Fish in Space - Short Story by Montikarus

A letter to an unknown benevolent alien race that lives outside this solar system,

It's the year 5 PPB on an unrecognizable earth in an unrecognizable solar system, at least in comparison to the 21st century of the AD time reference. PPB stands for Post Photon Band, I'll get to an explanation of that in a short moment. Firstly, let me fill you in on how things have developed now - worthy of a synonym for hell.

A world government that reconvened after 20 years of being dismantled by the infamous 2071 Anarchist Coup, have taken 'thought measures' into their own hands. A mass of people were force converted into 'governmentism' as an emergency action by a handful of brilliant minds from the date 6th of Jan, 2 PPB. The incident of PPB left the population of earth at lethal abuse of their own minds.  A phenomenon that magnified the power of thought and 'word'.

In the old world government, pain and suffering and sadistic tendencies were promoted for the sake of increasing industry and widening the scope of commerce over all social spheres. A society based on cause and effect with the cause generally being a self perpetuated pain, direct or indirect, and the effect being the commodification or the 'alleviation' of this pain.

This successfully manufactured a world population of 20 billion human beings enslaved to their animal appetites and sexual tendencies, basically 'farm animals' or 'factory hens', each with a specific job or purpose but not one being completely aware of the bigger picture due to compartmentalization. The period immediately following the coup did much to heal the wounds of the people but 20 years was not enough time to heal the generations rooted psychological wounds of industry (particularly the industry of war). I mention these aspects of our past society to illustrate how unprepared our minds were for the incident of which I am now writing.

As we live today, post PPB, the earth has a completely re-arranged geography, new maps have been made by expert cartographers and new cities re-concentrated from the rubble of old ones. We now live on our home planet, Earth, which we have inhabited through evolution for more than 50 million years as though we have just arrived here. We have been reduced to aliens on a strange world which vaguely resembles a place we once called our home.

"There is no possibility of an ultimate ending, only alternative eternal continuation." - JK Gartaker, Head Council, New World Confederacy

Due to necessity, all forms of religion, religious beliefs and cults have been made illegal. New Society can no longer take any more ultimate changes to reality that were not in effect honest to begin with. 'Ultimate thinking' was the cause of our doom and we have all taken the Solitary Vow never to repeat this grave mistake of history. We have learned we can only have freewill by allowing our small section of the universe to be ever changing, statistical and probabilistic - not ultimate or absolute. Even then, maintaining a mind reality where free will does exist is real hard work (mind the pun).

The new government is based on honesty and transparency. This has encouraged new convertees to join us in our ranks from the 'unknown regions', together we have created a society that inherently feels backward. Physically written notice boards are kept up to date. Business advertising is limited to simple stated facts on plain paper. Newspapers report everything statistically on a day to day basis - everything from obituaries caused by 'thought offences' recorded by Thought Patrols to the hourly Grand Council Treasury expenditure.

New Society is techno-phobic in nature, no one trusts a machine anymore. Even fridges - people have given up their ability to keep food cold and fresh due to an overwhelming fear of being eaten alive by a fridge while they are sleeping. The New General of the New World Confederacy had something important to say about this, "You have nothing to fear of fridge, machine or electric if your mind is free from guile and your imagination honest." Simply stated theoretically but the general public view is to do without, and face oppression, than to have to give up the imagination and purify all self-made future projections. As a result of these fears and the public's inability to control their animal appetites only 4% of the population use a fridge and 2% use a toaster (delusion created killer toasters can create worse outcomes than fridges). 40% of the population use electricity, which is expensive, but the expense is not why most don't use it, they have other reasons for oppressing themselves thus - choosing of their own volution to live in their simple homes as people may have done prior to the 20th century AD.

Back to the beginning to make a very long story very short, just prior to 1 PPB, a photon belt that orbits the central black hole of the galaxy we still call the Milky Way moved through our solar system and through the space around the Earth, chaos broke from the unconscious mind of the human being and unhinged many dark and lighted horrors hidden in our recessive genes. This was a horror story and a nightmare come to as real a reality as can possibly be projected by the mind. The mind became endowed with the Photon Band's direct power to manifest anything almost immediately.

