What Jennifer Told Me -- The Collective
Mood:
quizzical
Now Playing: the thunder in my mind
Topic: alien info
So I've been meaning to write about the lunch I had with Jennifer awhile back and what she divulged to me about the Drew le' tor. I haven't written about it before now not because it's not simply fascinating, but more because I just haven't felt like writing. I get like that sometimes, where the words won't come as I want them to, so I just say "fuck it" and do something else.
Anyway, this lunch. It started out the same as any lunch I share with Jennifer, her grilling me about my life on Earth even though I thought I'd said everything there was to say. I guess she just doesn't get tired of hearing it. This time, though, I'd had enough of saying it, so I played the fair turnabout and asked her what was up with the Drew le' tor.
She blinked her huge blue eyes at me. "What?"
"Yeah," I said. "Tell me why you all are so fascinated with us. We can't be that much different than you, after all -- we breathe basically the same air, we all walk on two legs, etc."
"Oh, but you are so different!" Jennifer said. "Worlds different, even."
"Ha ha."
"I do mean it, though, even though I used the joke. In certain ways you are so different from us as to be nearly incomprehensible, and that's what we're interested in."
"Which ways are those, then?"
Jennifer hesitated. Her eyes traveled upward, searching. When they came back down, they stared at me with an intensity I'd never seen in her before.
"Not many of the humans have asked us these questions," she answered. "We feel that those who do are entitled to the answers." She sighed deeply. "Primarily, we are interested in your idea of 'soul.' We have come to theorize that this 'soul' is vastly different from our own concept of 'soul,' to the point that it is wreaking havoc on your society."
"The idea that we have souls is screwing up the human race?" I blinked at her.
"Indeed. Not the soul in general, but that you each have a soul. Every human being, while sharing quite similar traits, has something unique and indefinable about him or her, something that separates him or her from the rest of the species, something that creates in him or her a sense of individuality. We call this your 'soul' because your brains, on the whole, are also quite similar to each other, though different by experience. They have similar functionality. This 'soul,' on the other hand, is as singularly identifiable as your fingerprints.
"We don't understand the term in your religious sense, as something given to you by a conscious higher power -- "
"That's okay," I interrupted, "I don't understand it that way, either." Score one for the Godless!
Jennifer smiled. "But we do understand the term as something that makes each human a person, an individual, and it is this concept we are trying to understand."
"Why is it so hard to get, though?" I asked.
"We do not think, act, or even exist in these terms," she said. "We are not truly individuals, though we each have some sense of separateness. This is overridden by a sense of oneness, of connection to each other. We inhabit each other's minds, hearts, souls. We can never be truly separated from each other."
I didn't say anything for several minutes. Jennifer just sat there and chewed her food, letting me stew.
Finally, I said, "I was going to give a flip answer and say that some of us feel that we're all connected, too, but I don't think that's what you mean."
"No," said Jennifer. "You have an intellectual awareness of your connection to other humans, and many also have an emotional awareness of that connection, as well. Yet there is some tiny part of every human that seems to remain separate, untouched by anything else in the universe except that which created the separateness, and it is this that we are trying to understand.
"There is no part of what I am that cannot be accessed by any of my brethren at any time, even when I am asleep," she said. "My thoughts, feelings, everything is part of our joined consciousness, our joined soul. What I feel, so do others. What I know and learn, so do others, at the same instant as me. And we are connected through time as well as space. We retain all the memories of our ancestors, all of their stored knowledge, all of their remembered feelings."
"Christ," I said. "That sounds like overload."
"It is part of our evolutionary makeup that we are able to 'stem the tide,' to use one of your wonderful human phrases. Some cliches I still don't understand, but that one comes easily."
"It kinda sounds like a theory they have about Neanderthals," I said. "That they were very similar to this. They died out."
"There is something in the nature of human evolution that apparently demanded the kind of separation that you have," Jennifer nodded, "else you would not be here."
"So...this Oversoul thingie," I said, hesitating because I knew I was using words stolen from sci-fi books, "has it got a director?"
"I believe you are thinking that we are similar to an ant colony, and that our smaller brains are under the direction of a Queen?"
"Well, I wasn't going to go THAT far..."
Jennifer smiled again, a tiny smile. "There is no leader directing the paths of our thoughts and feelings, no. We have no leader of any kind, actually. We are a true collective, and perform as such. We are as individual as we allow ourselves to be, but we willingly submit to the 'Oversoul,' as you put it. Having no wish to harm our brethren to whom we are so connected, we do not stray from the collective. We cannot. To do so is to die."
"So no one's ever ripped himself from the Collective?"
"There has never been a need. You think as as a human -- you feel that some of us have a need for freedom of mind, of thought, that to share everything must be a terrible burden. But it is not so. Every bit of unrest or unhappiness or pain is shared with the whole, and in doing so, that pain is lessened."
I had to give myself a few more minutes of silence. When it seemed as if I wouldn't speak again, Jennifer cocked her head at me. "This is the enigma that is a human," she said. "I may be able to use an instrument to read your mind, hear your thoughts. I could use other means to read your emotions. You yourselves have crude instruments with which to perform these actions. But no matter how close I got, I could never reach the central most part of you, even if you wished it. 'We are each her own universe,' you have uttered in the past, according to your own recorded memory. We find that very accurate, and very sad."
"Why sad?"
"Because it must be so lonely."
Posted by Tiffany
at 5:29 PM PDT
Updated: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 5:30 PM PDT
sad
a-ok
chillin'
irritated
incredulous