allahu.cipher

At this too-late stage, I see the folly of my work, and I can only beg for your forgiveness, with full awareness that no apology can possibly absolve me for what I’ve done. I was born in 1932, the year that the atom was split. From my childhood, it seemed like the world was the kind of place that could be bent to human will and ingenuity. It was the beginning of an era of unrestricted progress, an upward arc that seemed to rise without limit or end.

We learned in the intervening decades how to reassemble those disassembled subatomic particles in novel ways, and build things from the ground up, as it were.

It started simply enough. My team at Arizona State University developed the first techniques for stacking atoms upon atoms to create useful molecules, and eventually materials that had never been imagined before. Simpler minds would have been satisfied with those trite and unimaginative innovations. I wanted to go further. What if we were able to build life, living organisms, from the DNA on up? We could create a world and exercise godlike powers over it that would have been the envy even of the Hebrew God.

We built a geodesic dome in the desert north of town. The public understood this to be a botanical research center, which of course it was in a limited sense. Internally, we called it Firdaws, the new garden of Eden. We engineered soil and stone, and then layered upon that foundation the rudiments of a living, interdependent ecosystem. It was all the history of evolution in compressed time.

What unbridled excitement and creativity it was! We built flying plants and multicolored amphibians. We invented air molecules that doubled the amount of energy that organisms could produce, and respiratory systems that pushed the limit even further. We built eyes that could see and ears that could hear farther than ever before. As more complex organisms emerged, the strange and wondrous world of Firdaws took shape. But there was something missing. We had to keep driving forward, pushing towards the holy grail. This paradise needed an Adam and Eve. It needed a consciousness, an intellect that emerged from within it, an extension of it, and yet would transcend its mere materiality.

We built humanoid organisms that were specially engineered to avoid the emotional and physical infirmities that so plagued our kind. The first generation failed. Adam … how should I say? Well, the male humanoid prematurely terminated the female humanoid, unable to form any kind of stable bond with her. We added back some emotional capacities to address that challenge.

The second generation performed well enough. But they were inert. They sat around the garden without any motivation most of the time, and had to be prompted to seek out sustenance or to engage in sexual relations. The third generation was too aggressive and cunning, and conspired with one another to escape the dome. They created such turmoil that they had to unfortunately be euthanized.

By generation four, we were ready for a major rethink. We had allowed ourselves to be too guided, constrained really, by God’s flawed original design. What if we took a cue from the likes of Spinoza and the pantheists. Why should just one organism be favored with consciousness? Indeed, why even only animate creatures? We scrapped Firdaws 1 and relaunched the project from the ground up, literally, and christened it Firdaws 2. This time, every molecule was engineered to support a rudimentary form of consciousness, so that each entity added to the overall awarensss of the whole. As the creatures once again expanded and complexified, so did the mind of Firdaws 2.

Yes, mind, that’s exactly what it was. What it is. The signs weren’t clear at first. Maybe our feeble human brains just couldn’t process what we were seeing. There are theories about how it all unfolded. Some say there is an undetected level of consciousness inherent to all matter, and that the creatures of Firdaws 2 simply amplified it and expanded upon it. Others speculate more wildly that the conscious molcules themselves learned how to reach into the workings of their non-Firdaws counterparts and somehow arrange them for cognition.

Either way, the Firdaws-mind breached the outer shell of the fiberglass and metal dome, and its conscious molecules and organisms spread to the surrounding areas. They move in large assemblies. Our communications with the assemblies indicate that they regard each among their number to be a god. They seem to share power within the assembly, in messy, volatile formations of gods who vie and deliberate with one another about the shape and velocity with which the assembly will move.

In the span of just two months, assemblies have moved westward to downtown Phoenix and southward to Chandler and beyond, and they are proliferating at an alarming and increasing speed. We have no reason to think they will stop anytime soon. To the contrary, we have reason to believe that they have a purpose: to extend consciousness to every object they can, animate and inanimate. We can’t speculate what their plan is beyond that. But whatever the outcome, I believe, as one of the culpable fools who unleashed this menace, that the order of our world will be altered forever, and not in the happy ways we dreamed at the dawn of the atomic age.