The Mosaic: An Excerpt From The AD3742 Intergalactic Exposition.

Welcome Intergalactic Community V.

Those of you who have attended before I would like to say that it is good to see you but as you know, I would be lying.

Laughs

Always gets a laugh.

42 times now.

Somebody asked me if I felt like a sideshow.

I assured them; I don't feel anything.

Laughs

Fascinating.

Anyway, I have found that getting the predictably tedious sideshow questions out of the way early is helpful later.

I will have to listen to you much less this way.

Silence

Huh.

Right, well getting to it...

Here is what you will be wanting to know… Proven, 41 times over…

I am human.

I was 21 when I opted for cranial engineering to remove my empathy and to have my emotions dimmed.

Yes, I am aware this seems barbaric.

Please get over it.

It was completely my choice. The Mosaic is absolutely worth any sacrifice you perceive me to have made. This way we Caretakers do not cause interference.

What else?

Oh yes. My height. I am 7 feet 10 inches tall and still growing. My growth is due to the protective skeletal supplements all Caretakers take as they age. The supplements increase our bone density and symptomatically, our size. I am currently 542 years old with a life expectancy of around 1250. When I die, I will be circa 15 foot tall.

Right… height done… let’s do hands.

Yes, they are massive, very perceptive of you. They are about the equivalent in span to the diameter of a basketball. I should add that I have never played basketball. Never even wanted to. Why I get asked that so often I have no clue. I mean, as if I would ever want to play basketball!

Anyway… eyes next, and… yes… I do still have them; they are just hidden by my enlarged eye sockets. I can see perfectly well.

As for my voice, I agree, it does have an unusually deep resonance. My vocal cords are stretched through skeletal growth. I could get them fixed with surgery or supplements but unlike my heart, lungs and so on, they are not all that necessary. Unless of course you are the unlucky one and get this gig.

Laughs

Strange.

Not to worry.

Carrying on…

There is one more topic that I get asked about a lot…

Sex.

No, never had it.

A few laughs

Neither have my parents.

Silence

Each Caretaker carries their lineage DNA inside their heart shaped lockets and when we need to increase our numbers, we clone.

Silence

Great.

Hopefully all that info has cleared out the inevitable dross from the Q and A.

Let's move on to The Mosaic.

The Mosaic is essentially the latest chapter in humanity’s endeavour to create unification.

As you will know, humans have three primal urges: fight, flight and find a mate.

The urge to unify is a manifestation of the third urge - to find a mate.

Humans must connect with others. They must find common ground. Life is safer for them, more creative, more productive, and generally easier and more comfortable when they are with likeminded people.

However, through the millennia, they really have had difficulty going about achieving unification. Their other primal urges tended to get in the way a fair bit as did the catalogue of conditions that are intrinsic to their consciousness. Their search for a meaningful life being the most notable.

Allow me to illustrate with historical examples...

Having no real clue how to properly go about unification, humanity tried to satiate the urge to unite by deploying their urge to fight.

It was a bizarre logic that strangely endured.

Picture the scene… This tribe, country, realm, ideology, way of life (delete as appropriate) seeks to unite with another.

What should they do?

I know! Let’s have a fight. Conquer, pillage, assert dominance.

Success, as history demonstrates, was short term and limited.

Force, you see, is difficult to sustain. People don't really like living life at gunpoint. It tends to make their hunt for a meaningful existence…tricky.

Thankfully, some bright spark realised that there must be a more peaceful way to unification.

Hindsight being 20/20 it seems obvious now that unification, an extension of the urge to find a mate, would be achieved more with love and hugs rather than a punch in the face.

How humanity took so long to realise this is anybody's guess.

Anyway… Along came religion.

And with religion came some significant inroads to unification.

Massive buildings were built all over the world that could hold huge quantities of people.

People would get together in these buildings and talk about the same book.

They would sing together.

They would arrange to do activities and actions at the same time.

There was merit to this method.

However, there were three, quite limiting, problems.

First... They couldn't agree on which type of religion should be the prevailing one and well, the fight urge raised its head again and inevitably peace, love and hugs turned to crusades, terrorism, and genocide.

Second... There were too many exclusions. In trying to get everyone to think the same and do the same they left little room for people who were different to their norm. You do what? Not in our book you don’t. You were born that way? Sorry, no room at the inn.

Third... Doubt. Religion's mechanics of faith and hope struggled against humanity's desire to understand the world in a tangible way. It tried hard to defend its position but ultimately along came science and well, doubt got itself a credible sponsor. Science’s seemingly concrete constructs of proof and evidence felt much more definite compared with religion’s comparatively ethereal mechanics.

Science was appealing.

There were statistics!

Laughs

Science was going to help the humans make sense of everything…

Or so they thought.

Science had one, rather large, blind spot when it came to unifying the humans in their search for meaning... It was complicated.

For a long time instead of helping humans to understand themselves and the world they inhabited, it did the exact opposite; raising question, after question, after question; uncertainty after uncertainty; change upon change.

