Chapter 422: Refuge's Stables and Other Aliens

Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued)

I teleported us to the stable. "Stable" is misleading because internally it's more like a very large, luxurious, natural animal den, although with some internal walls, shelves, etc.

I told Donna, "Your new pets are outside."

Donna ran for the door.

I told everyone else, "Follow her quickly because you'll enjoy seeing the expression on her face."

We exited into a lovely highland plateau. It was covered in thick grasses and areas of multicolored wildflowers. To the south and west the land sloped down, allowing us to see a series of heavily forested hills descending for many miles away from us, with a major river and some small lakes among them. The eastern side of our plateau offered a gentle climb through a beautiful forest, and the north side was a cliff face, over which poured a substantial waterfall.

I'd created the waterfall myself, and had developed the pool at the fall's base into the perfect swimming hole. I was proud of it so I'll digress to describe it more fully.

There's an unnaturally soft, sandy beach on one side of the pool, surrounded by shade trees which provided a variety of chilled, refreshing fruit. There's also a spring in the trees which produces nicely chilled pure water, one of the nearby trees conveniently having leaves perfectly shaped for cups. Depending on which of the many colors of leaf is chosen, the water put inside it will acquire different flavors; the darker the color of leaf, the more flavor it'll impart.

Next to the beach is an easily climbed rock face that provides several diving platforms and a near-frictionless trough on one side, giving what is initially a waterless waterslide. That goes around and through the rock. There's a teleportation gate in a dark tunnel that can unnoticeably jump each rider into one of four other and increasingly extreme waterslides. Whether a rider jumps, and to which chute, depends mostly on their state of mind. The four alternative chutes are built in the waterfall's cliff face to give much more height for longer, faster, wetter runs. They have lengths with an open side along the face of the cliff, with the most extreme of them having an invisible section which exits the cliff completely, extends over the swimming hole and around the fall before reentering the cliff face again. It has a section where the tube doesn't exist so the rider is in freefall for a few seconds before being gently caught again, and it has loops and corkscrew sections too. That ride randomly jumps the person from section to section so they never know what's coming next, and I also have gravity doing weird things in different parts of it. It's a REALLY hairy ride, so Donna will LOVE it! The five chutes terminate near each other, delivering their riders into the swimming hole conveniently close to the path that leads back to the start of the ride again. Once they're used to them, I'll let the riders consciously choose their rides. If it proves popular, I can create many more chutes for them to try, making them as long and as exciting/scary/freaky as the riders want.

In the middle of the large swimming hole is a small island. It can be swum to, or walked to across the pretty little bridge I built. It has its own little beach, beautifully scented flowers, and a large, idyllic, moss-covered 'bed' in the middle, just in case I can think of a use for one of those. The island also has a hot-water spring that makes a wonderfully natural hot tub, large volumes of the hot water overflowing into the surrounding pool so different parts of that offer us different temperatures depending on their distance from that overflow.

The swimming hole's details were too far away to be seen from the stable but they wouldn't have been noticed even if they'd been closer because there was a much greater distraction in front of us. When Donna had run out of the stables, she'd been gobsmacked by the sight of a family of Pegasus-inspired creations of mine. They were eating grass in a loose group in the open meadow about a hundred yards from their stable's door. Most of us missed Donna's first sighting of her new pets (not me, because I have sight blobs), but her face was still gobsmacked when we emerged.

I'd taken my inspiration from Pegasus rather than unicorns - which little girls are meant to like - because Donna had never shown any such liking. Donna loves speed and adventure, so sitting on the back of a Pegasus-type creature while its wing muscles beat powerfully under her thighs as they fly at high speed will thrill her immensely.