Thought Patrols scour the streets in search of deviance within the Ether. When identified, depending on the deviant thought, the thinking person receives what they were thinking inflicted on themselves in a controlled Thought Chamber. Nine times out of ten this means they are shot on the spot as it doesn't matter how they thought of death (if death was the subject, to themselves or to another or including torture) death is death, and a death thought simply requires that a death take its place and not necessarily the torture that was thought along with it. Patrols do this as a service, paid by the New World Confederacy assisting the community with swift decisive action. To let these thoughts sit on the Ether and accumulate energy translates the thoughts into a myriad of ugly manifestations including possibly also auto-self-replication.

Penalties for Words actually spoken are much worse and carry punishment to everyone within hearing shot of the Word, Words or Phrases Spoken. After the incident Words have direct power to  manifest any phenomenon in 'delusional reality' (known before PPB simply as 'real reality'). Every person within New Society puts a check on their tongue and tests all Words in a safe room in their mind in the HIFR (Hypothetical Impenetrable Field Reality) or a physical Thought Chamber before Speaking. Those offending with Word and anyone within listening distance are shot on site and/or closely monitored through the elaborate surveillance networks (there are possibilities of self-resurrections as it can and does happen). Word has become God in a sense as in the old christian Bible text in the book of John, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God." This, outside of all mystical significance is a thought structure consentually agreed by all New Society due to the simple fact that Words in these times hold so much creative (and therefore destructive) power.

Holographic recorders equipped with super sensitive microphones inhabit every room, street, closet, toilet and bathroom. Each unit makes a slightly perceptible beep every half hour to remind us or whoever then inhabits our minds that we are being watched and listened to with graceful sensitive reception. All New Society colonists are 'thought chipped' which is the basis for the New Society Public Thought Consented Banking and Identification System (N.S.P.T.C.B.A.I.S.). Without making an understatement obsolete, this is for our own protection, as numerous cases of body possession happen from mind projecting unknowns on a regular basis. Usually the possessive monster manifests something fantastic like a dragon or an atomic bomb and all Level 6 O-Minds in the area quickly dash to neutralize the possible catastrophe. The worst possessions I have known are the subtle body snatchers who insinuate an anger spasm over a long period of time to slowly undermine the general morale, the well-being or New Society and the authority of the New General.

Reproduction is about the only joy we have left outside of our minds, at least after the infrequent attacks from the 'unknown regions' stopped. Women no longer are required to go through labor pains. Birthing and Growing times have been reduced by New Society Public Thought Consensus to a single year, this gives us an edge on the unknowns as our population steadily increases despite the terribly necessary 'Thought Offence' casualties.

Time sense was severely distorted from the period where the photon belt first struck on 2091 AD (1 PPB) to the time government reconvened in 2 PPB. There is no accurate figure as to how much time actually passed in that one year period as each person's subjective reality or group-subjective reality dictated a level of reality outside of real reality (which we now call 'delusional reality') that created a hyper-negative time stream dimension near-on eternity. The latest estimate is that 163 million years passed in the hyper-negative time stream while the earth and the solar system only experienced approximately 1 year of 'normal' time from it's physically subjective experience. Simultaneously, according to the O-Minds a singular moment passed less than a perceptible second.

Another fast emergence on the eve of 1 PPB, due to automatic popular thought consent at the time of the incident the solar system was rearranged. The sun is slightly bigger, the moon is a literal crescent form and an extra planet called Nabarru sits outside Pluto (you can thank the conspiracy theorist group-mind for that one). It is rumoured that Nabarru has an alien race on board that wills us harm. I choose not to think of this personally, but it has already manifested so it is no harm in mentioning what is honestly there. For some strange reason the collective field of all inhabitants of earth both in New Society and the 'unknown regions' does not have any effect on the galaxy outside of our solar system. One scholar, Johanna Clarkala, theorised that we are in a massive fish bowl, a controlled environment, controlled from another bigger greater galactic fish bowl. Johanna was duly shot by patrols the day of Speaking for 'thought treason'. Theories in general are outlawed and I risk repeating this catastrophe again in this letter.

