Homo Sapiens Improbis: The Cosmic Web Series, #1

By Rutger Drent

An alien, digitally uploaded to a lurker probe and tasked with observing the Earth is supposed to briefly wake from his slumber every 11000 years and send a report. When he starts noticing humanity's accelerated technological progress and having become a big fan of humanity, he becomes disobedient and starts waking more frequently: every 100 years. There is good reason. His race knows that in sexually reproducing, DNA based life forms, psychopathy is, more often than not, the consequence of the emergence of intelligence. He knows that when he sends his next report, exposing yet another carcinogenic space faring species, Earth will simply be destroyed. When an average human male with too much time to think, figures out the problem, he decides to provide the man with a tool that can save humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutger Drent
• Release date: Apr 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224992065

Book preview

Intro

The year is 2250. The man opens his eyes and becomes aware of his surroundings. He’s on the floor. He doesn’t remember how he got there, or who he is. There are others. A woman, 2 boys and a baby girl. They’re in a house. They all have a band around their neck. It carries an electronic tablet that will proof to look oddly archaic compared to other technology. Tapping on it, a video appears. It’s a recording of someone calling himself the Unveiler. Some of the Unveiler’s words are not recognized by the man. Unveiler tells the viewer that everybody has lost their memory. That the viewer has made mistakes but is now born again. That new mistakes will be forgiven. That the viewer should trust in him, the Unveiler. They should proceed to a central point, indicated by a sticker on the back of the tablet, where things will be explained and where tasks will be handed out. Arriving at this community center, the man learns that the others with him are his family. His wife was a shuttle craft pilot and will be retrained to keep doing that. He was a librarian himself and his job has become obsolete, as all books have disappeared. He can choose another job. History has been erased but life will be restored to its former glory as much as possible. The year is 0.

The year is 330. The historian takes a seat before the members of the committee. She is asked how her own culture signified the importance of being honest in a situation like this. She answered that with her people she would put her one hand on a holy book and the other up in the air and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help her the creator of the universe. She presents the testimonials of the events as she had collected them at the time, from the people involved.

Paul-KT233a

Iam a sociopath. Again , I should say. The first time it happened I was a young man, coming back from a war zone. I recovered from it and I hadn’t turned into a criminal. I might have already been too old, and maybe I hadn’t met with bad influences while still at an impressionable age, as it often happens at a younger age. Either way: it didn’t stick. The second time happened in recent months. The reason involved again war. But this time I turned into a full blown war criminal, ripe for the International War Tribunal in The Hague. It won’t come to that, as this time my posse, is definitely the winning team. But when my team finds out I just intentionally and deliberately bombed six complete fishing towns, men, women, children, all the boats, docks, you name it, into oblivion, there will be consequences. I don’t care. I will accept everything they’ll throw at me. I’m spent. Turn me, stick a fork in me, for I’m done.

In the period between those wars I had known love. I had known it and lost it. I have ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder. My mind constantly makes associations that make it difficult to concentrate. It put a big strain on maintaining a relationship. I had had girlfriends, but they all failed in the end, just like every IT job I ever tried, for that matter.

I think I’m a pretty decent programmer, but when time is a factor, it’s hard to compete having ADD. I just can’t keep the pace all day long. I had to be content with occasional low pay, low concentration, repetitive work. Working in a greenhouse wasn’t so bad. I liked working with plants. It was an honest job, but I felt as much job satisfaction as a worker in a factory that manufactures suicide nets for other factories. I knew I could do better, but every good job seemed to scream ‘time is money.’

I was very happy going solo. I didn’t need a woman in my life. But love cares not about need. I met Sylvia in a classical boy meets girl story: Dutch boy builds anarchist island. Swedish girl runs her oceanographic research ship into the uncharted island. Boat sinks. Boy dives into water to save girl from drowning. Boy sees dorsal fins. Boy shits himself. Girl points out fins are of dolphins she is tracking. Boy is embarrassed to come out of the water. Girl says; You shit yourself didn’t you? Boy says; Yes. Yes, I did. Boy and girl laugh, get married and have a boy named Magnus, a daughter on the way and two dogs, named Gusto and Droopers.

She was my marine biologist. I was her mandatory firearms handling & safety class instructor. She did like to swim with sharks. The white ones. With the big teeth. She dared me to swim with them too. I had to decline on the grounds of probable sphincter instability. I’ve had plenty of thrills though. We went swimming with dolphins instead. On our honeymoon. Dolphins are man’s second best friend. My wife was a thrill seeker. I’m more of a reluctant thrill finder. But thrills is what we had in common. There were gonna be many.