The stallion was about 50% larger than an Earth stallion, which made him look HUGE to Donna because she's used to thinking that an extra two or three hands of height make for a large horse. Other immediately noticeable features were its long, feathered wings and its forequarters being covered with golden hair. similar to a lion's mane. Although not apparent yet, the mane was tentacle-like and would grasp the rider's legs firmly enough to keep her in position even if flying upside-down or in an outside loop. The creatures were also exceptionally good looking, in horsy ways.

There were six mares who were silver-colored, reduced-scale versions of the stallion, being about the same size as a large Earthly stallion. One Pegasus stallion to six mares had seemed like a natural ratio to me. There were two yearlings, one silver- and one gold-colored, and two silver-colored foals, still so young that they gamboled around and sometimes had coordination problems, bumping into others in their exuberance because they hadn't mastered steering and stopping yet. They were currently untangling themselves after bumping into each other in their rush toward Donna to greet her.

The stallion caught Donna's open-mouthed attention when he greeted her by spreading his wings wide, bending his forelegs to bow to her, and saying, "Greetings, Donna-sister-of-Mark."

Donna was being jostled by the two attention-demanding foals, the yearlings were quickly closing in to nuzzle her, the mares weren't far behind, and the stallion had just blown Donna's already gobsmacked mind. She didn't know where to look or what to say. She had her mouth open though, ready for when she managed to get her brain working again.

The other girls and the parents had caught the stallion's greeting and were also astonished. Not as badly flummoxed though, as they didn't have two impatient foals nudging and licking them.

Donna saw me and exclaimed with wonder, "WHAT ARE THEY?"

"I created them a few hours ago, so they don't have a species name or individual names yet. I thought you might like to name them, considering I made them for you."

"They're mine?"

"All yours. They can gallop on the ground much faster than Earth horses, and can fly in the sky too. You can bring your girlfriends here if you want to share the fun of your new pets, but when they leave they'll only remember that they played with your other horses. When your friends are in one of the elevators at home, just request to be in Refuge's stable and you'll appear here. Why don't you climb on the stallion and let him take you for a ride. He can tell you all about himself and his family while you're riding."

With no thought of asking Mom's or Dad's permission, Donna gave the foals a last hug then parted them so she could rush to the stallion.

The stallion said, "Climb on in front of my wings, Donna-sister-of-Mark." It knelt on its forelegs' knees, to make that easy for her.

As she was swinging on, Donna asked me, "What about stirrups and reins?"

"Its mane will hold your legs firmly, and it's smart enough that you don't need to control it with reins. Only the stallion can talk to us, but they all learn to understand English at about the same pace human babies and children do, so you'll be able to communicate with the mares easily and yearlings in simple ways. Only the adults are strong enough to carry a rider in the air so you can control them verbally, or as they get used to how you use your body to indicate what you want, like leaning to turn. If you're riding a yearling on the ground, probably pointing where you want to go will be best, but you'll need to train them to understand what pointing means."

"NEAT!"

Mom was about to ask, but I beat her to it, "They're 100% safe, Mom. I created them for Donna so I made sure there are all sorts of safety features. They won't let her fall off. She can fly all over the planet on them if she wants because there are no predators, poisonous animals or any other threats here anymore." There is a very large cat-like carnivore - like a Smilodon but much more impressive - because I have a thing about big cats, but it'll only hunt humans so it can play with and lick us. It'd be best not to mention a large carnivore to Mom though, as she's too quick to worry. I wouldn't let it happen, but it wouldn't really matter even if the cats ate one of us, as I can easily recreate anyone. I didn't explain that scenario to Mom either, instead continuing my reassurance, "Plus she's got one of my minds hovering invisibly over her head looking after her continuously, so she couldn't possibly be any safer than she is now. Not that it could happen, but even if Donna died, I'd just bring her back to life."

"You can even do that too?" asked Vanessa.

"Sort of. For a start, none of you can die now unless you want to. I'm looking five seconds into the future for all of you, so if death's coming your way I'll either stop it directly or teleport you to safety. If death did somehow happen, then depending on the cause I'd have to recreate your body and/or your mind, then connect them together. Bodies are just physical matter so there's nothing tricky about recreating those, and minds are just information so they're even easier to copy onto a volume of the Universe, provided I've got a source to copy from.

