What follows is the second part of a transcript of a conversation I overheard in a bar restaurant in Marseilles, France, a while ago.
Both the woman and the man looked to be in their twenties. She had a French-inflected British accent. He sounded Texan (but intelligent).
I missed the start of their conversation. I’ve transcribed the rest from a recording I made surreptitiously once I realized that the conversation was a bit odd. I’ve cut out most of the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, pauses, repetitions, and drinks orders.
I used italics and [notes] here and there to try to put some of the expression back in. Also, I tidied up a few of the sentences, left out a digression about the relative merits of French and Californian wines, and made sure that no personally identifying information was left in.
The transcript ended up spread over five parts;
… … ...
Her: Well. ok, a close look at the details of our DNA and cellular machinery would get weird, I admit. But, as knock-off brands go, we’re pretty damn kosher.
Him: I gotta admit, you look very human to me. Brand name, top of the line, and mint condition, as it were.
Her: See? You can flirt! I knew you could!
Him: Um… Anyway, back to… You were saying, about the origin of humans?
Part Two
Her: Oh, that. Right. Well, we did notice your ancestors once they were running about the place causing trouble. Y’know, fire, agriculture, cattle, spears, war, the wheel, and stuff like that. By then, though, it was too late to watch your origin episode. And way too late to cancel the show.
Him: The last time I heard someone say that the origins of humanity were lost in the mists of time was when my professor was prepping slides for yet another grant committee. She’d be furious if she thought you’d actually been there and still managed to miss it!
Her: Well, that’s the way the hominoid crumbles. There are some clues, though. That religion thing, that’s a dead giveaway, for a start.
Him: Oh! Like, it shows we evolved a higher mind because of our spiritual awareness? Not the opposable thumb stuff? That would be interesting.
Her: Not exactly. It’s more that it tells us you’re a servitor species.
Him: A what?
Her: A servitor species. They’re pretty much the only ones that exhibit religion. You almost never see it in natural species.
Him: That sounds... not quite as good as I was expecting…
Her: Well, it is a bit messed up, I guess. Look; We think a fugitive species turned up on earth around then. Y’know some group fleeing something or other, and looking to hide?
Her: Kind of like; you’ve turned up at some obscure planet in the middle of nowhere and you want to stay hidden. And I mean you really want to stay hidden, because the kind of thing you’ve fled halfway across known space to avoid is the kind of thing that you really, really, do not want to find you again. On the other hand, you’ve arrived on a few ships, maybe just one knackered one, and you need to rebuild your civilization pretty much from scratch. So, how to do that without showing a giveaway tech signature?
Him: Um… Ahhh, right...
Her: That’s right, you modify a few promising local species, and breed them up to serve you. That way, you get the labour without the tech.
Her: Well, a bit of tech, obviously, but not enough to show. Not if you have sufficiently ingenious adaptable, obedient and motivated servitor species.
Him: … And you get them to worship you, so that they are obedient and motivated…
Her: … And like it. Yep, you got it. You build that stuff right into their genes. Your masters are long gone, but worshippers gotta worship, no matter what – so you lot have spent the fifty thousand years or so since then inventing substitutes. Some work better than others, but none quite fill the hole, of course.
Him: Ok, that is ‘kind of messed up’. Plus, it seems, well, careless, to leave something like that running around loose after you’ve left.
Him: Come to that, what happened to them? Were did they go?
Her: Your masters? Dunno, we missed them completely. To be fair, they were in hiding. As best we can tell they were around for only about two thousand years, maybe a bit more. Then, we think, they just buggered off.
Him: ‘Buggered off’?
Her: ‘Departed with alacrity.’ Sorry, old habits. I’ve been British for a while. Their empire was where it was at for a couple of centuries.
Him: But, you’re Chinese.
Her: Going for the KPop look, so Korean, really.
Him: Ah, right. Either way, though, wasn’t that a bit out of place in Imperial London, back then?
Her: You change your hairstyle sometimes?
Him: Um, yes. I guess…
Her: Same thing.
