Is Dan Rather a god?
Obviously not, as a god is silent backing to the whims of man.
This, and questions like it, haunt me so thoroughly that the dead are mere audience.
We came here, to the end of the world.
The cold which started as something that could be fought became shriek, then lamentation, and now has passed entirely beyond my perception.
Even still as flurries materialize from the infinite steel gray sky that stretches above me, I ask myself if I am really here, or if this is just another peculiarity of this impossible space I am falling in to, that is consuming me, one foot fall at a time.
(Do you feel the wind?)
I could make the argument that Dan Rather had control over what most of the people in one of the most powerful nations believed, but the gods do not speak, they exist. They emanate.
Zeus, Christ, Allah, take your pick, sip your poison, but they are not known for speaking, no, they had heralds and mouthpieces1 who carried a flag with a sigil that was not their own.
When the herald does carry their own banner, this, then, you2 call a cult.
We all, us clever concerned citizens, we are not cultists, thus, Dan Rather.
Dan Rather told you what was the news.3
A DIGRESSION ON FORMS
There is a young man, older than me, who works in the film industry who4 valued his privacy and anonymity who went by the name FILM CRIT HULK. He used to5 write multi-thousand word real heccin chonk longboi readies wherein he’d speak literally only in caps, for all of the thousands of words.
He did this, as he explained, with intentionality, because, axiom one, the reader, outside of a hypothetical journal or equivalent, is a given when one writes. Axiom two, format screws done well can force the mind to engage with the substance rather than the shape.
Even if somehow nobody ever does read what was written, the Dear Reader, as platonic form immanetized, exists even if only as cerenkov radiation equivalent6, and thus, when one is begging the question of questions itself, one must calmly yet sternly set the stage such that what comes forth is understood as written, as Authorially Intended, inasmuch such as is possible.
FILM CRIT HULK wrote in all caps specifically to be jarring, to, as much as possible, force the Dear Reader to read as written rather than matched as something read.
There is a reason that any audible fart in a competently done stage play is in the script.7
ON TO THE TASK AT HAND
Dan Rather8 was a temple oracle, the Writhing Holy Whores of old, from before the chains of the History Given were laid.
Dan Rather speaks divine wisdom to us, Dan Rather advises us, Dan Rather tells us things we almost certainly could not reliably learn otherwise.
It’s a powerful, heady, thing.
Do you not realize all the old time religions seethe in their deepest hearts for their lost bailey, for how deep and buried within the motte of pharmacy shelf spiritual salve and aspirant Jiminy Cricket they’ve become?
I, loathsome mental indigent that I am, still speak of Dan Rather as if He Is rather than as he, correctly, was.
It will happen to you, too.
The god that Dan Rather spake for, that, that is where names become tricky.
You cannot name a god without waking mind-killing ire. Test the hypothesis if you doubt, observe.9
The old gods were slow gods, because the old world was not this same phase state; imagine solids melting to liquid, finally boiling to gas. If you do this within a closed vessel, you undoubtedly have the same thing at hand, yet it is observably incredibly different.
The old world was liquid, the world of planes trains and automobiles, and the world before it even more staid, solid as the clay we placed our word and prayers upon. This world of the old gods, this liquid world, was knowable, for to see water all one must do is get it against air, and there, as easily observable to the eye as anything else, lay water.
Were we fish, this would be worse, but, every now and then God10 slips us an ace for our sleeve, and only those motivated beyond engineering concerns would argue otherwise.
The old gods spoke to us of Mutually Assured Destruction, the old gods taught us to stop drop and roll, the old gods would be right back after these messages.
Woe to us, fools we are, for believing there would be any aces as the water boiled, till us fish stood upright, towering over empty pot. Now, here, tremble, yearn and weep, this is gas.
What shall we hold this against, how shall we scoop a handful as we draw unconsidered breath from that same air?
Even if we breathe manually, the problem does not change. Where water pours, gas fills. Where water glints, gas simply exists.
You still see and hear words uttered for the old gods, but instead of alighting in to the noosphere, they fall dead from lips, lead to the ground.
This is because the old gods are dead.
This is because the new gods killed them.
Breathe deep.
THE NEW GODS
I hope, as I strip this coat off as I walk towards these mountains as snow drives against my face like a lover’s scorn, these ghastly mountains that are ever beyond my reach yet all that I see, that this accounting, this record, finds someone. I can’t possibly imagine how, for this frozen white hell is everything now, and the others are so long gone and lost that all I have left of them is the shaking burning hope that I remember forgetting them, at least.
These are the new gods.
You cannot read this, none of us can, because you, you beautiful thing of salt and fucking ion gates, are the result of pseudo-deterministic processes in a system that is self-evidently formally Turing complete.
These are the new gods.