^-- "I'd almost certainly be able to take a snapshot of your body and mind during the five-second warning period, but to be doubly safe your bodyguard minds take backup snapshots of your minds and bodies several times every day. That way if anything happens to you I'll be certain of being able to recreate you. You might miss several minutes of memory, but I can recreate those too, based on what the bodyguard mind observed.

^-- "It wouldn't be so much a 'bringing back to life' as a recreation of it, but the result would be indistinguishable to anyone, including the person involved. It also permits some other tricks. You don't have to be dead to be recreated, so if you've got a lot of paperwork to do, come to Refuge and ask the house to make some copies of you. You can make as many copies of yourself as you want, although I suggest you don't have any of them return to Corvallis for obvious reasons.

^-- "You can tell the house whether or not you want your copies to be mentally linked to you and each other. You won't need to if the copy is working on something that the original just needs the results of, but more likely than not you'll prefer to share each other's thoughts and experiences. I've set that link up in a way that makes it feel like the other person's life is a little indirect, like watching a scene on TV rather than participating in it directly yourself. Unless you get very caught up in what the other you is doing, you won't have any trouble differentiating your life from theirs. Tracking the actions of multiple yous gets harder when there are two or more copies. That's like trying to watch two TV programs at the same time, while you're also doing something else yourself. You'll find you lose track too easily initially, but with practice you'll be able to work with an increasing number of yourselves." I could've given their minds the capability of handling any number of simultaneous copies, but everyone needs some challenges in life.

^-- "I know you have trouble keeping up with your Math reading, Prof. Get a duplicate to do it for you at Refuge. Ditto with Mom and Vanessa doing MAF work. If you need your laptops duplicated, just tell the house. It can duplicate any matter you want."

"What happens to the duplicated people afterward?" asked Vanessa.

"Whatever you want. My advice is that you ask the house to cancel them. That seems like suicide or murder but it's not because your existence continues. I create and cancel my minds continually and it's no big deal. Think of it as walking away from a mirror. The mirror image of you gets 'lost', but that's certainly not any form of suicide. That the duplicates the house will create for you have greater depth than a two-dimensional visual image doesn't make any real difference.

^-- "If you want to, you and your duplicates can have turns living on Earth and on Refuge because being perfect copies you truly are interchangeable. Prof's duplicate and his original minds might want to take turns staying on Refuge to work on some original research for articles he wants to publish. Julia's might want to take turns doing her college assignments, Donna and her duplicate can take turns playing with her new pets, Ava and hers can be park rangers here for the entire planet. This is a totally unspoiled planet, Ava, and it has some amazing species on it. You and your duplicate would get a huge blast going on field trips to learn about them first hand. I'd love to come with you on those trips too, so if you want company, tell the house and it'll create a duplicate Mark for you."

I created another Mark beside me right now, to help get them used to the concept. Mark2 appeared wearing hiking clothes and with a fully loaded backpack on his back.

Mark2 said, "Let me know when you want to go, Ava. We'll use a couple of Donna's pets for transportation, and we'll have a blast. As you can see, this is an exceptionally beautiful world. Catch you later," and Mark2 disappeared.

I - Mark1 - explained, "I did that mostly to illustrate the point. I created his body and created the mind I attached to it. After he'd finished speaking he canceled himself. It's no big deal because his self still exists. That it exists in other bodies is irrelevant. You think it's a big deal because all your life you've been used to having only one body and mind so you think it's precious. After you get used to having many of you whenever you want them, you won't think twice about canceling them-slash-yourself.

