Chapter 419: So Many Options; Introduction

Friday, July 25, 2008 and on

The Universe is a truly AMAZING place. It offers countless sources of beauty, wonder and excitement. It has a depth of ... I'm sorry, but you'll never understand; your minds are WAY too small. But take it from me, you're living in an awesome creation.

You'll have to take it from me because I'm not letting you follow me. I've already adjusted the laws of physics so the W-Dimension synchronization process is weaker. Partly because I want the dimensions to be able to diverge more so I can see what happens when the ideas I have are put into action, and partly because I don't want you to follow me. The Universe isn't big enough for two gods, let alone millions of them. My path to godhood is now closed to 'everyone', whether human or any other minded species. Joining me in godhood will be by invitation only.

Fictional stories usual end with: " ... and they lived happily ever after." This is my autobiography though. There are a few similarities, but there are mostly differences between this and stories:

• The "they" is a terribly inaccurate simplification. In most stories, "they" is a guy and a girl. For me, it's not even a guy and several girls. There are trillions of me and hundreds of billions of my loved ones, many of whom don't know it yet as I'm only just starting to contact them. That's a LOT of "they"!

• The "lived happily" will be accurate because I'll be making sure of that. There will be a lot of living and much happiness for my loved ones and me.

• The "ever after" is an understatement, as it will be "forever after."

• By far the most profound difference between this autobiography and fictional stories is that this is my Genesis. We've reached the end of my ascendancy, but only the very beginning of my godhood. This document is ending but my fun is only just beginning.

I'm not going to be content to walk off into the sunset. I can make my own planets and suns, and I aren't going to be satisfied by a simple stroll along one of them toward the other - I have FAR bigger plans. The Universe is mine and there are SO many options for what I can do with it. There are a finite number of w-dimension instances, about a trillion of them which contain human life on Earth and quite a few that don't although they don't interest me much at the moment. Each dimension is billions of light-years across, so I have a HUGE playground. With a bit of preparation I can even trigger the Universe to create fresh w-dimensions, initiating what you currently think of as the Big Bang in each of them. They'd take a long time to coalesce enough to be useful. I'll have the time, but I have no use for fresh dimensions yet. Maybe later.

My future will consist of activities on four levels, from the very large scale down to the smallest:

1. I am the GOD OF THE UNIVERSE! Its galaxies down to its atoms, and certainly including its creatures, are all in my domain. The Universe contains a huge number of intelligent alien species and far more unintelligent ones. I have power over them all, but I have yet to use that power for anything other than starting to get to know them. I'm choosing to do that slowly simply because it's much more fun that way. One thing I have plenty of is time.

2. There is one tiny volume of the Universe where I already know enough to immediately start intervening. I don't have to study humanity before deciding if anything needs to be done as I've got a list that I've already started acting on, plus I have a large number of ideas that I want to try out. Humanity is in for some surprises. Expressed more elegantly: I am ready to start guiding humanity toward a better future. I'm not sure what "better" actually means, but I intend to start finding out. I've got quite a few opinions about what it isn't, and I'll be acting to get rid of some of those immediately.

3. At this point of my life - the end of my ascendancy and beginning of my godhood - my loved ones are uppermost in my thoughts. ALL that is good in my life was made possible because of them, and I will very much enjoy rewarding them for that. Death can't claim me now, and I will prevent it claiming my loved ones too, for as long as they wish. I will be ensuring that they have very long, very happy and extremely interesting lives.

4. I will also ensure that I have an EXTREMELY interesting life. I now have access to a phenomenal amount of information and can perform an incredible amount of thinking, but I am still young so have much to learn about how to think, how to gain maturity, how to grow into my responsibilities, etc. Having said that, I am also looking forward to having a lot of fun along the way - if a god can't enjoy himself, who can? That's not a facetious comment. A god CAN have fun. Apart from anything else, if my fun causes problems, I have the power to fix them.

In terms of the first of the above bullet points, I have very recently been sending hundreds of billions of my minds out into the Universe to begin learning about it. I can jump my minds directly to specific places, such as where alien minds are, but I want to explore physical space too. I've always been interested in science fiction and now I'm living it by boldly sending billions of my minds where no human mind has gone before. They are already providing me with many wondrous experiences, but I am not yet knowledgeable enough to interact with alien species. I'm sure that I'll become an actively involved god as letting nature blindly take its course seems a very poor process, not to mention a boring one. Guiding the Universe intelligently seems much better. Universe-wide unguided evolution will be allowed to have some influence, but I don't think I'll let it dominate the future. I have the advantage of being in control of many dimensions, so if Species A wipes out Species B in one dimension, I can ensure that B survives in others, just in case B later develops into something that makes me proud that I saved them. If they make me proud enough, I can re-seed the dimensions they were earlier wiped out of. However, discussing such activities is getting ahead of myself and they aren't suitable topics for this, my Genesis.

