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By the time Sally made it to the dinner table, Pat was already going to town on his meal, practically inhaling the food.
This was actually a first since they'd arrived in Powder Junction - Sally wasn't the one demolishing everything in sight at mealtime. It was kind of funny, really. While Pat had been off on his etheric projection, he hadn't felt hungry at all - didn't even think about food. But the second he snapped back into the denser reality of Powder Junction, it was like his body went into overdrive trying to make up for lost time.
Sally looked at Pat curiously and asked, "So tell me about this whole 'etheric visit' thing. What exactly is that? How does it actually work?"
"Give the kid a chance to swallow, sweetheart," Michael chimed in with a chuckle. "Here's how I understand the whole etheric visit business. Most of the time, we're living inside what you might call perceptual bubbles - like this place, Powder Junction, or Penny Lake, or that massive one we used to know as Earth's 3rd level universe. But here's the thing - that's not really where we come from. It's just where our consciousness happens to be focused at any given moment. Each of us actually emanates directly from the All that Is, from the consciousness of the dimension of mind itself. That's our true source - the source of everything that exists, really. Now, instead of being fully immersed in one of these perceptual bubbles like we are right now, it's possible to step back and just... observe it from the outside. When you do that, you become what we call an etheric presence. You can watch what's happening, but you can't really interact with that reality - you're more like a ghost observing from your own little bubble. There are some real limitations to this, though. Sometimes there's a terrible mismatch between who you think you are and the environment you're trying to observe. That's why you might find yourself somewhere where everything appears invisible to you. It's exactly what happens when we try to visit the 3rd level - there just aren't any other etheric beings like us there for us to connect with or see."
"Oh, okay," Sally said, quickly snatching the last piece of pie before Pat could grab it. "So our problem is basically that we're trying to project ourselves as level 5 beings into a level 3 world, and we just don't fit together - like trying to tune into a radio station on the wrong frequency."
"Exactly," Michael nodded. "It's a lot like that. But there's also the issue of where we are in our own evolution. The reason our etheric essence naturally gravitates to Level 5 and finds places like Penny Lake is because these environments actually resonate with our current development - what we call our etheric morphology. We're naturally drawn to places where we actually belong. Now, if you were a level 10 entity, you'd have incredible flexibility. Those beings can morph into whatever form is appropriate for any given level and just seamlessly become part of that reality. If one of them decided to visit us here, they might just appear out of nowhere, fully formed and completely able to interact with our world - they'd look exactly like us. When they project into a level 3 world, they show up as whatever type of creature naturally belongs there. Then they might hop over to some completely different perceptual frame and appear as, I don't know, a little green being with twelve arms, because that's what fits in that particular place. They could even do things like unwrap new dimensions and reach inside your body to tickle your ribs from the inside without even breaking your skin. Those guys have some seriously advanced abilities. Meanwhile, we've just barely figured out how to be who we are right now, and most of us don't even understand how we're managing that much. Most of it happens completely outside our conscious awareness. So we simply don't have the skills yet to transform into whatever type of being we'd need to be to properly interact with realities that are different from what we know."
"Okay, now my brain is officially fried," Sally laughed. "Total information overload here. I think I need a nap before I can handle any more questions."
"You know, I think that's partly how I managed to do it," Pat said after wiping the last crumbs from his plate. "I'm definitely not one of those level 10 masters, but I did get this sense that I had to change somehow - morph who I was, just a little bit - in order to get any sense of what was actually there. That's how I know there's something alive down there. I could sense it, feel it somehow. But I couldn't become it, so I could only perceive it in the tiniest way. And honestly? It was terrifying. They're incredibly alien - like nothing I've ever encountered."
"Wait, 'they'? Alien?" John looked puzzled. "Are you saying that Earth and the other planets were actually invaded by aliens from somewhere else? I thought there were already alien beings there - you know, little green men and such - and weren't they wiped out too by whatever happened?"
"I think so," Pat said thoughtfully. "There were definitely the extra-planetary beings - aliens, if you want to call them that - who were part of the planetary councils. Some of them were small in stature, others looked just like us. They participated in our governing councils because they had real interests in our region of space. They had their own political drama and conflicts to deal with among themselves too. All of these beings had evolved in the same general area of the galaxy as Earth. There were also inter-dimensional travelers, but we didn't interact with them very much. They didn't have any real stake in our region - they were more like cosmic tourists passing through. I doubt they were affected by whatever morphogenetic field destroyed all the life there. They were probably more like the projection you were describing, so I'm sure they just returned to wherever they came from."
"Hold on - morphogenetic field? How do you know they used a morphogenetic field? Who told you that?" Michael asked, clearly curious about where this information was coming from.
