EP3 Through the Ring
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Hello, I'm Aon, your dimensionally fluid, space-traveling guide through the deep world of Jack the Space Dog.
If this is your first episode, you're coming in a little ways into the story — you might want to check out Episode 1 to get caught up.
When last we left Aon, he had come across a doorway, after following a series of strange light and shadow inconsistencies throughout the city on the world he's been calling the Atlas world.
At this point, I've been in the city for weeks. I'm starving, I am lost, and I've tried everything to find anything useful that might help me get back home. I feel at this point like I might be losing my mind — but I don't really have anything else to do. So I go ahead and follow what I feel like are signs. It makes a kind of itch in my brain that I feel like I have to find out. I have to follow it.
Before we get into the door, I'm going to wind back a little bit, because this leads into one of the more pivotal moments of the story. This leads into an event that is the fulcrum — the thing that swings the fate of the universe from a future that's set and hopeless, three degrees over, to the possibility of hope.
Every artist, I think, has the dysfunction of needing to be seen. We have some message, some goal, something that leads us to make things we want to share with the world. It's an idea, a crusade, a message, a story. For me, it's a story — but the story spans more than just the artwork. It spans into how I'd like the world around me to be. The way you want the world to be should be the way that you are yourself. You can't expect it out in the world if you can't be it. You make your own world. For me, that's the message in my story. My story is what I want the world to be.
Aon comes across the doorway. To call it a doorway is a little misleading — it doesn't look like a door. What it looks like is a large sphere sitting partially in the ground, with a series of bands slowly rotating around it. The rings appear to rotate through the ground and the surfaces around them, as though they don't quite exist in this plane. This is what Aon sees, and this is what seems to itch in his brain, calling him to come and look.
As he approaches, a sort of podium appears in the air in front of it — but it's like a hologram. It's there, but it's not really there. He can touch it, but it isn't made of anything. It appears to have something like a handprint space on it, or at least that's how he interprets it.
I'm just as sure that I might be losing my mind as that I might be finding an answer. At this point, while you might be thinking — no, no, don't press the big red button — what else am I going to do? So I put my hand on the podium. And I can't remove it.
A voice speaks to me and begins to ask me questions.
The first question it asks is: What do you want? But I can tell it doesn't mean, why are you putting your hand on the podium. It means — what do you want? What is the thing you truly want?
At this moment, Aon is starving. He is facing his own mortality in this beautiful, empty place. His answer is simple: to live.
The voice says nothing. A moment passes. Something seems to be calculating. Then the next question: What is your motive? What is your reason for being here? And you might think it means, why are you in this place — but it means, why do you want to exist? Why do you want to live?
That makes me think a little more. My first answer had been off the top of my head because that's what I was feeling most intensely. My next answer is: to make my world.
So it asks: make your world what?
And my answer is: I want existence to be a place of value. That's what I try to add. Value.
Again, it calculates for a moment. Then it says:
The things you're asking for require much more than you know. I can offer you these things — but at a price. The price is something that cannot be put into words. But you will never be the same if I give you what you're asking for. What you want is what we want. What you want is what killed a civilization. It may sound noble, and it is — but the pursuit of it carries the same power that can make the world and also unmake it. Is that what you're asking for?
Obviously I don't fully understand. I just repeat my answers. I want to make my world. And I want to live.
The rings begin to move. They line up horizontally, spinning against each other, and then flatten out. The sphere becomes a portal. It beckons me to come in.
So I step through.
What I step into looks somewhere between a Jedi Temple and a science lab.
This was the Atlians' final solution. This place was designed to implement their next plan — after moving their entire solar system into a pocket dimension, after buying themselves breathing room, the next step was to be proactive. To find a solution against the Sect.
To do that, they understood that regular living beings were at a disadvantage against something so massive it sweeps across worlds like a tide. Even with technology as advanced as theirs, they could not hope to stand against something so overwhelmingly destructive — something that consumes entire worlds so quickly that by the time you know it's arrived, everything is already gone. It's a hopeless situation.
So they devised a plan to remake themselves.
There's a framework for thinking about levels of civilizations and their technology. A first-order civilization gets all of their energy from the planet they live on — fossil fuels, sunlight, all available resources within a planet's atmosphere. A second-order civilization harvests all the energy from their sun within their solar system — all the energy escaping the sun, utilized at a hundred percent efficiency. A third-order civilization can make use of all the energy in a given galaxy — every bit of energy produced by every star, harnessed and used.
The Atlians were a third-order civilization. They had that capacity — and chose not to use it to its full extent, because to do so would mean depriving everything else in the galaxy of it. But the ability was there. And a civilization like that, at the end of its road, can conceive of a final solution that is almost beyond imagining.
Their final solution was these super beings.
Think of the character Vision from Marvel — organic, but fused with near-indestructible material. A living, breathing organism that is essentially impossible to destroy. That's what they do to you. Your organic self is pulled apart atom by atom and remade out of material that is near indestructible. But to survive that process — to come through it and maintain your sense of self, your consciousness, your individuality, after having been completely disassembled and recombined — requires a rite of passage.
