Chapter 4
Solnet/Omnivision Video Post
@anika.radovich.solnetworldview
January 10, 2121
1750 hours U.T.
SOLNET Special Report:
An Epidemic of Angels?
This Solnet Special Report will cover the growing epidemic of angelizing that has been sweeping the world over the last few years. It’s been going on for a number of years but has become more common in recent months. All over the world, in most major cities and countries, millions of people are reporting that friends and loved ones have disappeared and the person they thought was a loved one is not, but rather someone or something different. Reporter Anika Radovich visited recently with noted psychology professor Dr. Seth Gaylord of UCLA, and reports on what could be causing such a mass hallucination.
“Good morning, Dr. Gaylord. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today.”
“My pleasure, Anika. I’ll try to answer your questions the best I can.”
“Dr. Gaylord, law enforcement and health authorities worldwide are increasingly overwhelmed in many cities and regions with this phenomena that has come to be known as ‘angelizing’. Combined with continuing unusually intense meteoric activity in the skies, the epidemic has many people on edge. Some religions are reporting that what is happening is evidence of an impending Day of Judgment and the end times. Are we seeing some kind of mass hallucination at work here?”
“Well, Anika, as a scientist, I like to define my terms first. When we say angels, what exactly are we talking about? The most effective definition of an angel would be a swarm assembly of nanoscale robotic elements, so configured as to resemble a human being in all measures. A sort of pseudo-human, but made up of nanobots.”
“Angels, as you describe them Dr. Gaylord, have been around for decades, have they not?”
“They have, Anika, but in recent years, for a variety of reasons, the growth of angel technology and angel acceptance by our society has exploded.”
“To what do you attribute this growth?”
“Primarily, I attribute this growth to the spread of Assimilationism. This is an ideology, some would say a religion,that promotes and celebrates angels and the associated technology.”
“Why has Assimilationism become so popular today, Dr. Gaylord?”
“Well, Anika, this is an interesting psychological phenomenon. As you know, I have written extensively on this subject. (see Gaylord, Dr. Seth, “Epi-social Spiritual Phenomena among Technologically Advanced Stage 4 Populations.”). We find even among many so-called advanced societies a vestigial longing for stability and security. This is an innate coping mechanism among Homo sapiens and has endured in our genome for thousands of years; it helps us survive and adapt to environments which are changing rapidly, as ours is.”
“How does this longing for security relate to the rapid growth of angels, Doctor?”
“Well, because angels are so prevalent today, we often say you can’t even tell about your own neighbor: are they real humans? Are they angels, that is, are they swarms of bots that resemble humans so closely, you can’t tell if they’re real? Because of this insecurity about what is real and what is not, we seek answers, totems, icons, explanations, whatever you want to call them, to cling to. Things that we perceive are real. Things that are solid and stable. Assimilationism offers this assurance…that there is an explanation for all these changes, that there is a greater story here and they offer believers a chance to be a part of it.”
“You’re taking about the Old Ones and the so-called Mother Swarm.”
“Certainly. For many people, God has vanished. But throughout history, human beings have sought explanations for things they don’t understand, things that they can’t explain. The ancients created gods in every part of nature: a sun good, a moon god, a god of the oceans, and so forth. Later, we subsumed all our gods into one overall benevolent Heavenly Father. Now, that no longer seems adequate to comfort us when our neighbors, our friends, even our spouses may be something other than we thought. They may be angels.”
“Doesn’t science provide explanations? I mean, angels are just nanoscale assembler technology that have achieved incredibly real and lifelike configurations. There’s a technical explanation for all this.”
“True enough, Anika, but our gods provide one thing that science can never provide.”
“What is that, Dr. Gaylord?”
“Science provides detailed explanations. But science does not provide meaning. It doesn’t provide purpose. Those are moral and ethical concerns. That’s what makes Assimilationists so compelling…that’s why Assimilationists celebrate angels and de-construction and being absorbed into a mother swarm…it provides a purpose for all we see going on.”
“Dr. Gaylord, do you think what the Assimilationists claim about the Old Ones is true? Do you think the Old Ones are real? Or are they a projection of this longing you describe?”
