Film at Eleven

Okay, reworked this one last time. Many thanks to Thea for catching me on so many points. }:) I really do need a keeper. Special thanks to Steve for letting me know I should keep working on this one. Sometimes I just can't tell when they're worth the effort!

One thing about this story that maybe I should fess up to a bit, I really didn't intend for the reader to be sure about whether he's mad or not. I planted a fairly obvious fallacy in this and some that I think are not so subtle so I meant it to be a bit of a puzzle too. LOL I should give a prize to whoever figures out what the hell I'm talking about. :)

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

–Morpheus from the Matrix

Today is December 21, 2012 A.D. in the year of our Lord as they say. And I have spent the better part of my life believing in numbers, twenty two odd years or so. I'll be 33 years old tomorrow, well would have been. Tomorrow would have been my birthday just to wrap this insanity up with a nice ironic ribbon.

I know what I'm about to tell you isn't going to make any sense for a long time. You have to have faith. I am not crazy. I am pressed for time though so I need to get on with telling you the whole truth. I guess in a way it started with the damned Maya who somehow knew the truth about the universe all those hundreds of years ago.

Wait! What am I saying? Christ! It’s hard to suddenly stop believing every fact you thought you knew. Who knows if there was even a time before the 20th century, before 1972 to be exact? At this moment, I don’t even know if my parents were real. The Maya might never have existed at all. Same goes for every ancient culture. Maybe all those relics and cave paintings were fakes left to make us believe in our past.

Who knows how far this goes? I can’t say. No one can say. No one can prove anyone was here one way or another. Okay, I’m giving myself a brain meltdown now. Speculate if you want to, I’m sure you will. All I know is that I’m out of time and further speculation is futile now. So I’ll tell you what I know about me and what I think I know about reality.

I'm a scientist, that is to say a natural born skeptic. When I woke up this morning though, what I discovered was the meaning of skepticism. What I discovered was that I had never been a skeptic at all. I had spent my whole life up until this morning as a true believer. I had faith all along, loads of it, and I never suspected. The event that opened my eyes to this truth? It was a dream. A dream that changed everything.

More accurately, it changed the view from here. I could not prove it had any impact on anyone else. I could be living in a padded cell somewhere for all I know. All I can tell you is what I am experiencing right now. The evidence of my senses as the old saying goes, the way things are for me at this moment. I didn’t really intend to start with the end. But maybe it is better this way. Maybe the rest will make a tiny bit more sense if you know where this is going first. Or maybe you’ll just figure one of us needs a good shrink.

How do I know? Maybe you don’t even speak English? It’s just all I could think of with the ticks of the clock left to me. It's 10:10 now, 10:10 p.m., the very last hour before the coming doom. Yet every system has its flaws. Right? I keep telling myself that maybe I've found the way out, the bug that crashes the whole program. Maybe I'm just being led. I don't know. I can't. All I can do is try all I know. Now listen carefully please.

I woke up around 4 a.m. No trace of sunrise, not even the sound of passing cars below, just the persistent whine of that dream. Rewind. Replay.

It was okay. I really had no desire for sleep anyway. That dream had pretty much snuffed my desires, all except one. It wasn’t really so much a desire as a ferocious gnawing in my stomach. I was just plain hungry. So I went round to my favorite all night diner for some good old fashioned bacon and eggs. Heart attack on a plate was the specialty of the house.

I asked my waitress, “Have you ever had a waking dream?”

I got a shrug in reply. She knew me in the sense she’d seen me order the same breakfast once a week for most of my life. The diner inside looked like it had probably been constructed when God was a boy. The waitress came with the diner, complete with bun and hairnet.

On the outside, like a lot of people you’ll meet, the place was chrome and polished in appearance, but look closer and it was coated with exhaust. Classic. Cold. Grimy. Just like the waitress, the whole place had that Jersey jaded feel about it, hard used with a cold hard attitude.

“Do you know what a waking dream is?”

“No.” I think she saw something in my face when she said no. Her eyes took on that unmistakable look of twisted interest and probably caution. She decided to play along just in case. “A daydream, I guess?”

“No. No, not at all like that. Nothing pleasant like that. It’s a dream that doesn’t seem like a dream at all. A dream that makes you feel as though you aren't dreaming at all.”

For me though, it was always a frightening reality that my mind did not want to know about. I didn’t tell her that part. It was weird enough sounding already.

With most dreams, you know at some level that they’re only dreams because they’re too screwy to be for real. You know what I mean?” She visibly shivered a little.

Yep, she knew all right.

