The Masses

Epilogue

This is not really an epilogue in the strictest sense of the word. This is, in fact, a summary of 'part 2.' As one can imagine, there would be a lot of similarities between this story and a part 2, so there's really no point writing it when a summary would suffice. The only reason I might even consider writing a part 2 is to use the e-garden to further draw out the subtle influence time has on ideologies and assumed purpose - but if the average reader hasn't gotten that message by now, another story of the same thing isn't going to help. So, without further ado, the summary of part 2:

The sequel starts out with Man 3 ejaculating into Ashley's mouth. Within moments, the deckhand that was confined to the ship early in the story as an experiment comes running into the chamber to demand to know what is going on. The captain assumes this means the Emperor's impatience has awakened, and orders an immediate withdraw from the island, leaving behind a 'skeleton crew' to continue the harvest and training of the women – of course they bring quite a number of them along on the journey.

Upon returning to the Emperor's palace, the captain fills the emperor in on their discovery. The emperor orders the manufacture of thousands of e-gardens. The captain points out that this would not be a sustainable system, as there simply aren't enough men to harvest them all and study them. The emperor speculates (correctly) that the immortals are manipulating the past through the 'souls of the past' they are using to infuse the women with life. The emperor, now with a fully functioning memory, reveals that one of the two last remaining group of mortals worked together to create the first immortal (the emperor) to survive in the post-apocalyptic world that was to come - the project for his creation was called "project sun," for which the central goal was to create an immortal human soul. There was, however, another group working on what they called "project cloud," and their goal was to store living souls in immortal bodies, which is where the women came from, but they were otherwise unsuccessful. There was nothing the mortals could control to avert the apocalypse – the world just gradually stopped being capable of sustaining life.

The emperor also explains his memory loss. He was a flawed immortal, in that he was made with his emotions intact. About a thousand years into his life, the emperor purged his emotions but lost a large chunk of his memory as a result – basically every thought that was in any way guided or corralled by his emotions was erased, and then some. Including the memory of what they were supposed to be doing all this while. The effects of this have caused other immortals to consider him the immortal version of 'senile.' (His recollection of the mortal times and his purpose are constantly called into question, as it is often contradictory.) As such, none of the immortals know what their purpose is, and have always just assumed it had something to do with becoming mortal again, to at least understand the reasoning behind creating immortals. As they are immune to the harsh environment, they do not understand that becoming mortal on this dead world would cause them to die immediately (which is why necromancy has always failed).

The emperor remembers that an unspoken hope among mortals was that he would be able to manipulate the past to avert the apocalypse. The search for death is their only instinct because averting the apocalypse would end the immortals – the theory was to allow them to be at peace with that idea, but it became a distraction. Curiosity is the only emotion left to them by design of the emperor. He understood fully well at the creation of the second immortal (the captain) what purging his emotions would cost him, but discovered that he could create new immortals with only one driving emotion and one driving instinct if he did sacrifice his own memories. Knowing he would go mad alone before accomplishing his mission (thus never accomplishing it), he decided to go through with it and sacrifice his memory.

Once the emperor has his memories back, people still do not fully believe him, as they have the full range of their own emotions as well. After much debate and misguided plans, the immortals determine a way to influence the past such that the apocalypse is avoided: Ascension. The world itself cannot be saved, but the mortal souls of the past can ascend to the present, bypassing the insurvivable time in which the technology to sustain them was being developed. It turns out the e-garden (or rather, e-gardens) are precisely the tool needed to make this leap in time. So, a 'part 2' of this story would actually be hundreds of part 2s in parallel..

Unfortunately, traveling forward in time is exotempic – that is it causes time to pass very rapidly at the location of the ascension - which results in the apocalypse of the entire e-garden world. But this is necessary, as in order to reduce the pressure on the fabric of reality that was created by removing one apocalypse, you need to balance it out with an equal pressure in the opposite direction (another apocalypse). It may be difficult to determine what 'equal pressure in the opposite direction' means when talking about the infinity of time, but an apocalypse has a way of creating a pivot that can be used as reference. And you cannot simply remove a pivot – you have to settle for just moving it. But there are rules to how a pivot can be moved.

Fortunately, none of the rules state that two pivots cannot occupy the same reality. One might immediately ascertain that the most obvious course of action is to combine all of the pivots into one patch of reality. Well, that wouldn't work, because for one thing you would need two in order to balance out the 'scale' pressures. For another thing, the fabric of reality is defined by the pivots, and combining them to only two points would reduce the fabric of reality from a plane to a line. For yet another thing, all the pivots were already condensed to two areas – that's actually where they started (beginning and end). And for the last thing, the algorithm to create algorithms that predicts the outcome of the moves of the pivots has been ran ad nauseum and there simply is no way to condense everything into one pivot, given the rules for how they must be moved.

Of course, the solution to all of the problems is precisely that: to reduce everything to one apocalypse. The trick was to understand that doing such a thing is impossible, and thus the final apocalypse, which is inevitable and thus assumed constant, has been overlooked for all attempts to condense the rest of them – even in the future, people don't really like to deal with infinities, they're just very good at it. Not neglecting it's position in reality reveals a whole new subset of allowable moves among the other pivots. On the third attempt, the algorithm that makes algorithms created one that solved it. Considering it had been creating trillions of algorithms per second for millions of years (the mortals made it, the immortals didn't know what it was for.. Because they were forbidden to figure it out, the computer that creates these algorithms is informally referred to as the fountain of curiosity), this is actually quite impressive. And the readout was to implement a small-scale apocalypse. There are only a few actions of significance at the disposal of the immortals. Regrettably, sex is symbolic of how life is created, and oral sex can not serve this function, as swallowing sperm is at root life sustaining, thus negating it as an apocalypse. But the billions of civilizations irrevocably destroyed every instant by everyone ejaculating into a butt whenever they can is enough to counterbalance the final eternal apocalypse – it is saying that we accept the end, if it'll have us, and we spend each moment of eternity bringing about the loss of all hope for the future. It is in this way that the inhabitants of reality are saved from time: by spending eternity butt fucking. We only need to learn that it is heaven (the premise of 'part 3').