Him: You changed your ethnicity?
Her: Sure, well, my appearance, it takes a fortnight or so…
Him: A what night?
Her: Sorry, Britishism again; two weeks. That’s mostly for the facial bone structure. Like I said, our DNA is freaky in places.
Him: Um...
Her: Anyway, yeah, maybe they went on the run again, maybe they went back to reclaim whatever they’d lost. Or moved on, or just got bored and died out. Who knows? Most star-faring species are long-lived, by your standards, so a few thousand of your years probably wasn’t a huge deal for them.
Him: So they, these ‘masters’ of ours, just ‘buggered off’, as you so quaintly put it, and left us to run riot?
Her: Well, yes, but it likely wasn’t deliberate. It’s a bad idea to create a servitor species without a kill switch. Maybe they didn’t bother, but more likely they did, and it just didn’t work.
Him: A kill switch? Like a neurochemical dependency on the presence of the masters? That kind of thing?
Her: Yep, along those lines. That way, once the masters are gone, all their servitor species just kind of wind down and go extinct. There were several others here that did. The Neanderthals, for one.
Him: But, we didn’t?
Her: Seems not. Your numbers did get very low at a few points, but you pulled through, somehow. Which was good news for you, and bad news for damn near every other species trapped here in this biosphere with you, because servitor species that go feral tend to mess things up in a big way. They might not mean to, but it’s almost inevitable. Intelligence, physical skills, a driving sense of purpose and a nagging sense of pointlessness, all wrapped up with a desperate aching need for a higher power to follow. And, of course no intrinsic sense of restraint – intelligence without wisdom, drive without direction, as it were. Honestly? It’s amazing that it took you this long to wreck the place.
Him: So why didn’t you lot stop us? Figure out the kill switch and turn it back on?
Her: Well, we considered it. But we’d thought the hominids had been on the brink of producing a civilization, anyway. So it seemed a bit unfair to cancel your shot at it, just because some third party had stuck their oar in.
Her: Then, at first, as you spread out you seemed to be shedding some of the programming. For a while we thought maybe your masters had designed it that way; a ‘revert to type’ design, instead of a kill switch.
Her: Besides, you lot were fun to watch, and things had been kind of boring.
Her: So, yeah, a mix of good and bad reasons. With hindsight, it might not have been our best decision. But… well… It has been interesting, at least.
Him: Look – the ‘god’ thing; If it was just some clowns who turned up here on the lam, that puts a bit of a damper on several thousand years of theological thought, which seems a bit of a waste. I mean, that stuff is a big deal to a lot of people.
Her: To be honest, the only one who ever got close, theologically, was H.P. Lovecraft.
Him: The Cthulhu guy? Wrote horror stories?
Her: Yep, him. We, our US contingent, had a few chats with him about that, back in the nineteen-thirties.
Him: Why though? I mean why him in particular? The horror genera owes him a lot, sure, but he wasn’t a great writer.
Her: Well, like you said; he was the Cthulhu guy. He had some very precise ideas about his Mythos. More like ‘insights’, really, and they mostly turned up in his dreams. We wondered where those dreams were coming from.
Her: Look. There’s a lot going on in known space, and most of it would be utterly alien and incomprehensible to you. To any of you. But, it’d be utterly alien and incomprehensible in an understandable way.
Him: Um, that doesn’t…
Her: Bear with me. It’s all bafflingly different. But it’s still in and of this universe, this reality. Right? So you, your species, could eventually get your collective heads around it. Well, most of it. And it, most of it, could grok you back, eventually. Right?
Him: Right. I guess.
Her: Well, then there’s the other stuff.
Him: Spooky monsters? A’la Lovecraft? Cm’on.
Her: Yep. Those.
Her: They, whatever they are, overlap with us. All the realities, ours, theirs, every-ones, are right here, right now, but we pass one-another by like Neutrinos in the night. We don’t interact, which is a damn good thing.
Her: Except, they, or it, or whatever, seem to be too ‘big’ for their reality. They sometimes bleed over into ours, and probably others, too. To us they ... well, think of them as waveforms. With lots of harmonics and, unfortunately, the occasional immanentized node.