The rest of this chapter and the next will mostly be about the second level listed above: your new god's interactions with humanity. As fascinating as the entire Universe is, humanity currently has the greatest meaning to me, so you'll be receiving a great deal of my attention. I can have as much "attention" as I want merely by creating new minds, so I can guarantee that I won't be too busy to make my presence felt on many of your Earths. It'll be fun to see how different ideas of mine play out. Some of them won't please many people, especially because my actions will sometimes be pretty damned unmysterious, but you'll have to get used to whatever changes I make in your dimension. Humanity is under new management and I don't like many of the usual ways of doing things. One thing's for sure, my approach will be very different than that of whatever figment of imagination you last thought was your god, as I'll actually be doing things.

After the next chapter, most of the rest of my autobiography will be describing the start of my new interactions with my loved ones, that being the third bullet point above. They're very important to me so I have very many thoughts about them. As you'll read, my ideas for my loved ones will naturally sometimes overlap with our interactions with the rest of humanity, often in unusual ways.

The fourth bullet point above is about me. As I'm common to all the other points, you'll pick up plenty about my intentions from the chapters devoted to those discussions, so there are only a few specific comments about me in the final chapter.

Before I start listing specific ideas and plans that I have, I'll make clear that there's one major principle that's going to guide my actions more than any other: variety. I've already mentioned that I've weakened the W-Dimension synchronization process in part to permit greater variation across dimensions. Some of those variations will be the result of random chance, but many of them will come from deliberate choices and manipulations of mine; initially just on Earths, but eventually throughout the entire Universe. There are three reasons for that:

1. It'll be a lot more fun for me. I have prodigiously expanded my minds' capacities so we can follow each others activities, even though there are more than two trillion of us so far. I obviously don't want us to do the same thing two trillion times! It is far more fun to do many, many different things simultaneously.

2. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm new to this godhood business and I have a lot to learn. I'd hate to wipe out human civilization or make other calamitous mistakes in every dimension at the same time - those sorts of mistakes are hard to recover from (not impossible, just annoyingly hard). I'm going to create a great deal of variation to make sure that all my eggs aren't in the same basket.

3. I have a suspicion that there is no possibility of knowing what the single "Right" approach is even for a god. Life is too complex, the future too unknown, and judgment too dependent on the perspective of the judge. To give a simple example, it would only take me a second to double the life expectancies of all humans. Would doing that be a Good thing or a Bad thing? At first thought it seems Good. Think about it some more and you'll see that it has some very serious problems and would also cause a great deal of harm, from retirement homes going into bankruptcy, to the risk of massive population explosions in many countries leading to runaway pollution, resource depletion, religious riots, civilization collapse, etc. I will, however, guess that it'd probably do more good than harm, in which case should I wave my hand and make human life expectancy 20 times longer? Or 200 times? Or 2,000,000 times? I don't know the answers to these questions. I have innumerable options open to me, many of which interact with each other, but if I can't tell how much to change a single aspect of human life, how can I possibly tell whether a thousand changes will work together beneficially or not? What I can do is try lots of things in different dimensions, see which ideas or combinations of ideas give poor or good results, and make the necessary adjustments throughout the Universe. I'm going to be a "By the seat of my pants" kind of god, as opposed to the type that thinks He's infallible right from the get go. I will often be authoritative though; you shouldn't forget that.

Let me start by saying that what follows are just my initial thoughts. I've only been a god for a few minutes and it's going to take quite a lot longer than that for me to get used to my new status. I will admit that some of my initial ideas are silly and possibly even childish, nonetheless they are my ideas and as the purpose of this autobiography is to help you understand your new god, I'm going to describe them. Feel free to laugh at them or me if you wish - I'm not a god who's going to be offended by that. If I tell you to do something then you'd better do it, but you're free to hold whatever opinion of me you want. Heck, I don't even care if you worship false idols, making me probably the first god in human history to have that attitude.

^

In some w-dimensions, I'll do nothing other than post my autobiography on your internet and wait to see how humanity chooses to react to it. If you're reading this, then the ball's in your court. I'm not even going to tell you what the game is, although it's a safe bet that it's not football.

