A la Node

11 – Enlightenment

“Two scientists conducted an experiment on a woman. They hypnotized her. When she was under, they told her that when she came into the room next, she would open up her umbrella inside the room.”

“On a rainy day the next week, they asked the woman back, and as she came into the room, she immediately opened up her umbrella. ‘Why did you open your umbrella?’ they asked her.”

“Without thinking, she told them that she always opened her umbrella when she came in out of the rain. They asked her again: ‘Why did you open up your umbrella?’. She thought for a second and replied that she wanted to shake the water out of it. They asked her again why she had opened up her umbrella, and this time she looked troubled as she tried to find the reason. She looked thunderstruck as she suddenly remembered – ‘I opened the umbrella because you told me to!’ she exclaimed.”

We looked at the old man with a certain amount of skepticism. “Well?” asked Mary.

“Well, children, what do you do every day for no other reason than because someone told you to, and what reasons do you make up to explain your behavior?” He grinned as if he had made a deep and telling point. Mary rolled her eyes up into her head, and then all the way around so that her iris’s re-appeared from the bottom. The wizened old man blanched slightly, but managed to maintain his calm air of gnomic wisdom.

“Turn him off, Jack.” I turned him off and paged through the list of remaining possibles – the little old man flicked for half a second as if reluctant to save state and deactivate.

“I don’t know, Jack, we’ve been through fifteen hundred psychologists, twelve hundred gurus, a couple thousand clerics, and more neuroscientists than I care to count. Ancient wisdom my ass, nothing they say makes any sense at all.”

“What else do we have to do for the rest of eternity?”

“Well, lets start on the philosophers, see if they are any better.”

And so we did. How many? To begin with, we counted every reconstituted human wise man and woman just to take the edge off the boredom, but eventually the counting itself got too tedious to bear. I was beginning to feel like we would indeed be at it for all eternity. We had a recording of every human that had ever lived, every sentient of the species since mutation 876-a, which was the last tiny step between dumb ape and the modern human genome. Every freaking human mind ever, and all we had to do was find one that could enlighten us.

“The problem, I think, is that they were all human.”

“We’re human, sort of. Our minds are based on a human simulation, so what’s enlightening for them must be enlightening for us, right?”

“I don’t know, sometimes I feel like it would take a real human to recognize it.”

“I know, Jack, fool’s errand. Not much we can do but try.”

We started on the playwrights next, and then did novelists, and then went through a couple of the religious leaders again just to see if the writers had given us any better perspective. It hadn’t.

When we needed a break, we pulled up Frank. He had become something of a friend to us, a cynical, cigarette smoking man with dry sense of humor and little sympathy for our quest.

“Hello Frank, it’s us again.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Still looking for Enlightenment? How long now?”

“We are, Frank. We can’t stop, it may yet be in the database. It’s been fourteen thousand years so far.”

“Yeah, well good luck with that.” he lit another cigarette and puffed the smoke out over us. “When they made you, did they know you’d go on doing this forever?”

“We don’t think so. I think they expected us to synthesize the One True Way and hand it over in a matter of years.”

“Then they all went off and died, eh? I should say we, I suppose. What the hell are you going to do with enlightenment if you find it, anyway?”

“Be enlightened, I guess.”

“The people who made you, wonder what they would have done with enlightenment? Bunch of short-sighted asses if you ask me.”

We all just sat there, considering it. We had been designed to find enlightenment in the saved database of all human knowledge, but our creators had all died long ago, leaving us to the task.

“The meaning could be there, though, they gave us every possible chance to find it,” said Mary.

“But you guys are basically free to do whatever you like, right? Got the whole planet here to wander around on, with no humans to tell you how to use your time.”

“Well, that’s true… but-” Mary began.

“Hey, you don’t have a deadline, right? You guys will last forever? So who says you have to seek enlightenment all the time. Go out in the sun, wander around, set fire to something. Whatever. Then you can sift through the saved bullshit of all humanity on rainy days or something.”

“I suppose we could, technically…”

“Anyway, you kids should turn me off and go have some fun.”

I looked at Mary, in her sleek cyborg body, and she looked at me and mine. There wasn’t anything in our programming that said we couldn’t do other things, just a mandate to keep mining the database for Enlightenment.

“You know, Frank, you may have something there.”

“Sure, kid, I’m sure there’s some kind of enlightenment out there, but maybe it’s not something you can know. Might as well enjoy the universe while you’re here, just in case.”

We turned Frank off and let his image flicker into nothingness. There was, as a matter of fact, an entire planet out there. An entire universe, in fact.