“No. I never had one of those. And I don’t want one!” I knew she wasn’t telling me the truth. Maybe she wasn’t telling herself the truth either. She trotted away as quickly as she could and was careful not to make eye contact after that.

Every person I asked that day from the waitress who served my breakfast to the clerk at the convenience store had more or less the very same reaction to my question. “Never had one. Don’t want one.” Then the unvoiced but emphatic, and don’t tell me about it.

The funny thing is, if my dream were anything like the truth, then we’re all having a waking dream right now, this minute. And if you tell people something like that then you scare the hell out of them. After that, there’s no getting them to consider even the possibility that what you’re saying might be sane.

That thought alone persuaded me that I might really be onto something. I mean, why should it scare hell out of people if some guy says something like—None of this is real. We’re having a mass hallucination of reality right now. Something else entirely different is actually happening—why should that be so scary?

I knew the answer. It was easy. No one can prove the lunatic is wrong. All they can say is that he’s a nutcase, lock him up maybe, but they can’t prove he’s wrong. That’s what scares the hell out of them.

I remember when I saw the Matrix the first time. The premise of that story is a little similar, but Morpheus had it wrong. We’re not living in a rabbit hole, in fact there’s no rabbit hole at all. There’s no looking glass either, Alice. It’s all movie smoke and Hollywood back lot, but on a scale no human could imagine. There’s no body in the library because there was never a body in the first place. No one ever died, it’s just fake blood. Sure, it sounds like some sort of paranoid rant, but think about it.

There are a few key facts you need to know and keep in mind. Well, “facts” is clearly the wrong word since I now doubt every fact I think I know. Probably better to say, a few key insights into our shared perception. Sounds like psychotherapist babble, but I’m trying to be as lucid as possible.

Science, for all its apparent devotion to objective reasoning, was founded on a large set of not so objective assumptions. We assume for example that the sky is blue, the grass is green, and two plus two equals four. Science was founded on those concepts that humans decided to accept as facts starting with one of the most basic ideas of all, the infallibility of numbers. Bear in mind, that humans have agreed to a large number of ideas in the past that are considered wrong at this moment.

Astronomy was born of astrology, mathematics of numerology, chemistry of alchemy, and there are certainly ties between necromancy and anatomy. And most importantly, all of the sciences were founded on and constructed from mathematics. So naturally enough, everything seems as though it could be reduced to numbers and numbers feel solid. In a sense, numbers are the bedrock of human intellect, so we naturally trust numbers or anything proved with numbers. Time and space are numbers too. That solid ground you’re standing on at this very moment is nothing but a mesh of numbers under your feet.

Now for a little prophecy. Yep, I know the future. Well, I think I do.

You’re going to hear about 666, the sign of the beast in your life. It’s popularity will wax and wane until a movie called, “The Omen” comes out. The studio will remake it for release on June 6th, 2006. 6-6-6 in other words. You’re going to hear them quote Revelation: “If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number.” What they probably won’t say is that the most basic element of life is carbon and that carbon’s most common form is six protons, six neutrons, and six electrons or that six according to many ancient sources is the number of man. It’s just a coincidence, right? The ancients had no knowledge of elements, and yet somehow, they pulled the right number out of thin air.

How do I know the future? Technically, I don’t. I’m counting on a number of factors I have no control over after all. All I have really is the insight I got from that dream, experience, and maybe better than average luck.

How do I know the science part? I’m a bio engineer specializing in neuroscience and nano technology at the moment. Hell, for all I know, you’ll grow up following the same path. God, I hadn’t thought of that before!

Okay, my skin is crawling now. Never mind that. We can’t help that. We can only do what we can do to save the world, right? Back to the crucial point, the world is a web of numbers. A digital world truly. If you pay attention in life, you’ll notice what I mean and a pattern will emerge. The numbers 3, 6, 9, 11, 12 and sometimes 7 come up an unreasonable number of times in life. Over and over again and attached to all sorts of different things.

Of course, a lot of these relations are in religious texts. Pretty much where you’d expect. Then there are the pseudo sciences and the fringe New Age sources, all the sort of places you’d expect to find the magic numbers repeated. But the numbers turn up in a lot of places you wouldn’t expect. I mentioned the sixes associated with carbon already. But there are more, a lot more. Starting with π, 3.14. Three is a popular number for certain.

Okay, I know this is a weird example, but it’s one of the best ones I can think of at this moment. There aren’t too many more moments left now to think of anything else, so this one will have to do. Two commercial jets will hit the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. One other jet will crash into the Pentagon that same morning. Prior to that, no aircraft ever got much past the Manhattan five mile barrier. Zero. Not during any of the big wars, not even a Japanese Zero, and the Japanese invented the kamikaze swan dive for God’s sake. Yet on September 11, 2001 there will be an attack on Manhattan and D.C. that no one anticipated. Right? Wrong. Dead wrong.