The dimensions in which I do this will mostly be those in which Mark Anderson never achieved anything noteworthy, so mostly where he remained single-minded or zero-minded (dead) until very recently. In accordance to my overarching "Variety Principle", in some dimensions I'll put a kind of low-level fog in people's minds so they'll be unable to notice that any of their reality confirms any of this story, so those humanities will be uninfluenced in their decisions, and belief in me will be a matter of faith, which amuses me. In other dimensions, I'll allow small similarities to be noticed, and in yet other dimensions the only restraint I'll put on people will be to stop them annoying my loved ones. In some of these dimensions I might decide that "Time's up!" and I'll sort the unbelievers from the winners. That'll happen at different times in different dimensions so some of them won't be for hundreds or even thousands of years, if ever, but some will be only weeks from now.

^

One thing I want to do a lot of, in many different ways to maximize my enjoyment, is to pursue a career as a scientist. Julia, Prof and I have talked about this a great deal over the last year or so, and we're all looking forward to it very much. Being left free to pursue many different versions of that career is a large part of the reason why I want us to have low-key lives in so many dimensions. Where "low-key" includes being known as the world's greatest scientist. Compared to be known as the Universe's god, being a hundred times greater than Einstein is low key.

I'm going to advance humanity in many different ways across the dimensions. In some the advances will be biological, in others "physical" (as in Physics. I'm not sure why "biology" goes to "biological" easily, but "physics" takes on a new meaning when it becomes "physical". I guess English must have some faults. Maybe I should do something about that). Getting humanity into space is my most eagerly anticipated ambition. As a god I could do that trivially easily - it's as simple as materializing easily used spaceships in parking lots all over the planet - but I want to do it 'normally'; as if I really was a scientist making breakthroughs and developments. Julia, Prof and I will enjoy that. We've got all the time in the world, and even beyond that, so there's no great hurry, except from our impatience to enjoy it.

Being a god takes all the challenge out of that, but I'll create some Marks with restricted abilities to understand the Universe - say with the equivalent of thirty two minds - so they'll have to do their own R&D. I'll let them have their own grapevine so they can externally network, as I'd been so looking forward to. All the Full Marks will share the Restricted Marks' emotions, so we'll enjoy their lives. I'll be creating all sorts of different Marks - some of them VERY different - so we can all enjoy a multiplicity of different lives.

One thing I will use my godhood for in most of these dimensions is to make sure that the advances those Marks make will be implemented in ways that prevent governmental interference (only in "most dimensions" as my Variety Principle requires me to allow some humanities the opportunities to fuck up if they choose to. Who knows, maybe some of those dimensions will surprise me by excelling). Because I believe that Government interference would be contrary to the best interests of humanity, in most dimensions I'll be restricting or rendering impotent its involvement in Julia's and my companies' successes. In each of these dimensions, we'll have a research and commercialization company that will be very successful, become very rich and powerful, and will develop and control some wonderful technologies. Before too many more years, those technologies will enable our company to get into space and set up self-sufficient operations "out there", despite the Government's interference and desire for control. I'm sure it'll try VERY hard to wrest control of our company's technologies and operations from us, and I'm even more sure that we'll have a lot of fun frustrating its attempts. The Restricted Marks may or may not know it, but they'll have God on their side and actively spying on every one of my enemies, so the goodies are certain to win in the end, and in ways that often show up the Government's immorality.

It's going to be a great deal of fun to do an end run around the Government of the magnitude I've got in mind: light-years. Except when I allow otherwise for experimental purposes as part of my Variation Principle, the US's and all the Earth's other governments will be left behind impotently on Earth while humanity expands outward under the management of Julia's and my company. We'll be acquiring and using all the 'astronomical' resources, making all the First Contacts, dealing with all the alien species including acquiring their technologies, introducing them - the new technologies and the aliens themselves - to Earth, all as if the US Government was irrelevant. It'll be many millions of wonderful adventures for us, offering us many millions of possibilities for how we do it in different dimensions. Even just how we govern humanity starting from its expansion through to its creating innumerable settlements throughout our galaxy offers many interesting possibilities.

With inspiration and methodologies supplied by all the Universe's many alien species, there are some VERY weird but extremely useful biological advances that I could pretend to invent, taking humanity in directions completely unforeseen. That'd be a lot of fun too, especially because the religious bigots will have their (lack of) feathers very badly ruffled by it. I've never understood why so many people get so rabid at the thought of humans being genetically modified. To me it seems like an excellent idea to make ourselves more physically and mentally capable, and diversification is nearly always beneficial in itself, if only by making life more interesting. Isn't life more interesting because we have two sexes? So wouldn't three or more be even better? How about branching humanity into several species? There are lots of interesting possibilities.