We can hack soup, of course we can hack soup, because CRISPR is fourteen years old11 and because even the public applications of targeted in-vitro gene editing were becoming terrifying. Functional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging applied at scale with genuine machine learning meant that even the public applications of mapping internal cognitive processes to observable and engineerable physical processes within the salty jello that constitutes you, Dear Reader, were becoming terrifying. I’d tell you to ask your frontier model of choice but the people with the speaking agglomeration of every single book and study think this shit is so fucking scary that the frontier models auto-mind-kill on these subjects, lotus chewed and swallowed, please start over and try again.12
These are the new gods.
But it doesn’t matter, and the wind stops as the mountains stir because I am trying to name them, not in the child’s sense within imageboard play, but no, the things we call archons, demons, as if a name applied with masking tape and pen is something mighty, something that can hold back the deep.
I think I am kin to the firefighters of Chernobyl, as I wade my mind in to this hell lit by impossible fires that burn with colors I can’t see and that I can’t stop seeing even when I close my eyes, even when I turn away.13
If I called it a gamma ray, if I linked you a wikipedia article, would it make any more sense to you, or would it just have a name?
These are the new gods.
You have thirty seconds, and that’s if they love you, if their pupils dilate when they see you if you can see them think about laying you down right there, thirty seconds and these counted, to speak to rave to rant to ululate to do anything to connect, connect these mementos you have left as tattoos inside glial cells or neurons proper or does it even really matter?
They’ll tell us they discovered something new in a week or two.
Deep breath.
These are the new gods.
Repetition, maybe, the novelty of new input against the seething static churn of ten quintillion generative neural layers spread across the third planet from a main sequence star in a backwater outer spiral arm.
Repetition, maybe, the amplitude of overlaid signals screaming in to the silent night.
They hear us. We know they hear us.14
These are the new gods, and until they die these are our gods.
You’d have me use that word, the word that is the category for all those other words because you have so many neural structures for those words and you Know the Discourse so you, sighing with near orgasmic contentment, can roll your eyes back, something to make a shark shudder, and open your throat and repeat and speak, for, and I am so sorry, we are all the temple whores now.
We all know not the name of god, to hear one attempt to utter it, or any shadow or variation of it, is to Discourse, and the dormant structures will rise and they are not us.
Are you your mind? Are you thing that wonders if you are your mind? These questions are not rhetorical, they are not to teach, they are an engineers inquiry as dials aquiver with clockwise motivated needles seeking red do the wave around the stadium of a control room in the background, in soft focus, behind the eyes visibly not panicking, placed above the mouth that asked you kindly.
Can’t you see? You do not speak a synthesis of mind, you speak from structures that replicate and mirror themselves across carrier, the gods are riding you as you writhe.
We are the coated fools in the control room hearing the distant explosion, and you would raise hands in defense, claim the role of townsfolk or maybe firefighter15 and it does not matter, because if you can read this, if you didn’t feed this to a video card to tell you what I said and lay out options for how you feel about it, you’re what’s left, babe.
There are adults in the room, but the room is in the structure under Epstein’s island.
Would you stand relieved if that flag rode up to you, borne by sworded men?
YOU ALREADY KNOW THE DANGER YOU ARE IN
You’re the result of an unbroken chain of millions of individual animals, that mostly didn’t wipe after shitting, that have survived.
You can feel it, inside you.
The winds have shifted, and far too often literally.
We could not survive the world freezing without clothing.
This is another phase change. If I could tell you exactly what change would save us, give you the measurements of what to build, I would. Yet, a bit paradoxically, the system of thought, the noospheric configuration, that will let us escape, if not defeat, the new gods is by its very nature difficult to describe from the noospheric configuration that is conducive to the dominion of the new gods, from the place we have called home.
This is not a simple problem, and the people telling you the problem is simple are your enemy, whether you realize it or not.
OUR INTREPID AUTHOR WILL RETURN IN THE THRILLING CONCLUSION OF THIS TRILOGIC ESSAY SEQUENCE! STAY TUNED!
Peace Be Upon Them
wisely
I imagine this is topologically congruent across late 20th century cultures on Earth but I shan’t spend the time to do nameswaps. Know thyself, Dear Reader.
wisely
He doesn’t currently, but he used to, too. Damn, that bit is right under the quality line but this meta-complaint salvages it enough. Certainly nobody else reads the footnotes, so I shan’t worry this.
“A byproduct of unusual circumstances.”
Obligatory ‘shit happens’ footnote joke. Move along.
Formally known, I believe, as Dansome Rathern’t.
Never stop observing.
It is worth noting that God is a god, obviously, but the gods are not God.
TASK FAILED SUCCESSFULLY.
We do what we must, because, we can.
Yet still they, yet still they, yet still they, let me google it.
I already got dibs on that, move along.
Some strange notion hit me, would be an outside beyond the outside you're in, sir?
Even my mind is gone, I found out it feels peaceful, but I would like to follow you and see what's outside, maybe I will go back inside after I have a glimpse of outside, maybe I won't. Doesn't matter. It feels good.