“As a psychologist, I have to say that something you believe in is as real as it takes for you to believe in it. To you, to any believer, it is absolutely real. If you act and move and think as though something is real, then for you, it is real.”
“Actually, I was speaking objectively, Dr. Gaylord. Are the Old Ones a real entity that we all can see and agree is real?”
“Ah, now Anika, you are beginning to sound just like a psychologist. That’s the old Cartesian dualism, isn’t it? Real and material versus something in my mind. I think, therefore I am. You know, there is a school of thought that says we created the Old Ones. That we are the Old Ones. I find that an appealing answer to your question.”
“Then you believe the Old Ones aren’t real?”
“Oh, I believe they’re real, all right. I believe that you, investigative reporter Anika Radovich are real too. But then, you might well be an angel, too, and a very attractive one at that. How can one tell these days?”
“Thank you, Dr. Gaylord, for taking the time to be with us today.”
“It was my pleasure, Anika.”
As a part of our continuing effort to bring the most compelling and newsworthy stories on the angel phenomenon to you, Solnet Special Report sent correspondent Anika Radovich to Freeburg, Tennessee, to interview the citizens of this small town and get their views on what is happening. While every news source is unique, Special Report found that the views and opinions of the people of this mountain hamlet were particularly representative of the most commonly held views across our audience.
“I’m standing here on the side of Main Street in Freeburg, Tennessee, with one of the more notable citizens of this lovely town, nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Mr. Lanier Barnes has achieved a certain notice, some would say notoriety, for Freeburg as a result of his strongly-held opinions about angels and Assimilationists. Mr. Barnes, welcome to Special Report and thanks for taking the time to be with us.”
“Well, shoot, Anika, what’s a fellow going to do when a pretty young thing like yourself comes sashaying by. Where’d you say you were from?”
“Thank you, Mr. Barnes. Actually, Germany. Mr. Barnes, could you explain what all these people have gathered for? I see you’ve got some kind of rally going.”
(COMMAND TO DRONECAM: Altitude 20 meters. Wide-angle establishing shot…be sure to center Barnes and get the Courthouse Square and those mountains in the background…I’ll add effects later)
“That’s right, young lady. Every day this week, we got a rally going right here on Main Street. Just look at ‘em, must be several hundred of these good folks today.”
“What’s the purpose of your rally, sir?”
“Well, we’ve been rallying and Net-blasting for some time now, trying to call attention to the gravest problem we face today.”
“Which is--?”
Barnes’ face takes on a pained look, like something he had eaten didn’t agree with him. “Those pointy-head bureaucrats at the UN won’t enforce the
danged Sanctuary Laws. You know, all the Containment Laws. Hell, we already fought wars over that, didn’t we? All the friggin’ haloheads and asses are taking over.”
“Mr. Barnes, I am assuming you are referring to angels and Assimilationists?”
“Darn right, sweetie. Angels and asses. They should be quarantined, like the scum they are. We need to stick the lot of ‘em into camps, like we did to the Japs back in the 20th century…you know: enemy aliens.”
(DRONECAM IMAGE FILE 223.832: Placards and signs wave in vigorous agreement with Barnes. Other members of the rally close in around the speaker. There is some good-natured shoving and shouts of “Damn right!” “Give it to ‘em straight, Barnes!) (AR Annotation File).
“Mr. Barnes, angels are just machines. Swarm configurations of nanobots configured to resemble human beings…surely you don’t think of these machines as enemy aliens?”
“They’re bugs, all of them. I don’t think of dangerous viruses as enemy aliens either…but I don’t want ‘em around. All these bugs are eating our food, drinking our water, mating with our women…they need to be in camps.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Barnes…did you say mating with our women? I’m not aware of any angels accused of sexual engagements with actual humans.”
“Oh, Missy, you don’t know the half of it.” A middle-aged woman with short-cropped black hair squeezes out of the crowd and stands before Anika. The reporter whispers into her lip mike DRONECAM…get a close-up of this—“These bugs have been defiling our daughters and sisters for years. I know it’s supposed to be illegal, but you know it goes on. What kind of offspring could possibly come from such infernal liaisons…monsters, half-bred freaks, that’s what.”
