A.R.Yngve
ALIEN BEACH

Chapter Twenty-Four

DAY 116

"This is Christiana Mahnpour live for CNN, from the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Today's extra session of the General Assembly is in a state of total confusion - no agenda has been set yet, and the Secretary General is being besieged by requests from the delegates to make speeches and declarations.

"The delegates are spreading conflicting rumors among each other. According to some sources, there has just been an emergency meeting with the U.N. Security Council, where a representative of the scientists on Alien Beach disclosed a 'critical discovery' concerning the Sirian visitors.

"Delegates from the renegade states, among them Israel and Kuwait, are unexpectedly present, not in their old seats, but next to the speaker's tribune.

"Christiana, can you tell us if any Sirian delegates are in the building now -"

"Wait, Tom - I'm being told the Security Council members are entering the hall. I can see Carl Sayers, head of the ECT, with them now. The U.S. council member, I mean the President, is talking to the Secretary General. Wait... the President of the United States takes the speaker's chair... he calls for order..."

"Members of the General Assembly... fellow humans... this is a moment of utmost significance to us all, and I ask you to gather all your strength of character. Carl Sayers has demanded to make an official statement. In the light of recent events, the U.N. Security Council has been forced to allow him to disclose a recent claim from the Sirian visitors at Alien Beach. The issue at hand is so important, that the Security Council has decided to let Carl Sayers speak. You be the judge.

"Please welcome astrophysics professor Carl Sayers, Field Director of the international Extraterrestrial Contact Team."

"Thank you, Mr. President...

"A few days ago, the extraterrestrial visitors of Alien Beach imparted to us new facts about their culture, which they have kept secret until now. Rumor of this has leaked out, and caused misinterpretations... that have led to several tragic suicides in certain fringe cults. This statement aims to put an end to such misinterpretations, and to force us to confront an issue whose moment of truth has come - if our civilization is to go on surviving and developing.

"This much the Sirians have just told us. After thousands of years of research, a collective cultural effort that began at the dawn of mankind on Earth, they learned that... there is no such thing as a natural afterlife.

"No organic life form, in its natural state, can transfer its consciousness into another form. There is also no evidence, in spite of the beliefs that even Sirians used to hold, that any supernatural force can, or has ever extracted a living consciousness - a 'soul' - from a dying or dead organic life-form. In other words, when a living structure is irreversibly destroyed, it stays dead - forever.

"However, this research led the Sirians to another breakthrough in the science of life. I cannot go into the technical details, because the Sirians are not yet prepared to give them away. All I know is the summary I give you now.

"What is life? All living things are made up of elementary particles, but the particles themselves are dead. It is the way the particles are connected into larger, self-aware structures, that constitutes life. Life literally is order, structure - beginning with the double-helix program of the DNA molecule. The Sirians, by the way, also have DNA in their cells, very similar to ours - because the same laws that govern all atoms, also decide the workings of life throughout the universe. Break the structures, and the life ceases to be - back to dead atoms.

"The Sirian scientific breakthrough has a long, long history, which I will have to try and summarize...

"When overwhelming evidence forced the Sirians to give up the idea of having naturally indestructible souls, they sought desperately for a remedy - beyond mere longevity. They have developed several techniques of suspended animation, which they now use during extended space travel. But those techniques led further still. Since life equals certain structures, Sirian scientists attempted to emulate organic forms using new materials, such as metals and silicates.

"They managed to create organic machines out of these - pseudo-life, if you like. These organic machines now live in perfect symbiosis with Sirians, who exert a great deal of control over them - for instance, the Sirian lander vessel is such a giant pseudo-life organism. Each such machine consists of billions or more cell-like robots, locked together, each having a program resembling the DNA molecule in function, but not in form.

"Eventually, thousands of years ago, some Sirians embarked to remake their own organic structures in these new materials - to regenerate their exact forms from flesh into living metals and silicates. I don't know how much time was spent to accomplish this... but apparently they had some sort of success. There are no such reconstructed Sirians - you might call them 'androids,' artificial humans - on Earth now. From what I've been told, it seems a huge segment of the Sirian population underwent this reconstruction, then sort of... branched off from the rest of their kind. They moved off into space, never to be heard from again.

"I suggest a 20-minute break now, before I continue... "

"The remaining Sirian culture concentrated its efforts on going further in their search for alternatives to organic life. They developed new ways of scanning and storing enormous amounts of information, in the hope of being able to regenerate the newly dead from the atom level and up.

"But here the laws of nature put a halt to their efforts. For a long time now, the Sirians have had a working technology that in, a fraction of a second, can record and store all the information that makes up a living being, such as a human. But the energy concentration of that 'scanning' process annihilates the subject - melts his atoms into energy.

