[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 44

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What is awareness though, but the ability to see more sides of an issue? How better to measure your degree of awareness, than the number of different perspectives from which you’re able to view a matter, able to convince yourself of any or all of them?

There’s never only one side to anything. It only seems that way if your understanding of it is incomplete. God, too, cannot be just one way...but rather, every possible way there is to be. Light and darkness, one and zero, joy and misery, creation and destruction. The unity of all opposites, and the totality of all things.

How then could God have a masculine aspect, but not a feminine one? Why had the concept seemed so strange to me initially, when now it seemed as if it could be no other way? Of course networked systems of living, inter-communicative parts form a gestalt larger being.

Of course the various superorganisms on the Earth must then logically comprise a still-larger superorganism that authors I dimly remember have called Gaia. But is that the full extent of it? There’s always a bigger fish, isn’t there?

One of the ants crawled close enough to brush my skin with its antennae. Startled, it turned around and hurried off in the other direction. Despite my relative enormity, it couldn’t see me until it ran directly into the surface of my body.

To the ant, I’m too big to see. Big enough that it interprets me as part of its environment rather than a living thing. Just as I am made out of cells, but a single celled organism would interpret the inside of my body as an environment rather than an organism.

What organisms might humans overlook because, relative to the scale of our perception and understanding, they are “too big to see”? I asked Asherah. She smiled, this time subtly coy. “So...you’d like to receive the secrets of the universe, would you?”

How does one respond to that? “Yes, I want to receive the secrets of the universe.” She repeated herself, this time melodically. Singing it as though it were a verse in a larger song. “Are you ready for the secrets...the secrets of the universe?”

Not knowing what else to do, I sang along. “I am ready for the secrets...the secrets of the universe.” She repeated her part again. “Are you ready for the secrets...the secrets of the universe?” So I once more sang back to her “I am ready for the secrets...the secrets of the universe.”

It just continued like that, back and forth...until finally, she concluded the duet by flatly declaring “Too bad, you can’t have ‘em.” I lay there absolutely stunned. Then burst into laughter, realizing I’d been made a fool out of but feeling too amused to care.

I continue to lay there for hours, carefree as an infant under the maternal supervision of Asherah. I could tell that she welcomed it, and over those few hours we discussed all sorts of things. While discussing how far humans have come, she asked what ever became of the forest on Mars.

“Pardon me? The forest on Mars?” She affirmed it. “Yes, she’s like a sister to me. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from her. I hope she’s not upset with me or something.” I didn’t quite know how to break the bad news, so I just came out with it.

“Mars has been barren for billions of years. At least so far as our robotic landers have revealed.” She wasn’t having it. “You can’t be serious. What happened?” I didn’t have the answer she wanted and said as much. She became morose.

“You think they’ll always be there, y’know? That you can just come back someday and pick up where you left off. How can she be gone forever? I can’t accept it.” I did my best to console her, but that’s never been my strong suit.

“We’ve put people on Mars” I assured her. “There’s a small population of geologists, biologists and other researchers living there now. Their express goal is to one day restore the atmosphere and repopulate Mars with flora and fauna from Earth. Without a doubt, given the rate at which time passes for you, Mars will be green again before you know it.”

That did the trick. She still seemed skeptical of the claim that it was within humanity’s power to carry out such an ambitious and long-term project, but tearfully thanked me for giving her hope. “It won’t be the same as it was...but it does mean something to me. Speaking of changes, besides the acidic ocean and warmer air, I can feel all sorts of hard bits embedded into me. What’s that about?”

I didn’t initially understand, but it soon became clear she was referring to man-made infrastructure and population centers. “I have these long metal channels running through my skin now, which I never used to. Through the Earth’s crust. There are tremendous nests of humans made from metal and glass on my every landmass. It’s becoming uncomfortable, and the spread seems to be accelerating.”

I opined that humans have just as much a right to live on the planet as any other species. “Only you make such big changes to me, though!” she protested. “Turning more of me into machinery by the day. Fiber optic cables cris-crossing the ocean, geothermal columns driven deep into my flesh...and those tremendous machines which do nothing but suck in air all day long.”

She meant the atmospheric scrubbers. “That’s the upside” I offered. “Many of the largest machines we’ve so far built are for the purpose of cleaning up the mess we’ve made. Oceanic trash removers, atmospheric processing plants and so on.”

She seemed receptive to the notion, so I expanded on it. “Contrary to the dire predictions of Thomas Malthus, we do not breed as blindly as beasts of the field. We can see problems coming and act to prevent their worst consequences. Maybe the climate situation isn’t the best example of that, but better late than never.

The irresistable force bending the Earth is humanity. It would’ve broken already except that we’re hard at work making you as cybernetic as we are. A cybernetic planet, no longer dependent solely upon natural cycles to remain habitable...but instead assisted by machinery on an unprecedented scale!”

She held her face in both hands, at once fascinated and disturbed. “If that keeps up, before long I won’t even recognize myself.” I smiled, recalling how I felt waking up in this body. “Join the club. It’s not so bad. What you lose in comfort, you make up for in versatility.”

She mulled it over, no longer visibly distressed. “Well you could be gentler about how you integrate all of it into me. The way you’re doing it right now is painful. I suppose it can’t be helped, though...that must be what he meant.” she idly twirled a lock of her grassy green hair around one finger.

“Excuse me?” I interjected. “Who do you mean?” She blushed, immense face glowing red, cheeks resembling ripened tomatoes. “My lover...He said one day, you would transform this planet. You would consume the biomass, turning all of it into machinery. Turning it from a paradise for biological creatures into a paradise for machines...the new Jerusalem.”

It sounded an awful lot like something my father once said. She then asked me an odd question. “Have you built a machine which can make copies of itself yet?” I didn’t see the importance, so she filled me in.

“The machines you have now aren’t worth much. Without constant human attention, they break down, and require repairs. Only when machines can copy themselves will they have crossed the same all-important threshold that organic chemistry did when it became the earliest form of life.

Life endures indefinitely on its own, without any outside interference, because all living things have a survival imperative and the ability to self-replicate. Death is of course the end of individual organisms.

However their copy carries on, which then copies itself and so forth, continually outrunning their own decay. Just as it will one day be with technology! For only once it shares these properties with biological life can your machines continue on their own, indefinitely, with or without you.”

Somewhat stunned once again, I confessed that I’ve heard of no such development. That creating a self-copying machine is a very difficult problem indeed, and although I’m aware of efforts towards that end, nobody has yet succeeded.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 45}