Barnes cuts in. “We’re rallying today to get the Town Council of Freeburg to take a stand. Here…get your friggin’ bird-camera down here and I’ll show you—“
Radovich sent the command and the dronecam wheeled about and descended slowly on its whirring quadrotors, hovering just over their heads. Its multiplex cameras zoomed in and Radovich adjusted the view she was getting on her SuperQuark glasses, pecking at a small wristpad. DRONECAM…hold there—
“You’re holding up a sign, Mr. Barnes. Would you mind reading out loud and then explaining what it’s about.”
“Surely.” Barnes held the placard so the dronecam would get a clear close-up. “It says MAKE CHASTAIN HILL A BUG CAMP! We want the Town Council to designate the whole Chastain Hill area as a sort of re-settlement camp for haloheads…er, I mean angels. Keep ‘em separate from the rest of us, so they won’t contaminate everything in sight.”
“Just enforce the damned Containment Laws!” came a voice from the back of the crowd.
There was a chorus of “Yeahs!” and a sea of fists waving and pumping up and down.
Anika Radovich quietly instructed the dronecam to rise back to twenty meters and pan the crowd, which was getting more agitated.
“Mr. Barnes, you have referred to your followers as Hellcats. Why this name?”
Barnes sniffed, waved his hand expansively around the gathering. “We think of ourselves as normalizers. We enforce normality. Haloheads and asses ain’t normal. We call ourselves Hellcats ‘cause we intend to make life hell for these scumbugs.”
Anika Radovich found it expedient to thank Barnes for the interview and back herself out of the crowd, which was closing in steadily, shouting, jeering, fist-pumping. She had started to feel smothered and hand-waved the dronecam to follow. Radovich retired to a street corner on the other side of Main Street, out in front of Collier’s Drug Store.
While Barnes and his followers surged like an angry mob down the street toward the town hall, she decided to add some commentary to the footage they already had.
“It should be noted that Lanier Barnes and the rallies he has been leading the last few days here in Freeburg are anything but exceptional. Similar rallies and protests exist in many countries and cities around the world, in Europe and Asia, even parts of Africa. The rallies and the demands sometimes take different forms. But the underlying animosity toward angels and Assimilationists in general is the same. A deeply-felt sentiment is growing that angels need to be contained and Assimilationists should be gathered into concentration camps and isolated from society.
“Solnet Special Report always strives to be fair and objective in our reporting. Before making this trip to Freeburg, this reporter spent some time at a Church of Assimilation rally, an ‘awakening’, as they call it, just outside of London. We interviewed assimilation volunteers in a queue at the Westfields Market, lined up to be de-constructed… about just why they are doing this….”
LINK TO VIDEO POST FILE V.399.122….
Establishing shot from dronecam Sparrow One, at one hundred meters altitude, longitude 0 degrees, fifteen minutes, latitude fifty-two degrees, thirty minutes.
Anika Radovich annotation file: A sea of humanity covers the car parks that surround Westfields Market. Inside the mall, shoppers browse as usual, seeking bargains, buying vids and other gear, new shows, football jerseys, the usual stuff. Outside the mall, chaos reigns. But it seems to be a happy chaos.
All along one end of the car park, in place of lorries, cars, taxis and buses, are the booths. These booths are emblematic of any Assimilationist rally. These booths are where the awakening occurs, to use the Church of Assimilation’s own literature describing what is to happen. Some say it is a form of mass, assisted suicide. Some say it’s insane. Assimilationists say is the truth of the universe, a re-absorption of our essence into the great mother swarm. A necessary step to prepare for the coming of the Old Ones.
Special Report came to Westfields Market to find out which point of view is right. Maybe a little of both.
Her name was Evelyn Ngombe. She was tall, maybe with a bit of Masai in her background, proud, a bit fluttery and nervous. She grinned sheepishly as one of the techs helped her into the assimilator booth.
“A great day,” she muttered. “Great day...so proud.”
The assimilator tech was named Gavin. He sat at a console just outside the booth, while another tech helped Evelyn inside and made her comfortable on the seat. Gavin shut and latched the door, pressing a button to begin the seal and containment process. In seconds, a tight bot-proof seal had been formed around the interior of the booth, a barrier formed of electron injectors and a dedicated botscreen.