Earth's population has been reassessed to be approximately 150 million people. But this is speculative as we haven't any way to really know how many 'unknowns' live outside of New Societies' city walls and thought shields. The only way we can have security from the 'unknown regions' is by projecting separation between us and them using our collective Field. Our Field is literally how we see ourselves, and it is alive. It is its own entity outside of us. There have been many large scale attacks in the past couple of years from the 'unknown regions' since the advent of New Governmentism. Five of these attacks were successful for time periods of time from three hours to five days. These were 'personality winter periods' of inter-individual-aloneness-and-insecurity for the colonists of New Society but because of our direct physically programmed faith in New Government, New Government reconvened even without our having an existing memory of it ever having existed before (the 'unknowns' have been quite thorough in their dispersion techniques). The 'unknowns' are very malicious (and I use that word with the sincerest of cautions and truthful honesty to New Government) to our way but their attacks are getting less and less frequent and effective, as we are slowly increasing the power of our Field in Numbers and Self-Strength. Soon we shall be able to create a world together with our collective energy that only we exist within.

Every New City has 'Correctional Facilities'. This is where individuals admit themselves 'voluntarily', usually due to 'thought offences' that avoided death or their own fear of thinking wrongly (the precursor to actually thinking wrongly). They are then 'corrected'. Correction consists of force training through O-Mind to I-Mind teachers with techniques such as Self-Forgiveness reprogramming, honesty conditioning, harboring an honest imagination for life, writing self to freedom, and fear and emotion neutering techniques. Their minds are purified and stamped with New Government conditioning. Children's schools teach the same lessons, techniques and conditioning. The 'Correctional Facilities' are primarily for adults that still carry old world conditioning or 'new beings' that were created from 'The Rift' manifested by certain dark individual minds directly after the incident.

All fiction is burned on discovery, and most science texts. Old world science was deemed spurious by the council because of its ability to seed a reality that either existed only at the time the research was done or that it didn't existed at all and was merely the manipulation of the scientific discipline by ruling corporations of the time to favor certain outcomes in industry (in what we thought was before an ageless era when thought and Words created reality at a much more manageable pace). We have our own science now, everyone studies, experiments and adds to it simultaneously using Collective Vision.

Thought and Word was not known to hold enormous power until after the incident. The world was so unprepared. The incident caused Words to instantly manifest and thoughts to start a ball rolling in the ether, so to speak, that would manifest in some form or another within the next 24 hours. The greater the quantity of people that thought or said something, the greater the 'magic'. 'Word' takes the place of 'magic' with readiness in our precise times. Religion caused the most damage of all. There are still people in unknown levels of Mind living out various manifestations of each religious text. To some infinite bliss, to others a very 'real' eternal burning catholic hell. Their thoughts are atrophied in 'cycle form'. This means they will never escape these morbid manifestations (even paradise on a long enough time line can become a form of hell). The second greatest torment besides religion was modern psychology. Beings that once defined themselves as 'depressed' were doomed to live an eternity of sadness in a cycle of masochistic joy. Bi-polar created two headed ogres and schizophrenics literally split into two separate persons, a Jekyll and a Hyde. Some of the most powerful 'unknowns' that still attack New Society are the 'Hyde' formations that have manifested from the schizophrenic patient's 'splitting phenomena'.

I can hear the patrols nearby and I must make the ending brief and finish writing soon. I have willed a White Bird to carry this letter in a glass and metal canister to a space fish that manifested from the fish bowl theory to get this important notice to you.

We live like we do now because we still have hope in survival as a part of what we were. We are a race dependent on power, dumped in the deep end of direct responsibility of mind, thought and Word. We are floundering, searching for a stable piece of real to grab hold of and not let go.

Listen friend please! I implore you! This is not a happy existence. I am not satisfied. I realise what I create by writing and thinking this but I choose this as my honest reality. Help me, help us. Contain us. Change us into something older or something supremely new but please don't just let us sit here as the horror we are.

I hear them on the steps. They are KNOCK KNOCK KNOCKING!

[signed hastily]
Alastaire Freer

-- This is a reprint of a story written by Montego Ikarus (Montikarus) in 2016

Copyright The Montikarus Field 2071