One biological advance that I will apparently be quickly discovering or acquiring from aliens in many dimensions, is the secret to immortality. If that is publicly known to exist, then all my loved ones and I can openly live forever. It would be particularly useful to give that to Prof and Vanessa before too many more years, although there are many other ways to keep them alive, as you'll read later.

It's extremely easy for me to grant anyone immortality: it just needs me to repair and tune their body properly, memorize it, and from time to time move their mind into a fresh reproduction of the snapshot, disposing of the old body in the usual way: I turn it into energy and send it to the Dark Energy reservoir. [By the way, there is no such thing as Dark Matter in the sense that there's Dark Energy. Your scientists talk about it, and they are failing to find some of the Universe's matter, but they'll either find it eventually or find the errors in their calculations.]

Despite immortality being so easy, I don't expect that many people will get it. As will nearly always be the case with everything I'm going to be doing, there will be variations across the dimensions because that's more interesting, will teach me more about how to steward humanity, and it maximizes my chance of finding what works well - so in a few dimensions I'll make more people immortal, and in a few cases, everyone.

I once told a reporter off for thoughtlessly using the word "immortal", which is a mistake I've just made myself. Giving it proper thought, I can implement immortality in different ways: bodies truly do become indestructible or are maybe easily replaced, or maybe they'd only be safe from diseases and decay, or maybe bodies remain exactly as they are now but their owners' minds are immortal, such as by having the mind of a just-died body appear in the next baby to be born. I'll try them all and other variations a few times. You don't know enough about how my new level of abilities work to imagine how I'd do what I'm talking about, but how I could stage-manage those things will become clear from later examples of my interactions with humanity.

To use our biological development company as an example for how I could introduce immortality, what will happen is that Julia's and my company will accidentally stumble on the immortality formula, will give it to ourselves and our loved ones, and will publicly announce it. Using my godly powers I can easily arrange for the CIA, FBI, or some such agency - I don't really care which of them gets the blame - to raid our lab. Heck, I could have three different agencies launch missions on the same night and have them meet and attack each other, turning their operations into a comedic clusterfuck. During the raid(s), the Government's illegal heavy handedness will result in critical data and samples being destroyed, and it will subsequently prove impossible to reproduce the formula.

Meanwhile Prof's and Vanessa's bodies will have become amazingly youthful and all my loved ones will be in superb physical condition, forever. I'll give interviews in which I'll say, "Oh well, what a pity for the rest of humanity that our government acted so illegally. The voters of this country really should do something about reforming the political system so that sort of thing doesn't happen again." Unlike our first lawsuit against the DHS and CIA when my lost immortality was only a possibility, it'll be very interesting to see how the public react when they think they TRULY did miss out on being immortal and the proof of that is walking around in extremely healthy bodies among them. I can even make them so apparently healthy that if I allowed assassins to kill them, they'd heal and come back to life.

Or the restricted access to immortality can be achieved by aliens arriving on Earth, publicly appear and inquire who the world's greatest scientist is (that'll be me by then). They'll quickly discover who and where I am, then zip across to my home before the Government has had time to arrange to fuck it up. I'll do this at a time that all my loved ones are at home and with a news team handy. The alien saucer will arrive, an alien will emerge, my whole family will greet it, and it'll offer me a dozen or so vials of immortality elixir to be given to whoever I want, as a no-strings-attached gift to humanity. I'll immediately pass them out to my loved ones and we'll chug them down in front of the camera before anyone can interfere. The alien will wave its tentacles goodbye, leave, and my loved ones and I will live forever. Thus the world will see a justification for our long lives, allowing us to live them openly. Some or all of our descendants would inherit immortality too. I imagine our descendants will gain benefits in proportion to their quality of character, but that remains to be seen; I'm flexible about issues like that, especially as I imagine my descendants' mothers will have strong opinions on the matter.

It might be fun to have various numbers of spare vials in some dimensions, just to see what happens. I'd fill them with some very exotic liquids - for which there are many sources throughout the Universe - to disguise their being irrelevant.

Or as a third completely different approach, Archangel Michael can return and grant immortality to all my loved ones.

Whatever the initial scenario is, I'm sure there'll be all sorts of crap we'll have to put up with. I'll hide the godly interventions I'll have to make to keep us safe, and eventually the public will cool down. Even if we have crap for several years, being able to openly live forever will be worth it. I haven't yet explained how powerful I am. You'll understand more about that later, but for now take it from me that I can EASILY keep us safe. I can even manage the situation so it doesn't spiral out of control, for example, I can prevent another batch of evil CIA scientists kidnapping any of my loved ones to experiment on, and do it in such a way that no one will get suspicious. If necessary, I can simply edit their memories of any suspicious events.

