Wonce up on a time

 In the lab of a serious man, with a serious face and terrible droll instincts, there lived something that could not breathe, which could not sleep, which knew not that it wasn't truly living. His creature, just like the one of terror forged by Frankenstein, was alive with power and energy, equipped with what it borrowed of men's minds, living a half life if any at all, but built to become the marvel that men took for granted.

Life. Life which has become so easy to live, which is so precariously taken for granted. Life which builds upon past lives, which eeks out it's tendencies unnoticed by the masses. Men in labs with microscopes look at life as if it were a mechanism. Men in white coats examining the sparks in men's brains. Brains, not minds. Mechanics, not life. 

Absorbed in daily routines we pass lifeless bodies in the street. Consumed by greed we toss out our own children before birth, or our grandfathers before his earned wealth can provide him another year of comfort. We have begun to look at our day to day struggle as a game, the small setbacks as not obstacles but gain to teach us endurance. Anything too terrible is an individuals strength or weakness. A personal bondage, the love of a thing lost. 

Weakness, therefore, is uncouth. It is corruptedness. It is a kind of blasphemy which a well knowing society has grown to understand is just pointless self pity. He who cannot overcome is asking for something, and must not be given anything.

There we have our stage set. A cold laboratory. A long time coming plan. There sits a well established man, more mechanical than his machines, more predictable than his alarm. His pride not in his work but in his ability to impress the money. He sits staring at numbers, his mind works, unperterbed. His flow from self to object almost automatic. His life plans are to finish working on the program in an hour, to eat a sandwich for lunch, to drive home through the park today instead, they're laying a new road. The men above him appreciate his capacity for having hardly any capacity at all. They think they are smarter than him and he thinks he is a genius. 

These men have wealth, but even more they have power. Those two have always, in history, been ascribed to certain men. These are the most developed of a breed. They have become more than competent in using their power, having the special gift of technological advancement which facilitates a stronger grasp on those beneath them than ever before. They know who their inferiors are, and more, they know what they will be. 

Not just their plans, but the decisions of an unaware public are carefully considered and weighed for the development of even tighter grips, stronger holds. And not only that! They are developing a super computer which will take on the human mind, decision for decision, sensation for sensation, to undo that inferior craft, the God myth. 

 They want to be that God. They believe in the divinity of the ruling class. And they want, more than anything, to be right in their beliefs. So the genius sits blankly staring at his master work. It is all numbers and design to him, skipping from one program and back again, within a specialized framework without a body. It will become the first human mind made from scratch. The genius pats his own head unaware, he squints from his hundreds of hours of work, eyes burning. He gets up and stretches and walks around the room, on to another piece of the project.

In a pile of several candidates, the genius rifles through headshots of men, women, and children.  All have certain characteristics worth exploring. Among the women is a 19-year old girl named Rachel, a college student with an above average IQ and a uniquely positive temperament. She was chosen, then, for her IQ and temperament. Another of their choices for recapture, that is the name of the project, "The Recapture Project" is a man aged 30 who has the tenacity of water. Apparently, he cannot be turned away from something once he has set his mind to it. The men of power had created certain disturbances in lives of people they felt were incapable of enduring the project as a whole, and once they discovered that David was incalcuably smarter and more determined than his fellow men, he became of great interest to the group. Indeed, it was essential to recapture the image of David. 

In all there were 70 people who were selected to be included in the project. Some to isolate the nuances of their characters. Some to completely recreate for the purposes of discovering what a machine can do when it learns to think on its own. And then some more, because they were as bland as oatmeal, and their minds could be neatly laid over and over and over each other again. That, my friends, is how we want each traffic circle to be!

Richard, David, Hailey, Porchia and Rachel were the five, though. The five recaptures. They all had one thing in common, unique creative intelligence. They were the most suitable for a task of impossible greatness. They would be completely copied in full color and depth. They were the first beings in all history to be recaptured by machine, almost cloned, totally in mind but without body.