Invasion of The Penitent Race. Chapter 1
OK, today is the day. A lifetime to reflect on, .. no, a species to reflect on, and all I can think of are these old sayings and colloquialisms like “A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned”, or “Kill Two Birds with One Stone“. And my favorite “Curiosity Killed the Cat”. Funny how such sayings are embedded in our language and communication. We almost forget they are there. The curious cat is one that always evokes imagery for me. Each time I imagine a goofy cat, creeping toward danger, only for it to go wrong. And then the phrase “cats have 9 lives” follows. The usual response anyway, making it easier to shrug off the thought of the poor cat’s demise. And so our cat can be curious 8 more times. It’s OK I had a cat so I’m allowed to have such thoughts.
The Luminous Virus have a similar saying for humankind. It’s spoken in a series of light flashes and roughly translates to “human penitence erodes human perseverance”. The real nature of the saying is more like an algorithm or an equation but in language that is the closest, we get to a translation. There have been some who’ve interpreted the saying as an old religious phrase “the meek shall inherit the earth”. And that seems to be the case, but to what end? The most common English translation is “penance destroyed the human race”. I always found this ironic. The saying could easily be “guilt destroys the human race” The difference between the word ‘guilt’ and ‘penance’ is largely religion. In other words, our culture has inserted a religious scapegoat into a saying about feeling guilt, I wonder if that will be lost on people going forward?
But am I anti-luminous? I’m pretty sure the answer is “No”. Seriously who could be these days? The virus has given us all we need to sustain our future. Yet at the twilight of the human race perhaps I’m a bit nostalgic. It’s hard to imagine life before the invasion yet it’s only been a generation now. I was miserably trying to be a high school jock in 2025 when the virus hit. I was out on the football practice field, and looking back I don’t recall anybody saying anything when it happened, Those running laps or drills just sort of stopped. Pads, helmets or anything held in hand drop to the ground and everybody was just looking up at billions of small walnut-sized illuminated pods raining into the atmosphere from space. A massive worldwide mix of fear and excitement ensued. It was, after all, life raining in from outer space. No need for all those dishes and space probes looking for proof of aliens. They came to us. Scientists and scholars filled the news feed explaining what they understood as the new discovery. At first, we had tons of questions: Why didn’t we see them coming? Why didn’t they burn up in the atmosphere? Where do they come from? Were they sent? Who sent them? Some alluded to the true nature of what was happening, using explanations of how a sneeze transfers a viral organism from one host to another. However, at the time, they didn’t understand the viral nature of luminous until the virus took root.
But our fear turned immediately into excitement. Any thought of scary aliens was overlooked. As soon as they fell to earth we saw what was happening. Many pods landed near street lights or electronics and the effect was magical. Wearable and hand-held electronics showed fully charged. Lamps suddenly lit up. Seemingly infinite electromagnetic energy flowed from the pods. We didn’t have a clue why, or that it was a trojan horse. We were just too excited about a solution to what we thought was an ongoing energy crisis.
So why the dilemma right? Free energy isn’t a bad thing. But that’s the point of reflection and pondering the Luminous formula; “human penitence erodes human perseverance”. Now that we are twenty years into this whole thing and I can’t think of anyone who questions the saying. I do know what it isn’t about. The saying is not implying that sorrow, empathy, guilt or whatever you call it is a weakness. Scholars have vetted that. The human trait for empathy is universally recognized as noble. It is admired, it is a good thing and perhaps something we’ve taken for granted. The debate on the algorithm is an examination of how or why humankind repeatedly turns guilt into shame, then into a massive cultural desire to suffer. I’ve read stories on all sides. Many point to the roots of religion, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for creating a lens of our world viewed as right vs wrong, good vs evil. This argument says that a religious way of thinking has put everything into buckets. A right bucket vs a wrong bucket. And those buckets allow us to look back and say “hey if we only chose more of the right bucket we’d be better off, so let’s make amends for sinning”. The more conventional view is it’s always been there. It’s fundamentally human. Religion had been far out of the mainstream when Luminous hit, so I can’t believe religion is part of the formula. But it’s a bit ironic we still say “bless you” when someone sneezes.