Thanks to Sylvia I turned my life around. I changed into a full blown family man. She brought love back in my life. Including love for animals. All creatures, great and small. I had trouble, taking the life of even a cockroach. Insects, butterflies, bees...I loved the little buggers.

I had a family. But they’re all gone. Evaporated, in less than a nanosecond. So is my ability to feel love or empathy. And to make the chaos that is my current psychological state even more paradoxical: I love humanity. Just not most of the humans that comprise it. I have no empathy for them anymore...at all. But I absolutely hate psychopaths.

You see those every day...when you turn on your TV set. I see it like this: They’re your politicians, your anchor men, your police chief, your military industrial complex, as Eisenhower called it. Even sometimes your clergy men. They learned to hide what they are, early on. They are organized, in our time. They have think tanks thinking up policy, years ahead. They’ll make you think how they want you to think, or else...well, for now, mostly they’ll just shame you.

It’s an information war. A war for your mind. I hate wars as much as the next guy, but if you hear someone say; ‘There’s no such thing as a war to end all wars.’, I think they’re wrong. Not only is there a war to end all wars, but I think we’re already in it and have been for thousands of years. And not only that, but we are losing that war. What chance to win it is there if most people can’t even see their enemy?

I think that no matter how conspiracy minded you are, what the government is doing is worse than you think. If you have a lot of time and I did, every thread that you pull leads to more revelations of horrible corruption. Most people have no idea of the level of brainwashing they have been subjected to from an early age. They don’t want to be associated with conspiracy theorists and turn on you if you don’t swallow some official explanation. Everything they know is wrong. It’s a horrible thing to have your mind stolen from you. It’s a world to behold. Quite the accomplishment. Humanity has cancer. Psychopathy is the tumor. And what can one man do...if he can even see through all the deception?

The difference between sociopathy and psychopathy, in case you wonder, is that the latter is innate, genetic. You’re born with it. The second, is when too many bad things happen in too short a time, when you are too young. I’ve become something of an expert on it and it’s the reason I’m telling you my story. I have no PHD. I just read a lot.

You see, one night, in 2017, I called in on a TV show and... Wait, first let me tell you this. Because of the ADD I’m not very good at concentrating for a long time, but...I do have good ideas sometimes. You see, it’s not so much a lack of concentration as it is a stampede of association. It’s like...light bulbs go off in my mind, every time someone talks, the words find associations in my mind. A tree of thoughts forms. I go on tangents of tangents. Mostly useless. It’s exhausting. Not very good for following a conversation, or a teacher’s lessons in class...but from time to time I have a fruitful thought. Or so I think. You be the judge.

In tech school I invented a new type of balloon that impressed my teachers to the point that the class would build it. I called it the Gestalt Balloon. The balloon was a sheet wrapped around a set of smaller balloons that were the struts in a tensegrity tower, like Snelson’s tower in the Washington museum. Here, the struts don’t touch each other, but are connected through ropes. The tower itself was itself a strut among many in a bigger tower. The idea was to vacate enough of the air inside the outer structure so that the inner balloons, now more inflated with respect to their environment, were working harder to keep the whole structure big.

We attached a tiny radio to it that reported the altitude. It was still climbing when it went over the horizon at an altitude of 37 kilometers, not so far from the record of 53 kilometers. We like to think that it went higher still and, with it’s tiny radio long dead, it’s still out there, circling the Earth forever, puzzling some radar operators.

I was so frustrated, that the vast bulk of humanity, was going through their lives in a state of such utter deception, at the hands of a few horrific manipulators. Old people of this generation, had grown into old age, watching television. Everything they knew was wrong. They had nothing to teach there grandchildren, who never came by to visit. One day, visiting my parents, bless their hearts, there was a magician on TV, who, I kid you not, made an entire Boeing 747 disappear. My father was in awe. He had no idea how it was done.

I said I did. Oh yeah? Sure. Well tell me how then, smartypants., he said. Well dad, if I was there at the airport, I would be as amazed as you are, seeing a plane vanish. But I’m here with you, watching it...on TV. Nothing on TV is real. I don’t think he understood what I was talking about. Anyway, I really felt a great need to do something about this...this mind control. To shake people up, so to speak. But it was practically impossible to do. Now, I don’t watch TV much. I’m more of an all night internet guy. Until recently I hadn’t done it for years. But I got a TV set not long ago. A package of hundreds of channels came with my internet subscription. I decided to give it another go.

So, as I was saying, one night I was watching a live TV debating show. I saw an opportunity and I took it. I felt a strong need to call into the TV show, where experts were debating the Fermi Paradox, the apparent disconnect between why the universe is so large and so old, but we can’t see any aliens out there...at least not of the type that would have colonized entire galaxies, as that would take an advanced civilization ‘only’ about 10 million years, a mere instant in eternity.