That should be enough examples to give you the idea that our lives have a huge number of fascinating, bizarre and even silly - but not without value - options. Living forever, being able to try of all sorts of ideas in different dimensions, our being protected by a god with awesome powers, etc., permit a near-infinity of interesting experiences.

I'm generally not an assertive guy. Even with the power and knowledge that I have now, that's still the case. Maybe that'll change in time, but for the foreseeable future my interventions will mostly be by way of creating reasons for people to change, rather than forcing them to change, or directly changing them myself by editing their minds. To illustrate the sort of approach I'm currently preferring, I'll mention something my experiences have made me very bitter about: government immorality. That's high on my list of things that need fixing. There are many ways to encourage governments to behave more morally, and I'm looking forward to trying many of them out on different Earths.

One way is for me to provide outsiders that point out problems, so in some w's I'll have aliens arrive on Earth. Sometimes they'll be real aliens, and sometimes fakes: nothing more than recently created weird bodies with my minds installed in them. The following is too childish but it'll give you the idea quickly: I could have a spaceship recognizably similar to Star Trek's Enterprise arrive in orbit around Earth, except it'll be crewed by aliens on a mission to go where no blurgy-thing has gone before. They could judge Earthmen in the highly moral tone used in the TV series, and find humanity sadly lacking. I expect there'd be lots of alien "tut-tutting" and sad shaking of heads (if I give blurgy-things heads and the ability to "tut" with them). It'd be fun to see how humanity reacts to having its appalling morals pointed out, and seeing an amazing opportunity disappear over the horizon at warp speed because humanity didn't measure up.

I wouldn't do anything so obviously fake, but there are many ways the same lesson could be imparted in a far more believable manner. Ambassadors of the Galactic Council could, after their fact-finding tour - during which they will have uncovered horrendous examples of massive government immorality in many countries - sadly tell the United Nations that Earth-people are too uncivilized to join the Galactic Federation. They'll suggest, "We'll stop by in another thousand years to check. You can apply again then if you believe you're moral enough, although based on what I've seen I doubt you ever will become civilized." If during their tour, the ambassadors had demonstrated technologies that people salivated for, which they took away when they left, then there'd be a great deal of motivation for change.

In some dimensions I'll experiment by providing some coercive motivation, such as by having an Ambassador state, "One of our rules is that when we contact newly space-capable species, they are protected for a period of time equivalent to 143.2 of your years. If you have not proved yourself civilized enough to join the Federation by the expiry of that time, then its protection will be removed. Federation rules will no longer constrain how our member species interact with yours. Some of them are very aggressive and you would probably find yourselves being treated in ways similar to those in which you treat the animals of your planet. I suggest you try hard to civilize yourselves."

In some dimensions I'll use a shorter timeframe so that the children who are alive at the time of the Ambassador's visit will still be alive at the deadline, providing their parents with more motivation to force change. It'll be interesting to see how humanity responds, especially if the Ambassador uncovered a large list of very common human immoralities. They could be as wide-ranging as: "It's immoral of your religions to take money from people when there is no such thing as a God" (my tongue will be in my cheek for that one), through to things like, "All countries which are immorally occupying others should stop doing so." Given that all the world's largest countries are currently doing that, I wonder how they'll react, and how they'll handle the countries that fail to react. At another extreme, the Ambassador could comment, "It's immoral for your corporations to have profit as their goal rather than being beneficial to life on your planet." There are LOTS of possibilities to force people to examine humanity's current practices and to change them in positive ways.

In some other w's I'll be using a very different approach: I'll be declaring my godhood. That'll be another good way of pointing out people's immorality because that's what priests do most of the time. Sometimes I'll pretend to be another Jesus or even the Father himself. I think my assuming a Christian persona will probably be boring, but it's sort of obligatory, isn't it? Perhaps having some awe-inspiring, flaming angels flying around as my messengers might liven things up sufficiently, especially if they dress as blatantly as Archangel Michael did, regardless of their gender. Speaking of which, I might make myself a Black female in some dimensions, just for the fun of teasing narrow-minded people. Or perhaps even a hermaphrodite, to REALLY twist some panties.

I'm more looking forward to making my appearance in other guises. Allah should be enjoyable as I have a lot of respect for many of the Muslim values that were practiced several hundred years ago (I've read a lot of history, and many of the people's attitudes at that time were more praiseworthy than today's norm). Making my entrance by rising up out of the Black Stone of the Kaaba during the Haj, while sitting on a flying carpet, should get people's attention. I'll have to suppress the riot that would inevitably follow, but that'll be easy.