“Let’s do it,” Gavin said. The other tech pressed buttons.
Inside the booth, a fog had formed…that was the first layer of nanobots released into the compartment. Evelyn disappeared into the fog, only a leg and a shoulder could be seen.
The fog thickened. A faint buzz could be heard from inside the booth. Gavin watched as the cloud of bots thickened. More and more bots were released and replicated, swelling to fill every cubic millimeter of the booth.
Evelyn didn’t move. Anika Radovich commanded the dronecam in tight, focusing on her right leg. At first, it was unchanged, a smooth black leg with a section of her print dress showing, hitched up just above her knee. But even as Radovich watched, the black of her skin had begun to fade. In moments, it was almost gray, like the fog itself, oscillating between darker and lighter, but still gray. Then the gray became a translucent shimmer, almost like a ghost, flickering slightly, but growing ever dimmer. Her shoulder was the same.
Evelyn Ngombe was slowly but steadily being disassembled. She was being steadily broken down into a pattern, a pattern of atoms and molecules.
The end came softly, almost as if the woman were walking away in a light rain. Her body, the physical Evelyn Ngombe, began to fade inside the booth. At first, it had been barely perceptible, just a faint blurring of her skin, her extremities, a smearing of her legs and shoulder, as if a photo had lost contrast.
In time, and the time was less than five minutes, Evelyn Ngombe had devolved—that was Anika Radovich’s word—into a nearly translucent shadow, sti
ll recognizable in form, but without substance. You could see right through the form and the shadow to the other side of the booth.
And then she was gone. Enveloped and enmeshed and at one with the greater swarm of nanobotic mechs that was Config Zero.
And Anika swallowed hard…seeing in her mind’s eye the face and the disappearing Cheshire cat smile of Evelyn Ngombe.
Anika Radovich Annotation File: This was a typical sequence of events occurring all over the world at Church of Assimilation rallies, awakenings, as they call them. As you can see, the ‘volunteer’ is quite gone and fully disassembled. There is no effective means that this reporter knows of to re-construct the volunteer, or reverse the process. It is, in fact, a form of assisted suicide.
We’ll try to move in and get some comments and interviews with other supporters and volunteers.
“Excuse me, sir…ma’am… I’m Anika Radovich, Solnet Special Report. I’d like to ask you a few questions…what exactly are you trying to achieve here at Westfields?”
A young woman, early twenties, hair in a severe crew-cut, with braided bangs off to one side, consents to be interviewed. She yells in Anika’s face:
“FREE SYMBORG NOW! FREE SYMBORG NOW!”
Others nearby join in and the air is filled with the same rhythmic chant.
“FREE SYMBORG NOW!”
“Uh, Miss…could you tell me…Miss? Could you tell me your name, please? We’re live on Solnet Special Report right now….” She pointed skyward at the leering dronecam hovering ten meters above them.
“It’s…um, it’s…yeah, that’s right Free Symborg…it’s Jane…Jane Nyquist.”
“You’ve got a big rally going here…what’s it all about, Jane?”
“We want Symborg freed. Now. He’s in custody somewhere in the U.S. and he’s our hero.”
Radovich consulted her wristpad, pulled up an image of the robotic messiah who had mesmerized the world over a decade ago. “How do you know he’s still around?”
“He has to be. They took him into custody and we want him released.”
“Some people say that Symborg was a menace, that he advocated violent overthrow of governments. Some say he’s just a machine, you know, a collection of bots.”
Jane looked hurt. “Nonsense. Symborg epitomizes all that is good and right with Assimilationism. Free Symborg now!”
Others around Jane and Anika Radovich joined in. The dronecam captured all of it.
Jeez, this’ll make great footage, Anika thought. Then she saw a commotion on her wristpad vidfeed…a disturbance along the far end of the Westfields car park. Anika commanded Sparrow One to wheel about and investigate.
A long queue near one of the assimilator booths had broken down into a violent confrontation. Chaos and bedlam had come to Westfields. Soon, Metropolitan Police squads in full riot gear pushed their way into the crowd.
Sparrow One captured it all on vid.
Solnet Special Report Ends