^-- "The reason I chose to come to the stable now was so you can see that I can create life, whether brand new species like Donna's new pets or copies of myself or of you. When I called myself a god, I wasn't making an empty boast. Every miracle in the Bible is easy for me to perform, and most of them I can do a great deal better than that book describes. Never mind 'seven days'; it wouldn't even take me seven hours to create and populate a brand new Earth, and I could even do it in less than seven minutes if I pushed myself." I'd have to start by creating several billion minds to help me, and I'd cheat by copying the new Earth from an existing one, but I wasn't going to worry about those nuances. "Nevaeh, I see you're struggling to comprehend this?"

"You're saying that YOU have done all of this? Not the Guardian Angel or God, but you?"

"That's right."

"How do you know the Guardian Angel isn't doing what you want, the same way it always knows when to turn the lights off or bring you things without you having to ask?"

"That's a good question. I have a convincing answer for it, but before I say it I want to talk about Christianity briefly. Jesus lived so long ago that no one alive now has firsthand experiences of him, but what I find VERY interesting are the similarities between the Bible's description of Jesus' life and death, and my own situation."

^-- I used an advanced version of EKP to make Nevaeh look away for a second, so I could give the rest of my families a wink to let them know that this was going to be crap. I wouldn't want them to think I was taking it seriously. When I let Nevaeh look back, I continued to her, "Jesus died and rose again. You heard me say earlier that my minds have died up to nine times each. There's nothing specific in the Bible about Jesus having many minds, but he could've been keeping them secret the same way I've been doing for the last five years, or maybe the Trinity is an attempt to describe him having three or more minds. Dying is the ESSENTIAL step in how I got my abilities, and I find it very significant that Jesus' death is so important in the Bible.

^-- "There's also the years he was missing. There's a very big mystery about what he was doing during those years, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was going through the same sorts of things as I was going through for the last five years. Obviously not being kidnapped by the criminals wanting our $11 million or the CIA wanting to experiment on my body, but he could've gone through similar troubles. Some of those might've caused his death, just like some of my troubles caused my death, and each time he would've gotten more powerful, just like I did.

^-- "I think it's quite possible that there are so many years missing from the story of his life because he went through something similar to what I went through with Ron Fisher. Just as Mark Anderson was missing for quite a while, if Jesus was in an unrecognizable body, no one would know to write about him. So I think there's a very good chance that the Bible was based on a real man called Jesus who 2,000 years ago went through the same process that I have." Nevaeh didn't know that the Ron Fisher in Corvallis had really been me wearing a disguise, but that didn't invalidate my 'explanation'.

^-- "Jesus did his own miracles. He didn't have a Guardian Angel following him around doing his miracles for him. I'm the same. Five years ago my journey toward being God started, and since then I've been doing all my own miracles. Every miraculous thing that you've seen was done by me. You asked me how I know it wasn't the Guardian Angel doing things for me. The answer to that is very simple: because there never was a Guardian Angel. I wasn't all the way to God yet, so I had to disguise my involvement. I created a ball of light and told everyone it was a Guardian Angel, but really it was just a ball of light and I did everything we said it was doing."

I'll stop quoting my attempted explanation here, as all it did was confuse Nevaeh. I had to explain the key points a few more times and in different ways until she finally got her head around the enormity of my deception, and then she got angry.

I'd tried to divide the issue in two, in effect by saying, "Christianity was probably right in the past, but I'm the God of the future," but Nevaeh's anger prevented me getting to the stage where I could make that point stick, especially after she realized that the wild sex she'd been having for the last twelve months hadn't been sanctioned by her God after all.