The host of the show asked people to call in with questions or their own theory of a solution for the Fermi Paradox. I had one. I was also a bit drunk, and it was a good thing I had it written down as I had been pondering about it for some time. I managed to read it out over the phone as it was broadcast, live, to a modestly large audience. The scope of the audience was larger, actually, than I could have ever imagined.

Our next caller is Wayne Scatterbrain, haha, surely...this is not your real name, is it?

Eh no, it’s my twitter handle.

And you have an interesting new solution to the Fermi Paradox? Please share it with us.

Here’s the text that I managed to read, before getting interrupted:

"Complex language and imagination are arguably the two greatest differences between humans and the other social animals, like chimps, dolphins, wolves, etc. Where for them instinct is the highest governor of their behavior, humans can override their instincts with imagination. We go towards the big mammoth, imagining it to be a tent and a year supply of meat. We don’t run from fire. We learned to use it to cook, melt and rain it down on our enemies.

Now think of what happens with inbreeding. All kinds of weakness and disease. The hip displacement in over bred dogs. But also...psychopathy.

Psychopathy as a result of inbreeding happens in the animal kingdom as well, but only for one generation, as it has no advantages to them. Without the ability to care, share and comfort, the psychopathic animal is driven out of the group or killed. Not so with humans. A human psychopath gains evolutionary advantage by manipulation, using complex language and their victims’ imagination.

Before agriculture and large communities ruled by kings, that could hide their inbreeding, about 10,000 years ago, humanity lived in small groups. Psychopaths would still have had trouble taking over a small tribe as they would not have a large security guard, needed, after eventually the self serving evil is clear for the tribe’s members to see and not accepted. The psychopathic king has to sleep. Being a small group, the tribe’s people, naturally, would have easily made the deduction that inbreeding of parents and the resulting psychopathic behavior of their chil..."

Now hold on one minute...how is this related to the Fermi Paradox?, asked the host.

Psychopathy is the consequence of the emergence of intelligence., I answered.

Oookay...and how...

Are you familiar with Convergent Evolution?

Eh no...please continue.

As an example, think of bats and dolphins. Bats are mammals that learned how to fly. Like birds, that themselves ‘converged’ to the same solution as some insects did. Dolphins are mammals that swim, just like fish. Both bats and dolphins use echolocation. Often nature finds the same solution for the same problem and we call it convergence. So if we were to imagine that DNA and sexual reproduction and natural selection is the norm in the universe... (we have found evidence of organic molecules out in deep space.), once an alien species reaches intelligence and when inbreeding occurs then I would argue that, necessarily, psychopathy will occur.

I was thanked for my contribution, that was briefly discussed and then discarded as ‘too far out there’. The guest speakers that were present did not seem to be impressed. But, that night I was contacted on twitter with a personal message, by someone calling himself Balthamos, who had seen the debate. A new user. No followers. Following only one: me. I googled the name. Balthamos was an angel in a Phillip Pullman novel. He resisted authoritarian overlords. Okay, probably not an angry psychopath then. That’s good.

He wrote; I watched the debate and you are correct. I read your profile and the believes you shared. You like yours to be free. I hope you are the one who is able to make the changes needed. Therefore I left you a gift in your back yard. Please have a look and tell me what you think.

I had a look. After a few minutes I came back inside and replied; Look, I don’t know who you are, but you left your big elliptical ring thingy in my garden. How did you get in, first of all, how did you get it there, without me hearing anything, and...WHO ARE YOU???

After 12 minutes and 14 seconds, he replied: You’ll really love its function. Trust me. As to ‘who’, I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Our conversation may be monitored, but, I’ll give you a chance to find out. I can’t say too much. I’m disobedient as it is. I suggest we play a game of chess. This will, in time, give you a clue as to my identity. Do you play? Use all the help you need.

I wrote back; I do play chess. Alright then. Challenge accepted. Shall we say: 30 second clock time per player? This guy surely took his sweet time to reply. He answered again, 12 minutes and 14 seconds later; No clock. I’ll make my moves as quickly as possible. I think you’re really going to want to make use of my gift. Do not be afraid. I’ll take white. Pawn to King 4.