Him: This isn’t making it quite as clear to me as you might think it is...
Her: Yeah, well... It’s like the estimable Mr Pratchett once said ‘We’re trying to discuss quantum using language that primates developed to tell one-another where the ripe fruit is.’ Or something like that. I mean, It’s hard to explain my own reality to you. Now I’m trying to explain one that I find incomprehensible. Rather a lot is going to get lost in translation, I suspect.
Her: To be honest, it’s translation losses all the way down, even for the simple stuff. Analogies have to do a lot of work in a conversation like this. They kind of give the impression of a shared understanding, but it’s not really there. To use yet another analogy; it’s kind of like we’re talking about the shadows of complex things, rather than the things themselves.
Her: Anyway… We don’t even know whether what we experience is actually ‘them’, or ‘just’ some kind of interference phenomena between our realities. No idea at all as to what whatever it is on the other side might actually be like. For all we know, they might hold regular committee meetings, with biscuits (cookies to you), to decide what to do about all the baffling stuff that keeps dropping in from the reality next door and messing up their neighbourhood.
Her: Although, probably not, to be honest.
Him: More tentacles, fewer cookies?
Her: That’d be my guess.
Her: Either way, it’s those immanentized nodes that are the problem. They mean that something bad has been invited into our reality. Not bad in the healthy ‘good verses evil’ sense. Bad in the icky ‘the lucky ones get to die and go mad’ sense.
Him: ‘Die and go mad’? In that order?
Her: Personal choice. Either way round works.
Him: So, like, be careful what you summon, because you might not want it when it turns up?
Her: Yep. To quote Terry again; ‘If you don’t want the monster, don’t pull the lever’.
Him: Ok, so say what’s turned up is Cthulhu, Godzilla, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, or whoever – something big and scary. But there’s still just the one of them. Bad news locally, but it’s a huge universe. No matter how bad they are, they just aren’t going to matter, not cosmically.
Her: Sure, for Godzilla and the Stay-Puft guy, at least. But it’s not quite like that with the Cthulhu gang. Your religious folks got the ‘omnipresent’ thing right. That wasn’t in the original programming, by the way. And there’s a reason why it crept in: an interference pattern can have many nodes. They’re all the real one. They’re all the only one. It can be everywhere.
Him: [Laughs] It’s a franchise operation?
Her: [Laughs] The McDonalds of Armageddon?
Her: Or maybe like the theory that there’s only one electron, and it works really hard. Who knows?
Him: Ok, I get it. I get it. There’s some seriously bad news lurking behind the shadows at the edges of reality. But, even if there is, it’s all kind of theoretical, a bit abstract. None of that stuff has turned up around here. We’d kind of notice unholy world-ending horrors.
Him: [Laughs] Well, ok, aside from the GOP.
Her: Those fuck-wits? I mean, sure; criminality, corruption, greed, venality, cruelty, hatred, hypocrisy, stupidity, insanity, ignorance, depravity, degeneracy, amorality, and immorality; they’ve got all the basics covered. But not belief. No-one in that festering shit-pile believes in anything, beyond their own personal entitlement to wealth and power.
Her: The Cthulhu cultists, though; oh, they believe. They may be just as evil, and even more bat-shit crazy – but they really do believe in something bigger than themselves.
Her: No, there is some overlap. But, really, the GOP is just what it seems on the surface; a gang of cheap thugs doing shitty things for selfish reasons.
Him: Sounds like you know them quite well.
Her: Well, we do keep an eye on them. Humans can manage industrial-grade depravity without outside help, but that lot have way too much in common with the Black Sun for us to give them the benefit of any doubt.
Her: And that’s the thing; the damn Cult of the Black Sun. It hangs around, it never quite dies out. That’s a bad sign, and so were Howard’s, Lovecraft’s, dreams. Between them, they added up to what you might call a ‘cause for concern’.
Ok, that's as far as I’ve gotten. I’ll transcribe part three after work today.