I lost patience with the whole argument, as it was ENTIRELY crap. The Christian god does NOT exist, and I've read more than enough history to know how legends and myths get created, used, usurped, joined, evolve, etc. That's happened innumerable times throughout human history and there's no doubt whatsoever that Christianity is merely another compendium of those stories, especially because almost every single event mentioned in the Bible is mentioned in innumerable earlier and later myths, sometimes in places far removed from the Middle East, so independently created out of human desire. The Bible is clearly just a collection of myths that caught on because they pandered well to what people wanted. I haven't bothered making the effort to do so yet because it so pointless, but one of my minds might one day get around to checking out Jerusalem's 2,000-year ago past. I have no doubt that I'll discover that Jesus himself, assuming he existed, was at most someone who was used as a convenient hook to hang all sorts of myths on, simply because generations of local - and eventually even global - priests wanted to control their gullible flocks better, as priests in EVERY religion have ALWAYS wanted to do.

It's noble of me to have a rule not to directly manipulate my families' minds, and not even to read their minds - hence my attempting to convince Nevaeh in the usual manner - but too much nobility can become a stupidity; a lesson I'd learned more than once from the Williamses. It would've been stupid of me to let Nevaeh go stomping out of our lives because she couldn't break through the unmitigated crap she'd been brainwashed with for her whole life. She LOVES her life with us, and if she leaves it in anger she'll throw herself back into the church and her head would get seriously messed up. So I fixed her head right now. I didn't make her slavishly believe me, I just stopped her slavishly believing Christianity so she could think through what I was saying.

That approach was for the rest of my families' benefit too because I didn't want them to worry about me manipulating people's beliefs directly. They saw the argument continue, and saw me win it when Nevaeh realized that everything she'd been taught about Christian theology was false. By the time our fairly short argument finished, Nevaeh was no longer a Christian in any way. She now thinks they're idiots who talk a load of crap - I was very good at changing her attitude to agree with mine. She now understands that I'm "A god", in a way that's nothing to do with her previous mistaken belief in "THE God". She also understands that I'm also Mark Anderson, the very nice guy she's delighted to have in her life, and hopes to continue to be with for as long as we all get along well. Her previous wonderfully compliant behavior toward me which had been very much rooted in my having God's favor, is now rooted in the enormous respect she has for me.

The argument hadn't taken more than a few minutes as I have a very low tolerance for crap, so Donna was still joyfully wheeling around the sky - not that pegasi have wheels - and the others weren't too impatient yet. So after getting Nevaeh's final apology for her foolishly not understanding my point right away, which I accepted after she paid me off with a kiss, I got my families' attention again for a new topic. "I've also created something I call 'Communal Refuge'. In about 1-in-10,000 dimensions all the Andersons never existed or were killed for some reason or other. Sometimes they had car accidents, or more likely something fatal happened to one of their ancestors. Whatever the reason, there's no Anderson family to need a Refuge in those dimensions. What I've done instead is to create very large Communal Refuges there. In the same way you can teleport from Corvallis to Refuge, or among Refuge's rooms, you can also jump to the Communal Refuge. There you'll meet whichever other members of the families who are there from the 10,000 dimensions I've allocated to that Commune. You can socialize, discuss serious issues, or whatever you want. There are some garden areas already set up for you in this Refuge, Vanessa, but maybe you and a few thousand other Vanessas would like to potter around together in the Communal Refuge's garden. It's up to you."

[In some other dimensions I'd already explained what the Communal Refuge was, as you'll read later. This example of the Grand Tour varied in many ways from other of the billions of occurrences of it, depending on which of my families' comments I chose to respond to, the order in which I showed them the rooms, how well or poorly other Marks got concepts across, etc. I'm using one of the first Tours I gave as an example because the later ones got very slick and 'professional', so less interesting. For example, in most of them I saved Nevaeh the bother of getting upset by surreptitiously fixing her beliefs right at the beginning of the meeting, back in Corvallis.]

Vanessa checked, "They'll be real live versions of me; not duplicates?"

"Duplicates are still real live versions of you, but the answer is yes. They'll be from other dimensions so they're exactly as original as you are. If you talk with them enough, you'll discover that most of them have differences in their lives. Usually small differences, but occasionally something major. I'll talk with you about one of those differences later, but for the moment I want to give you the big picture.