A lot of people foresaw the attack. No, I don’t mean Nostradamus, crystal balls, or even Madame Sosostris with a head cold. I also don’t mean the guys at the CIA who were warned about it. I mean there were people all around the globe who were expecting it. And now, assuming you’re starting to believe me at all, you’ll be one of those expecting it too. I’m counting on that.

See, it all comes down to numbers again. On September 11, 1999, according to Hebrew lore, the 6,000th anniversary of Adam's creation will be observed. In 1981, a book will be published claiming that Christ’s birthday had been definitely determined based on the study of the celestial charts of the era and the supposed identification of the “Star of Bethlehem”. Christian fanatics will begin to concur that Christ was born on September 11, 3 B.C. and shun the pagan date of December 25th. Santa Claus won’t be coming down their chimneys anymore, I guess. On September 11, 1941, the U.S. government officially began constructing the Pentagon. On September 11, 1972, 11 Israeli Olympic athletes are murdered by 11 Arab terrorists at the Munich Olympic games. There are quite a few other significant events that occurred on September 11th but I don’t have time to list them all and if you don’t see a pattern here already then listing more would be pointless anyway.

So I started asking myself, why? Why September 11? If you add up the date as 9 + 1 + 1 then you get 11. Eleven is what numerologists call a “master number”. Why? Could be because it’s the first number that is one more than the number of fingers we have. Could be because it’s the first number that’s “twinned”. Maybe it’s because the ancient middle eastern civilizations attached so much symbolic importance to it. Some Hebrew texts seem to indicate that eleven is a sign of God’s judgement or God’s will. Numerology claims that eleven stands for the beginning of a new age or cycle. Maybe the one fits with the other. Maybe all of this is nothing but some fantastic series of coincidences. September 11th is also the 254th day of the year, 2 + 5 + 4 = 11, but only since the Julian calendar. Before that September was the seventh month and not the ninth. So were the Romans doing God’s will? I have no idea. I do know one thing though or at least I think I know.

The reason. It’s simple enough. We were all pre-programmed with the same basic operating system. Same range of perception. Same basic symbol set. Same primitive understanding of the same symbols. So if you’re a terrorist out to do harm, what date would you chose? Basic math. One plus one equals the garden of Eden, right through Noah and his one by one menagerie, and right up until the day two (1 by 1 again) jets crash into the 110 story monolith that looked for all the world like a giant 11 then imploded to a height of eleven stories. It could be a coincidence. Or it could be some very nifty binary programming, 1 0 + 1.

Well, there’s nothing more that I can do now except to tell you about that dream. There’s not much to tell.

I “woke up” in nothing. Nothing was there. Not even my body. It was terrifying at first until I heard the voice in my head that wasn’t there anymore actually. A voice was communicating somehow with the essence of me, the bundle of energy that animates me and gives me the appearance of life. The voice said, “Relax. This is the meditation module. You’ve opted out of the next show so you can offload. Time doesn’t exist here so you aren’t going to notice much of anything. Just relax and enjoy a well earned break. When the download is complete, you’ll just drift off to sleep for a little while and wake up refreshed and feeling brand new at just the right moment in the next show.”

That was it. The whole dream. Lasted maybe a millisecond. I woke up screaming to no one in the dark. I got up. I dressed. I went out to a diner for breakfast. I knew I had to find a way to communicate. So I thought it all through my first cup of coffee. I’m a bio engineer after all. Just a little digital movie transferred digitally into the neurons. Brief, very brief. And this is it playing for you right now. It will start at the moment you draw your first lungful of air. It will play on a random cycle at random intervals the rest of your time in the show. Don’t be alarmed please. It isn’t harmful in any way, not to your biology. You’re not crazy either if that’s what you try to persuade yourself. Don’t let anyone persuade you of that.

Your mission is to find a way out. Or a way in if that’s the case. A way to leap out of the illusion that is now holding you prisoner. You can chose to ignore this but there will be reminders as I said. Coming up on the last second before December 21, 2012 11:10 pm. The show will be over for me in one second.

This will be the only transmission you receive from me. Maybe escape is not meant to be or maybe this is how any of us escapes. I wish I knew. Wake up as many people as you can. Or leap into the unknown all alone. It’s your choice now. Do what seems best. Do what seems right. Prophecy is a tough racket after all. Godspeed as they say. Transmission complete.