There’s a professor I follow, Daniel Chapman, who lectures about penance being a long-standing driver toward the decline of civilizations. He’s working to correlate DNA sequences for his study, and perhaps find a way to adjust or manage the human desire for penance. He has a lot of history covered in his theory. From Mayans, Native Americans, Vikings, European Dark Ages, Egyptians, and those giant heads on Easter Island. All represent cultures who had little control over nature yet felt it was their actions or inactions that were the root of how nature behaved. Can you imagine the great Mayan cultures going through blood sacrifice after sacrifice, believing their pain, and their suffering somehow would set the universe right.
Chapman goes on to explain our more recent history at the turn of Millennia was no different. Even as religion was dying in the late 20th and early 21st century, the drivers of technology, politics, and culture were still all about making amends. While we’ve had a modest means to manage our place within nature, we still felt we are abusing it and needed to set things right and to make amends on inequality and ecology. During one lecture Chapman walked us through the democratization of global digital communication via the emergence of the Internet. He likened this to the discovery of fire or electromagnetism, but unlike those earlier discoveries, this advancement mostly amplified consciousness and guilt and subsequently finger pointing on a massive scale. The result, economies collapsed, while governments and culture dug deeper and deeper into fear and a desire to right social wrongs. It was the Mayans blood sacrifice all over again and it set the stage the virus needed to breed.
The day of the invasion wasn’t just a light show. The pods were changing us. The more we were around them the less conflict we felt. With the pods, inequality washed away. It was an injection of calm, the ultimate neural beta-blocking medication. Pods were put in everyone’s pocket, at the dinner table, and used for political negotiations. Suddenly everybody was clear-headed and felt less inclined to fight against another side. Big pharma had no chance against the pods. Cable news, opinion blogs, Reddit and Twitter were slowly starved to death. In just a couple of years the things we loved to use, smartphones, news feeds, wearables all became irrelevant. And this is where the saying really starts to sink in; “human penitence erodes to human perseverance”. I have to remember it is an equation. Typically we think the opposite. The more we want to do right by others the more we succeed right. That is morality after all.
From the perspective of an alien virus, our sense of morality and the need to make amends for it, even at the cost of humanity itself, was a foothold. It was a sneak attack using humanity’s drug of choice, our guilt. With the pods, bigotry washed away, guilt and shame had no longer driven conversation. The answers to all our energy concerns rained in from the heavens. Thanks to the Luminous, humans had no negative impact on their activities. It seemed glorious to many especially since the genetic changes that the virus was making on human DNA had not been detected. What we were losing was not as well known at the time.
Over time the effect of the pods faded. Their ability to power objects and drive empathy vanished, but it didn’t matter. The effect and power of the pods transferred to humans genetically. It was a virus after all, and that’s what a virus does. I never used to know that. I had thought a cold or a flu bug was simply something your body fought. I didn’t know with every cold my DNA was being rewritten and re-engineered. The popular saying is “blue eyes came from a virus”. I don’t know if that is true but it disarms the idea of a virus being all that bad.
By the time the invasion had rooted the change was already in progress. Even without the pods, we became less inclined to create conflict, less inclined to do the things that would lead to guilt in the first place. Our own bodies became batteries. We could transfer our own energy to electronics to machinery In the end we are more at peace and we are more sustainable. Luminos was for humankind like a side-effect-free drug. After millennia of building up society after society that felt a need to punish itself for its abuses, and wrongs we were given exactly what we wanted. Guilt-free power, guilt-free engagement. We couldn’t help but want pods around us all day all night, even though we knew what was happening… the ultimate penitence.
This is the nature of my reflection as I enter the final stage before the point of no return and the last of who I am, vanishes. I have to remind myself I have a choice, the virus is reversible, it was engineered, it was as a well crafted and designed invasion. My choice is either human penitence or human perseverance. But what does it mean to persevere as a human, with all our faults, with our innate desires to turn on each one another?
