By onestormynight
Digital delivery
Consider you are the character from the aforementioned 1960s Stranger in A Stranger Land, a human raised on a different planet with not quite human abilities like grokking, and, if I remember correctly, the ability to hear others' thoughts as if they were voices.
Once knowledge of these abilities become word-of-mouth viral, a kind of mass hysteria ensues that puts you at the center of any number of conspiracies. You find you are suddenly plagued with harassing phone calls, and in the age of home computers, harassing emails and spam.
You are bewildered by the sudden turn of cold shoulders, the line of cars following you to any destination, the never ending line of strangers walking the streets near your home, the suggestive remarks by those you have business with, the double entendres. Despite trying to cling to goodness, surely your encounters are tinged with ill will. Have you done something wrong, committed some crime?
As you become aware of the persistence of interest and pursuit, you wonder at its scope. Just how far does your alleged notoriety extend? Is there anyone who doesn't know who you are? If you are at the center of some worldwide conspiracy, haven't your human rights been violated?
As you attempt to go through proper channels to combat this nightmare, you discover you have no case, no concrete knowledge or advantage in these matters save your own abilities. If you have family, they too are likely in danger. How to protect them? You realize that you must come up with some way of making sense of what is happening even if it makes sense only to you. Hence, you devise a kind of idioglossia.
You begin assigning some kind of value to drivebys and other events and interactions. You make inferences from the taunting phone calls, bothersome emails, and inuendo-based real life interactions. Before long, you have a hazy grasp of how, why, when, and where. What you don't know is who.
You get work where you can knowing that it will end up in failure and usage. Your employment becomes a cynical betrayal of the American dream, of your dreams. It's as if your employers were only interested in your personal data. And what of that?
Was your personal information being used to mask their own illicit activities? Were they committing data crimes and trying to put the blame on you?
You realize that your phone is tapped, your entire home bugged. Steel and copper cables have transformed your home, even your body into some kind of power accelerator or battery. Utilizing your special vocabulary, you transform this cage of horrors into a sanctuary for yourself and your family. You cast an infinite shroud of protection around your interests.
At some point you've realized that your personal health data has been compromised via updated health data sharing policies. Or it has merely been stolen by unscrupulous lower level healthcare and maintenance professionals, or sold for public scrutiny by an errant family member.
While your initial attempts to work through "proper channels" has failed, your efforts have confirmed many of your suspicions. Your expectation turned into disillusion as you waited for the "powers that be" to come to your rescue.
Years pass, and the obsession with "leaving no stone unturned" continues. It occurs to you that obsession may actually be desperation. What has humanity done to itself?
No one has yet accused you or come for your arrest. You've long since realized that you can't fight the world so you relax, like floating. You let go and let god.
One day you realize that your detractors who are legion, are emulating you. They are not only trying to learn your unique language, they are trying to be you. They alter actual real time references online to suit their own fictitious history.
They have trespassed upon your privacy and your home, breaking and entering and guilty of property damage. They've hi-jacked your mail, your email and other accounts. They depend upon your deliveries.
They have nicked or swapped your clothes, your garbage and waste, your personal care items, your shoes, your family photos, your items of sentimental or other value or have tried to combine them with something of their own.
They steal and tamper with your food and drink, and your medications as they experiment with your life. They attempt to use your own ideas and creations, your very existence against you.
Your gifts are decidely otherworldly, yet they continue to use existing power structures and strategies to one-up you. The stock market rises and falls based on any perceived significance of your decisions and purchases as prosaic as they are.
Earth's inhabitants are in denial about their dependence on combustion engines and the planet's ever dwindling carbon based resources. Decisions that affect an entire nation are based on the fluctuating net worth of individuals whose fortunes can be reduced by half in a single day.
They are saying or doing the opposite of what you say or do as if to gain traction by opposing you. What they don't seem to realize is your language was created out of their alienation of you, out of their dissection and destruction of your very being. As the creator of this language which you devised to survive, you alone are also its opposite.
So many years have passed since this began that many later generations don't realize what they accept as part of their daily life. But the laws upon which your secret language are based have never changed despite many more recent rulings to accomodate more current behavior.
You realize the many items that have been plundered over the years are now serving as gleaming beacons and homing devices. All of their actions now fuel your trajectory as they exist in real time for all time.
Any action taken against you is also an action that will serve to hold them back and move you forward. You often wonder why the government or some other entity, doesn't employ armed guards to protect your home and your life.
The continuing public battlecry is "higher, faster, deeper, louder, stronger!" The pillaging and plundering ethos appears to have been built into human consciousness. Having been raised in an alternate atmosphere, you see clearly their sense of entitlement for torturing, maiming, deceit, humiliation and death which appear to inform their primary transactions. For better or worse, your own stance has always been "for defense only."
You find it difficult to relate to so-called humanity - a species that can no longer determine its own future and the extent of the damage they cause. The human race, as it exists on earth, appears to thrive on consumption and destruction.
Being human, everyone has their own agenda. This conflicting and accursed state seems to focus them on the short term and blind them to long-term answers to their problem.
You find yourself more concerned with the fragility of the planet and other species who are also at risk. What, you ask yourself, will happen when you return to whence you've come? When you are no longer here to stoke their immediate consumerism, what will they do with the stale, false, and decaying data they have collected over the years?
AI or Artificial Intelligence will have its growth and limitations based on the these events and how it utilizes any tiny particle of any of the above. To the extent that your home has been turned into the "event horizon," and your life, your existence a black hole, you know you have nothing to fear with the growth of AI.
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