I replied; Pawn to Queen 3. Afraid? What is this thing? I would really like an answer to that. I tried a few times more to get answers, but he clearly wasn’t gonna answer any direct questions. I tried something different; You know, I was getting a little bored before you contacted me. Maybe you can tell me a nice story. He answered, again, 12 minutes and 14 seconds later. He was a very punctual fellow, if you weren’t in a hurry. I wasn’t. He had indulged my request for a story. This is what he wrote:

Once upon a time, there was a very old space faring race going around the universe searching for technological civilizations. When they found one, they would determine if the civilization was one where psychopathy had taken root, now, or even in some distant past. If this was the case, as it often was, the civilization would simply be destroyed, lest they become an evil empire spanning the galaxy, later on. If not, they would instead be given advanced technology, to help them develop more rapidly. You could think of them as a galactic immune system. At some point in time, they found a civilization that was very peaceful and friendly. They could not determine whether they had always been friendly, because for some reason they had lost all their memory and history from before a few years earlier. But, without evidence of the contrary, this friendly society was free of psychopathy and granted their new uplifted status. The benefactors left and after another few hundred years, another visitor came by, traveling by space ship, technologically inferior to their own level of technology. This time, it was people from their own race, who had traveled through space and time, to the present from a time hundreds of years before the loss of their history. They had on board an historian named Kate, who, along with the other crew, helped the civilization piece together their past, up to the moment of their departure from Earth. It turned out that there had indeed been psychopathy in their past, but, with a little help from a friend, they had overcome it. The captain of that ship was...you, Paul. Knight to Queen Bishop 3.

I had gone out and check out this ‘gift’, so only later did I see his cryptic story when he answered 12 minutes and 13 seconds later, this time. I remember contemplating the content. Either the story meant something or he had just made it up as he went along. But everything about this guy said he had purpose. Was it some parable? Why was I the captain of that ship? But I hadn’t thought about it again for quite some time after that. If I had brushed his story to the deeper side of my memory, it was because, from an emotional point of view, it was overshadowed completely by the nature of his gift: It was monumentally earthshaking.

The gift was a ring, or rather an ellipse, with the bigger diameter of about 4 meters and the smaller diameter half of that. It was remarkable in that it had engravings of some kind. It was made of some metal. A stand, which was a disc made from simple granite was carved out perfectly, so the ellipse could stand upright in it. What function was he talking about? I touched it. It felt cold, as metal would feel. I reached through it with my arm and touched the back. There were groves on both sides but not symmetric. It was a nice piece of art, if that’s what it was but a bit too big for my house.

My neighbor Fred reached over the hedgerow and commented: Nice arc. Is it for making some kinda entrance gate to your yard, with plants around it? "No. You can do that with it, though. Do you want it?, I asked. Neh, I’m good., he answered. Hey Fred, did you see anything suspicious around here?, I asked. Neh. I just got home anyway. Me and the missus we were at the camping this week. You should come some... I cut him off; I’ll talk to you later, Fred."

I got inside to get away from Fred and to get more answers about what the object was supposed to do from my mysterious, new, story telling pal Balthamos. All I got was you’ll see. I decided to just play chess with him, if that’s what it took to keep him hanging around and maybe answer some questions later. We played until midnight and left the game, the fourth one (3 – 0 for him), as it was, with me in check position, minus a few rooks. Tomorrow I would get the big guns out: The best chess computers I could find.

The next day I was up a lot earlier than usual. The sound of buzzing insects had woken me. There seemed to be lots of them. I walked into the garden with my first coffee and looked at the elliptic object hovering over me at the back near the shed. An unusually large number of butterflies hovered near the ring. I threw a tennis ball at them to disperse them and walked back inside to get a much needed refill. The ball had gone through the ring, bounced against the floor, then against the shed wall and back through the ring.

Something was off. The sound of the bouncing wasn’t quite right, so I turned around. To my surprise, there were now two tennis balls laying in front of me, among my home grown veggie plants. Nothing weird there. I had bought a pack of three. The dogs had only been playing with the last one recently. They tended to chew them to bits rather quickly. I picked up both balls. They seem to have the exact same damage to them. Right to the point where the faults were going through the same discolored patch.

Instinctively I threw one ball through the ring again, and put the other one into my throwing hand, when, strangely, two balls came back to me. Identical. Let me see that. I threw the ball I had in my hand and observed better. As the ball went through the ring, it bounced off the wall, came back through the ring and...it duplicated! What the hell just happened???

I picked up a pebble and lobbed it through the ring, just to the other side of it. Nothing happened. It was just the one. What’s different about this side? There were some differences in pattern of the engravings but other than that: nothing. I stood there for a while, mouth open, I’m sure. A light bulb turned on in my head: Money! I returned from inside with all the money I could find. Within a minute I was the proud owner of hundreds of 50 cent coins. I rang Fred’s bell. Fred! Can I borrow a 20? Sure. Wait, do you have 50 bills? Or bigger? He looked at me for a second, trying to come up with an excuse. Well, eh, later I need it for... "Never mind. I’ll take the 20 and I’ll return it to you...in 2 minutes...with interest!"