"Compare the process to that old TV series 'Star Trek,' where humans are routinely teleported from their spaceship to a planet. Remember, at the speed of light it took only about nine years for the original Star Trek episodes to reach Sirius! One moment you see a whole man being disintegrated into energy - then the next moment, he is instantly re-created, thousands of miles away! We can only 'teleport,' if you put it that way, single particles today.

"In fact, even the Sirians cannot destroy a being, and then perfectly re-create him somewhere else - it's scientifically impossible. Because if the information that makes up the disintegrated being is moved - even measuring something involves 'pushing' it with particles of light - it will be irreversibly altered in the process. So a reconstructed being will be a slightly altered copy, never a continued existence of the original.

"But the laws of nature, the Sirians discovered, contained a tiny loophole. If the information that made up that being was to remain in the exact same place, not moved even the smallest measurable distance - then that information, whatever its form, essentially is the same being! A being made up of living energy, the structure of the organic person recreated as pure information - which is to say photons, light.

"Of course a being made up of photons would normally disintegrate, because light has no mass and photons do not attract each other. At the present level of human knowledge, this would be a dead end of the hope for immortality.

"Here we come to the point where Earth scientists are no longer able to follow Sirian thought, at least not yet... The amphibians have told us that they have found a way to instantly re-construct a living being, from this inconceivably brief state as pure information, into something our language cannot describe.

"The actual process, the technology involved, remain secret to us - but we assume they carry it with them on a long space journey such as the one to Earth. The ECT scientists have made this crude model...

"Picture this: You take a whole living being, excluding the bacteria in his guts and on his skin. Then you isolate him completely from the outside world in some kind of force-field bubble. No information can reach outside or inside - the bubble is, for a very short moment, like a miniature black hole. Then, triggering multiple nuclear devices contained inside, the being is instantly exposed to an energy concentration we cannot even imagine - and when I say 'instantly' I mean the shortest interval of time that can be measured. Due to the energy density created, the fabric of space and time ceases to exist inside the bubble. The laws of nature can no longer be accounted for inside it - no one, no Sirian, can rationally describe what happens inside, or if anything truly exists there.

"But in the next instant, the bubble collapses - the energy burst that has been concentrated inside, ruptures the force field. And the organic being that had entered the bubble now appears transformed into a new state - something that has no definite size, is neither mass nor energy, cannot be directly seen, but can emit real energy and move through space at nearly the speed of light.

"This... entity cannot be communicated with directly, because it exists under conditions totally different from ours. But it may, and I say may, contain all the information that made up that disintegrated being from before. It can receive new information, such as ordinary light from the normal world, and absorb energy the way we eat food. This entity, once created, cannot be destroyed... unless it plunges straight into the heart of an exploding star... or unless an infinity of time passes.

"On the screen behind me you now see video footage from yesterday, when these beings appeared to manifest themselves on Alien Beach.

"The process which I have roughly outlined here, the Sirians have been performing on their old and dying for several millennia. Hundreds and hundreds of generations, hundreds of billions of beings moving through space by their own force, riding the solar winds...

"Excuse me...

"I... I understand this is much to digest so quickly, but it's paramount that you learn the rest of it. Please take note...

"I have already asked the Sirians if they are willing to disclose the full technology of this... 'afterlife process' to us. Their response has been not unfriendly, but negative so far. I was told, that they sincerely believe the process creates immortal entities - they chose the word 'Ancestors' to name them - that not only contain all the information of the former beings - but also all their previous memories, their entire lives.

"And that's not all. Given the added abilities of such 'Ancestors,' these can also gain access to virtually all light in the universe - the ability to see what happens to one's relatives, see every person one ever met in one's earthly life, follow the thread of consequences from every act previously done. The Sirian belief is that if they do not lead near-perfect lives, their 'Ancestor' existence will become an eternal hell of remorse. This can of course be disputed, but the Sirians feel that our species are not ready for that kind of commitment to an afterlife -

"Wait - please! Hear me out! Quiet! Let me finish -"

"Christiana, what's happening there?"

"Tom - total chaos is breaking out in the General Assembly. The Israeli delegate, screaming and cursing, is trying to storm the podium and attack Carl Sayers. The Secret Service men are restraining him now... the hall is in an uproar, Sayers tries to shout over the noise but it's impossible to hear him.

"Some delegates are starting to fight each other with their bare fists... other delegates are blocking the podium, shielding Sayers from further attacks... furious, screaming delegates are throwing their pens, documents, even shoes at Sayers, who is pulled away from the podium by Secret Service men... the Secretary General steps up, calling for order... Security personnel are asking us to stop - keep shooting! Get away from me -"

"Christiana? Can you get the camera back..?

"Eh... It seems the Secret Service has just cut off all television teams in the U.N. building. We will return to the U.N. incidents and keep you updated... after this."

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