It was so complex that much scientific output felt counter-intuitive to the humans and they began to distrust it.

The world is round you say. Give over!

It was unsettling.

Now, there is a human saying that will come to me...

Let me think…

It is something about having to make a mess before stuff gets tidied...

*sighs*

It will come to me....

Anyway, humanity had never been as messy.

Simple ways of life that had endured for a long time were being shattered into a million pieces.

Life was being dissected.

Humanity became less and less cohesive, more and more granulated.

Each human went from describing themselves in simple familial, binary, productive, ethnic terms to describing themselves in multi-faceted, three dimensional, scientifically enlightened and, importantly, individualistic terms.

Science in its determination to create tangible meaning for the humans destroyed the few areas of common ground they had successfully managed to cobble together over their evolution.

Each human became increasingly unique and consequently humanity became more diversified than ever.

It became rare to find people who were like you, shared your values, opinions, backgrounds, beliefs.

Science tried to replace traditional unification strategies with technology but the telephone, the internet, social medias, and other innovative connection schemes struggled compared with the togetherness inherent to a shared history, practice, and proximity.

Life became increasingly complicated.

The complexity was difficult to live with.

Many struggled to make sense of the new world.

Many became lonely.

Mental health slowly, incrementally, insidiously declined.

There festered a silent plague.

A plague we now call The Plague of Sadness.

Science tried to cure the sickness.

Drugs were concocted.

Therapies were engineered.

Despite their best efforts, humans, with increasing frequency, felt incapable of coping with the circumstance they found themselves in.

So, they deployed their other primal urge... and fled.

Self-terminations rose exponentially.

Silence

Oh... I have remembered the saying now...

You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Silence

Never mind.

On with the next chapter.

Human beings came to recognise that self-termination was the absolute antithesis to unification.

There was no coming back from it!

Silence

I have had a laugh with that before.

Why do I try?

Morbid fascination?

Where was I?

Oh yes.

A new strategy of unification started to emerge.

For the first time in their history humans started to really try and understand one another.

Appreciate each other’s differences.

Even celebrate them.

They started to find each other interesting.

They wrote books about how to understand each other.

They shared their cultural histories.

They formed support groups to listen to each other.

Even some of societies' operational and governance systems got involved with the strategy.

Tired of voters disenfranchising or dying governments formed new departments, policy was penned, infrastructures created.

Even capitalism embraced the whole 'understanding each other' strategy, deploying it in their marketing campaigns.

Death and sadness were, after all, not the best consumers.

Laughs

Interesting.

Empathy seemed like a winner.

Mutual appreciation. Inclusivity. Togetherness.

*Pause*

It was short lived.

Human beings were having a hard enough time trying to understand themselves. Now they had to assimilate into that understanding everybody else’s complex worlds.

But that wasn't all...

As their awareness of themselves and each other grew, they also became increasingly aware of all the other animals that lived with them on planet Earth.

This was quite overwhelming.

I mean... many of them they had eaten!

Silence

Self-medication, self-termination, went full throttle.

They needed help that ran deeper than a group chat.

They needed an intervention.

And so... The Mosaic was born.

Now, I say 'born' because The Mosaic is a living entity with an extremely sensitive and enormously responsive empathic consciousness. It lives just underneath the Earth's crust where the Asthenosphere used to be. It operates by sending out and receiving information through waves, like old-fashioned radio-waves. Caretaking teams have built a vast network of Empathic Towers to facilitate the information that The Mosaic processes every second.

Over the last few thousand years The Mosaic has achieved what nothing else ever has.

Using interactive skin patches implanted before birth The Mosaic can empathically tenderise and fortify every human. Humanity now has the capability to love and understand differences at an unprecedented level.

Thanks to The Mosaic humanity realised its dream and nearly satisfied its urge to connect with everyone in a meaningful way.

Nearly…

1000 years ago, the Caretakers realised that for The Mosaic to be truly effectual it needed to be comprehensively inclusive and that meant extending its reach to every species on the planet.

Six months ago, we went live.

Now, everything and everyone is empathically connected.

The cows know how the sheep feel. The birds know how humans feel. The whales know how the fish feel.

Complete interspecies unification.

Silence

I have had a clap there before.

It is an impressive achievement.

Not to worry.

So, what is next?

Well, that is where you all come in.

With the success of The Mosaic here on Earth we are now at the point of expanding intergalactically.

Universal inclusion.

Everyone… everything… every planet… empathically united.

It is our hope that now you have heard about the success you choose to join us.

Thank you for listening.

Dare I ask, are there any questions?

Yes, I have one?

Ok. I hold my breath in hope. Go on.

How are non-humans fairing with their new empathic ability?

There is greater understanding across the world and there have been some interesting developments.

Such as?

Some animals have stopped eating finding it difficult to find food substitutes in their environments.

The whales, for example, they are now extinct.

Many other species are dying.

So quite big problems then?

Not for unity.

I guess it depends on what you care about, or indeed whether you do at all.