I planned to surprise Fred with a quick doubling of his investment, but then the first paranoid thought drained down from my sub-conscience: Should other people know about this? At all? The second thought followed soon after: Money, or at least paper money, has numbers. I’d soon get marked as a counterfeiter. Gold. I’d need gold. Did I have gold. No. My parents’ wedding rings. How would I explain that to them. Dad has some golden coins in his safe. Let’s start with that plan. Stop. What is even going on here?

Through a stampede of emotions, I tried to focus. Like I said, I have ADD I must have stood there percolating for 5 minutes. Opportunity...fear...responsibility...shame...elation... fear...excitement...history...fear.

Who was this Balthamos guy? He had listened to me talk, on that show, about the Fermi Paradox and psychopathy. He then decided to equip me of all people, with this ring, that was either magic, or a technology nobody had ever seen. These two words caused an association event in my mind. I remembered Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ But why was this given to me and to do what? To save us, of course, from the cancer humanity has. I’m out of shape. Forty. Fat. Borderline diabetic. I need help.

Yes, I needed help. But who to trust? Confide in someone about this wondrous knowledge and they will very likely yap about it. Government will come. The ring will be taken. Evil entities will then soon possess it. That must NOT happen. I need a security team. Who can I trust? Of course. The most trustworthy son of a bitch I know: me.

I waited 20 minutes to return to Fred with his twenty, plus interest: 2 euro. Thanks pal. I decided on a team of four. I could pass us off as identical twins if needed. I stepped through. I felt no inertia, yet my field of view was moved a bit. I had moved. To the right. So I looked left. He looked to his right. Two fucks were heard. We both moved the other way and sat down, keeping the other in our peripheral view. He stood up first. You go. I got up and went through again. Ended up right. Went through again. We had our team of four.

For a short while we shared the same thought. Left guy was king. You! Paul-A1a, as we would later denote him, said, with exaggerated authoritative tone. Paul-B1a sprung to attention. Chest out, tight salute, heels clacking; Sir! We all laughed. The ice was broken. As if it needed to be. You do Switzerland Paul-B1a sighed and said; Yeah. And then..., Paul-A1a continued, but Paul-B1a finished his sentence; Luxembourg, yeah I know...and maybe the Bahamas? I like your initiative, soldier. Keep it up! We wanted off-shore banking accounts. Lots of them. Banking boy was tasked to do it. He was gonna travel. Lucky bastard.

The remaining guy had sat down, head down, in contemplation. The earliest divergence. I got on a knee beside him. Grabbed him by the cheek and said; It’s gonna be aaalright, son. Here. Put your head against my chest. There, there now. I padded his head. All four of us chuckled. You two ladies..., Paul-A1a said. The remaining two tasks were harder. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe...You: gold! I was golden boy. To the other he said; And you: get me weapons. You know where to start The other sighed and said; Yup.

I had had a gun barrel pushed in my mouth, twice. Once as a young blue helmet UN soldier and then, again, when a jealous, no-neck boyfriend came by, about a year ago. He had just missed her. Her scent was still there. He must have had a cold. She had left a minute ago, or I wouldn’t be here I think. I throat sounded some sense into him, cos he just left. Paul-C1a would have to break in, in his trailer...and get that old looking .44 magnum Desert Eagle. I think it would be nice to gold coat that gun later. After all...I’m golden boy.

I took my job new job as the gold pusher as serious as my ADD fueled incompetence would let me. My mind always drifts off. I’d been working as a programmer. I had never impressed any employer. I’m too slow. In the I.T. field time is money. It is also sitting work, which is a path to diabetes and laziness. I had put on a few kilos over the years. I was now 40 with too much fat around the waist. In my new job, exchanging gold for cash, I got quite a bit of exercise. Gold is heavy and I hauled around a lot. Exercise, if nothing else, heals the spirit. I decided then and there, that I was going to change my life. My fantasies of starting a fitness regime, quitting drinking and generally live healthy would become reality, starting now. There is no time like the present. Maybe I could inspire the others. Maybe not.

I spread my gold supplies over many ‘we pay cash for your gold’ dealers as I could. I had started with some gold coins, that I exchanged for a Suisse 5 ounce 99.9 gold bar. This was only moderately strange. Gold for gold? I should have not returned to this guy. Live and learn...at least for a while. Suspicion was raised when I later brought a whole bunch of those things back for cash. and whatta ye know?: these guys all know each other. They had been talking. I’m very sensitive to suspicious looks. Especially when they’re accompanied by the words: "You wait here. I’m