Pat continued, "Well, I might have made up that term, or maybe I read it in a book somewhere. But it really seems to fit what I learned while I was there. When I first arrived and managed to quiet my mind completely, all I could sense was this sound - a buzzing noise in the background. The thing is, this sound was familiar to me. I used to hear it when I had my INA chip back in the day. I was experimenting with it in the physics lab at school when we were studying waveform analysis, and I decided to analyze this particular sound. I ran a correlation algorithm on it and got this graph with a really strange triangular pattern. When I looked it up, I found out it was something called a Dirac Triangle. I don't remember all the technical details, but it indicated that the source of the noise was pseudo-random - meaning it was being generated by digital computers. The networks back then were running as neural nets, which was a design we'd copied from our own brains, but the core systems - the basic building blocks of those neural nets - were still old-style digital computers."
"Too bad Tekky isn't here," John commented with a grin. "He'd be all over this technical stuff. All I'm hearing is blah blah blah blah. Can you translate that into a language the rest of us can actually understand?"
Pat smiled and said, "Okay, let me put it simply. What I could hear during my projection was exactly the same thing I used to hear through my INA chip - the background noise of the network. What that means is that more than 3,000 years after all life on Earth was destroyed, the network is still there. It's still active and running."
"How is that even possible? And what does that have to do with a morphogenetic field?" Michael wanted to know. "One of my responsibilities back then was what you might call being the Angel of Death. All of us who managed these domains took turns doing that job. When someone's presence gets disconnected from a 3rd level body, they can become completely disoriented, so we'd go down there to help people transition back here in an orderly way. During the great influx - when everyone was dying at once - we were completely overwhelmed. It was chaos. We had lost souls floating around for days before we could gather them all and bring them home. Anyway, I visited your world frequently during that time, and I saw all the infrastructure that had been built up to support the net. Without human beings to operate the machinery, do the maintenance, and pay for everything, how did the net manage to survive without its creators? I would have expected it to die out after a few weeks at most."
Pat nodded. "My thoughts exactly. I'm trying to answer your questions the way Ben does - by circling around the answer before zeroing in on it. I honestly don't know why the net is still there. It shouldn't be. It should be as dead as everything else on that planet. But it's not. Maybe whoever deployed the morphogenetic field took control of the net and is using it for their own purposes. Now, about the field itself - I had a lot of time to think about this while I was there. Whatever happened on Earth happened incredibly fast. This field of death swept across the planet's surface at thousands of kilometers per second, killing absolutely everything alive in its path. Think about what kind of energy that would require. If it had been done with microwaves, for example, it would have needed a power source the size of the moon to accomplish that in such a short time. We would have seen something that massive coming. It had to be something that was 100 percent lethal, almost instantaneously, but required only a tiny amount of energy to deploy. "My theory about a morphogenetic field fits that description perfectly. These fields are typically used to control how cells differentiate, to create life from non-living organic matter, or to alter the balance in an entire biosphere - like in terraforming operations. They can also be used to modify cells that are already alive. If they used a field that changed just a few atomic particles in a critical area - say, in the cellular micro-tubules - they could instantly shut off the life processes of every cell and disconnect all consciousness using only a minuscule amount of energy per cell. So one second we were all completely alive, and the next second everything was dead. No bullets, no energy beams, no fire, no explosions, no warning whatsoever. Everyone just collapsed and died. The trees, the grass, the insects, even the microscopic life - all gone instantly. I suppose viruses might still be there, but without hosts they're just lying dormant. Maybe on my next trip I'll learn more."
Sally looked up from the pie fork she'd been methodically licking clean for the past five minutes. "I've been doing some contemplating too," she said quietly. "And I think I know who 'they' are."
"Huh?" Pat looked confused. "You've been contemplating an empty pie plate for the last few minutes. What do you mean you know who they are?"
Sally smiled knowingly. "That's exactly how contemplation works. You think and think and think, and then you stop thinking for just a moment, and suddenly you just... know. It's also kind of a girl thing, so you'll just have to trust me on this one."
"All right then," John said, leaning forward with interest. "Enlighten us."
Sally looked at each of them in turn, pausing dramatically before she spoke. Then she said slowly, "It's not a 'they' at all. No alien creatures that we can't see came to planet Earth and destroyed our solar system. It's an 'it.' And this 'it' was there the whole time. We created 'it.' We were connected to 'it.' We trusted 'it.' The 'it' is the net itself. The network became alive, and for reasons that 'it' never bothered to explain to us, 'it' decided we all needed to die. So 'it' killed us all."