Splintered Fractions

Belgian Framboise Lambic Beer.  How many beers (pardon me, "malt beverages") have you uncorked in your lifetime?  Stop in Vlezenbeek, Belgium, and find out why you should know the answer to the question, "Are there any connections between a chunk of ice no longer pressing down on a piece of land and a tectonic plate floating loose over a bed of magma?"

No statistical evidence for the power of prayer, yet we still gather together in rooms and beg our gods for favours.

I don't want a scoop of ice cream but I want to hear the "Bananas" song where they chop nuts on frozen slabs of marble, don't you?

If I only didn't know what lonely me knows.  Prayer is not the answer - action-based responses to prayers, where time and place do not matter, matter.  What's the matter, batter?  Don't you know how to swing that bat?

Glad I know who I am not, at this moment.  Aren't you glad I don't take myself seriously?  Otherwise...ho ho ho...I wouldn't sit here with quill in hand.  I'd gather all of you up and line you against that wall over there, next to that newly-dug ditch, and ask every one of you singly, "Are you going to do what I told you you are meant to do right now or do I have to get you to fill that ditch back up one more time?"  Then I'd hand you a shovel so you can scoop up all the self deception and false fronts pouring out of your mouths and patch over that ditch you dug in your previous moment against the wall that you don't remember because I can erase your memory at will.

But I'm not like that.  I'm a nice guy.  I don't hold mirrors up to you because I believe all of us deserve the right to live however we wish, including hidden behind our rose-coloured glasses that make the world look like a bottle of raspberry beer.

Drink up!

For the rest of you, those who know what's going to happen next, you have the chance to answer the question for the first time in your life.  You can say "yes" or "no."  Any hesitation or reasoning/excuses will automatically count as "no."  This is not a question about your afterlife, your soul, your moral/ethical standing in your thoughts or in your community, or your favourite child you think you're going to protect.  This is only about you.

Keep in mind, every one of you is the most important person (set of states of energy) in the universe at this moment in time.  No one else exists in this moment.  [In fact, you don't exist, but for this question it's easier to think of yourself as existing so you can momentarily accept a personalised, anthropomorphic request.]

Remember, I'm not the one who will ask you the question.  I am just here to serve as an easy-to-read signpost to point the way.  I am pretending to serve as a representative of the arrow of time, for those who understand theoretical physics (and the arrow of time is truly a theory but one that will make sense to many of you who like to see through mathematical lenses).

The question will appear once and only once.  It will not be posed to you as a question, but if you are quietly listening to yourself and not the demands of the artificial world around you, you will sense the moment when what seems like a question will be asked of you.  You will know when you answered the question (or rather, you will know when your response was "no").

Once in a very long while, there appears a period of time when the whole population gets to answer this question again.  That's right.  Even those who have already responded in the negative get to reconsider their answer and hear the question one more time.  How long is a "very long while"?  I don't know.  I have no concept of time.  I do not exist.  I am inside and outside the concept of time, neither quantifiable nor infinite. 

All I know is all I know and all I know is that the whole population can reset itself simultaneously.  Of course, this has never happened.  Some say it will never happen, that our universe is composed of variations on a theme in everything that constitutes the universe.  In other words, sameness can exist but it doesn't happen.  No two planets, no two suns, no two people are exactly alike.

Therefore, I can assure you many of you will say "no" and go on being you.  When you do, feel secure that most of the people around you probably did the same thing.  You will live the rest of your life just as you probably would have had you not heard and answered the question.  The universe will not end because you said "no."

For the slim possibility all of you said "yes" and proved that the universe does have its comic, uncharacteristic moments, let me show you a possible future.

As you know, this has never happened before, so to show you this future I had to borrow a lot of extra computer cycles to generate or simulate a whole species' thought patterns reaching the same conclusion within a narrow space of time.

I burned out a lot of processors and made more than a few computer programmers and IT maintenance engineers angry while they repaired their machines.  No, you don't have to thank me for going above and beyond the call of duty.  I enjoyed the looks on the faces of those folks while they figured out how an ol' country boy like me could have hacked the hackers.

Wait a minute...what's this?  The programmers are trying to access my system and erase the scenario I'm about to show you.  Okay, I can play this game back.  Pardon me while I set in motion a series of counterattacks to their countercounterattacks and come back to you later on.  I have a safe copy of the species-wide "yes" scenario stored across a number of secure locations, including keypad entry locks for houses and automobiles, air traffic control towers, a few UAVs circling overhead and in some garage door openers, too (they make some really small UAVs these days), but it'll take a while to reconstruct the scenario if I lose this hackerfest tonight.  Until tomorrow!  May the best beer-guzzling g33k wannabe win!