^-- "There's probably not much else I need to say about the overall concept of Refuge. You can come here whenever you want and you can bring your friends here too. Like I said about Donna doing that, I'll ensure they won't have any astonishment about what happens here because that'd be a nuisance, and after they leave they'll think they were entertained in our normal home. Even their cellphones will work normally.

^-- "I'm currently not allowing outsiders to go to the Communal Refuge, nor allowing members of any of the families to go to each other's personal Refuges unless they're specifically invited. Like most else I've said during this Tour, those 'rules' are just my opinions of how things should be done initially, so don't hesitate to speak up if you think altering them would be better. Just tell the house or your bodyguard mind - you can get its attention in the same way you signaled the sight blob.

^-- "Speaking of entertaining others and as examples of the house's flexibility, if Dad's entertaining a bunch of his friends here and they decide they want to go bowling, just tell the house you want to go to the bowling room, Dad. The room will be created and ready before you've finished the request.

^-- "The same applies to all of you, of course. If Mom wants to enjoy a Celine Dion concert with her friends, just tell the house and it'll create a concert hall for you and put a perfect copy of Celine and orchestra in there for you. I'm sending minds all over many Earths to record as many of those types of things as I think any of you might enjoy. If you ask for something weird the house might not be able to supply it, but if you give it some prior warning it should be able to come up with the goods.

^-- "For events like a Celine Dion concert, the house will have to remove the memories from your friends when they leave - I'll probably just have them remember watching a Celine DVD - but you'd still get the full enjoyment out of it. I know the management, so I could even get backstage passes for you, haha."

"Wouldn't removing their memories create noticeable gaps?" asked Prof.

"No. What I'm doing is more sophisticated than plucking out a few isolated memories. It's also astonishing how good - or how bad, depending on your perspective on this - humans are at inventing self-deceptive fillers for gaps in their memories. I won't have any problem with my memory surgery.

^-- "Obviously I'll have to block hard evidence going back, such as photographs of Donna's pets, cuttings of alien plants, any of the animals natural to this world, its bacteria, etc. I control the only way back and it's easy for me to review what people are carrying with them, so that'll be easy."

"If you control the only way back, couldn't we get stranded here?" asked Dad.

"There are over a trillion of my minds in existence, all of whom know everything that any of us know. There's no chance of all of us forgetting you. Nor is there any chance of us being too busy because when we're busy we just create more minds to handle it. For example, I've got a very large number of minds exploring outer space because I find it so fascinating. When the first of them discovered this planet in its dimension, it had the idea of building a special home for his families on it. The other Marks noticed and liked the idea, so they started doing the same. Then when one of them saw how widespread the adoption was, he suggested making it a 'formal project' - not that we used quite that phrase. So in every dimension that there was a Mark, and in a few other dimensions, we created and sent a mind to the coordinates of this planet. When each mind got to its dimension's version of here, it created a million new minds and they got busy doing all the various things required to make this into the most perfect home we could collectively think of: picking the locations for each room of the house and improving the local geography to make the locations even nicer, removing or altering all the species that might've caused you any discomfort, and much more. It was a huge job, but a million of me working together on each planet didn't take long to get it done, especially because all our research and ideas were automatically pooled. My main point being that none of the other Marks were made too busy to do the rest of their tasks well while we were creating so many Refuges, because all of them were made with additional minds. In short, I'll never be too busy that I accidentally leave you stranded here.

^-- "Nor is there any chance of you getting stranded because I died. Each room in the house has one of my minds in it, and because they don't have a body there's no chance of them dying in the usual ways. Even nuclear bombs going off above every room wouldn't harm my minds. It'd take something that very badly messed up the fundamental structure of the Universe to kill them, and they could be immediately replaced by copies of my minds from far-removed locations. It'd take a Universe-wide calamity to kill me, so I expect to live until the Universe ends, presuming I allow it to. I'm going to be around for a VERY long time.