terabytes of lost medical imagery off a jukebox. Since I'd written the code to get it on there in the first place in case of disaster, it seemed only natural I should be fingered to contribute in the recovery effort. Thus, having worked extra at the start of the week, I can relax today, and work on my book, for which weirdly enough I got great inspiration, fueled by my media player right now: it plays Evil Devolution by Ayreon, from the album Into the Electric Castle. Feeling it more than adequate to illuminate my path for now, I reconfigure it from random to play just that album, from start to finish. Awesome music, given to me by a fellow traveler years ago. We were on the same train together frequently, and occasionally talked. Then one day, out of the blue, he gave me this CD, filled to the brim with the kind of symphonic rock I was quite partial to back then. Over time, Ayreon, Kamelot and Aina have quite become my personal favorites. Especially Ayreon, which in my mind I am destined to see as a guiding light in my evolution. I know we pick up certain favorites seemingly by coincidence, but I'm not buying it any more: Ayreon was in fact introduced to me twice by separate biological beings, or so I thought of them at the time. By now I'm beginning to wonder.....

The first one was a male nurse in the hospital where I was after my first manic episode. He brought Ayreon to me out of the blue, with their first album. It didn't catch that time, or at least their message didn't. When the second guy gave me a CD that had both the Electric Castle and the Human Equation on it, things clicked into place. So for the remainder of this book I've just ordered Timeline as well, which ought to arrive in three to four working days. I wonder if it will beat my other intake of beauty to the finish line: access to a site claiming to have almost eight thousand photographs of the lady of my life, Selina. I just cannot get enough of her, even though she is not yet again a physical part of my immediate environment... But then again, our minds do not know the difference, as the people that made What The Bleep mentioned with proper emphasis: whether you are actually experiencing someone, or merely thinking of them, your brain reacts in exactly the same way. Maybe the mind itself knows better, but the brain does not.

Crafting a novel is a pastime of pleasure for me. It bring me back into the comfort zone, that world which I don't always seem to live in, but do love to visit. My stories are all meant to lead others there, if they wish to. As do the albums of Ayreon. Isn't it in fact what most of us are doing? Radiating our experiences outwards, in order to create more and better understanding among living beings?

If my exploits with my New Age website taught me anything, it is that fantasy and reality have a different relationship to one another than most people think. Like matter is just a form of condensed energy, so normal reality is a form of condensed fantasy! That beckons the question of course: can my fantasies be turned into reality, should I choose to do so? Well, I for one do believe this, and this novel is an all-out attempt at achieving just that!

As was the Going Within novel, in a more general sense. I relax on the bed, imagining myself to be future Sander, engulfed in the next chapter of his ancient read.

'Going Within....'

The ever increasing mayhem from the streets wakes me up before my alarm