The AI tells Aon: some don't survive this. This is your opportunity to change your mind. We can provide you with food, water, and shelter. You can live out your days here if you choose not to do this. But if you want to leave — if you want to use the only means we have to get you off this world — you must do this. Because it grants you access to our technology. And in the wrong hands, that technology can unmake existence.
I don't have a lot of options. And I certainly don't want to stay and live out my time on this planet. I choose to do it.
I'm imagining some kind of physical trial. When you're told you might not survive something, you think of a trial by fire — something physically harmful. But then comes the condition I wasn't expecting: it must be both of us. Not just me. Jack and I, both.
We step onto a platform. Sections of the floor shift and change. Three rings rise up out of the floor and begin to rotate around us.
As I stand there, I start to think back through everything that led me to this point. And I realize that what I'm thinking back through isn't just memory — it's my life as it's being recorded and picked apart piece by piece.
I disintegrate.
I am unmade.
And as I'm unmade, I'm held. My mind, Jack's mind, and the AI's mind are held together as a single mind.
The trial — what it actually requires — is honesty.
Jack is my dog and my best friend. But how much do you really talk to your dog? If you were able to join minds with them and realize that they are thinking, seeking beings just like us — how honest could you be? Not just about what you want, but about what you don't want. What you've done. What you're not proud of. And then to share all of those things openly — to be honest about yourself, about everything you've done and everything you intend to do, about what you really want — and to even know that about yourself in the first place. That is what's required to survive this.
You, the AI, and your companion — in this case Jack — have to become one shared mind. Know everything about each other.
The AI represents an entire civilization's knowledge, history, aspirations, goals, and final great failure. Jack represents just an open wellspring of inconceivable love that almost hurts to look at — it shines so bright it almost makes you want to look away. To have something love you that much, with no requirements, almost makes you feel like you couldn't possibly be worthy of it.
Aon, having already spent weeks contemplating his own mortality, finds it surprisingly easy to just be honest. What could be worse? He was already going to die. How much more could it hurt to just let the walls down? He's already in a state of non-existence. How could he be any less vulnerable than this?
All that's left is ego and feeling and all the constructs you've built of yourself from your history and your experiences. It's just memory — memory piled up and stacked up. And letting somebody else read it, when that's all that's left of you, all of a sudden seems very easy. That's not something I would have been able to do before facing the real end of my own time here.
In that shared state, a piece of each of them is left imprinted on the others.
The AI — where it had been just a representation of the collective knowledge of a civilization — now takes on a personality of its own, drawn from Aon's mind. The will to go on. The primal need to survive.
The endless wellspring of love and hope that Jack carries within him is imprinted on Aon.
And from Aon, Jack takes the need to share, to create, to have introspection — things that dogs don't normally have.
Aon begins to be remade as a creature that has never existed before.
The Atlians never had the opportunity to test this. They never found out if it would actually work. They put the entire will and power and ability of their great civilization into this one hope — that making these new beings would move the needle just a little bit, from a certain end to a possibility of hope for all of existence.
As I'm being remade, I'm told a story.
The story is of the last survivor. The last prince of the Atlians.
He was the only one who stayed on the planet when everyone else moved to the Arc ships. He stayed to run the other side of the mechanism that would shift the solar system into the pocket dimension. He stayed because he volunteered. He stayed because he felt it was his duty to make sure it went right.
When the solar system snapped into the pocket universe and no one ever showed up — he knew that he was the last.
He spent the remainder of his life in a kind of deep state of thought. How do you conceptualize the end of a civilization that has been around longer than the civilization itself can remember? How do you internalize that?
He was a warrior. He was a musician. He was a poet. So he spent his time training and meditating. And he started to find that he could not see the future — but he could see connections. Connections spanning out almost like a predictive algorithm, emerging through meditation. He felt that he should make sure that when he finally left this place, everything was in order. That should the right person come along, they would have everything they needed — just enough hope to do what his civilization could not. To do what they failed to do.
The place that Aon stepped into to be remade — this man had seen it. They live for hundreds of years, and he spent the remainder of his life finishing this project. Completing the conversion temple, the temple of transformation. It was his last great effort — to finish what had required an entire civilization to begin.
There is a final message from him. He recorded his consciousness. The Atlians don't believe that a recorded consciousness inside a machine is actually that person — it has all of their thoughts and feelings, and it's a genuine philosophical debate, but they don't believe that's really the person. There are recordings of all the people who died. A copy of each consciousness, stored in a vast database. All of those people could, if you believed them still to be the person, exist digitally, as holograms that can interact with the world. But in the Atlians' belief — for all their research, all their peering past the veil of the unknown — they came across things they could not explain. And it led them to believe that we are not just the sum of our experiences, not just a recording of the firing of neurons. There is something. Something that you can't make with science and can't make with electrical signals. Something that connects.
So he recorded himself, so that his knowledge and his guidance could live on for whoever came after. But his last message was simply this:
Go further.
As Aon is reassembled, he collapses to the floor. He looks at his changed appearance and grieves — grieves for the loss of what he was, and grieves for the weight of the task he's now taken on. The responsibility that is now his. For what he thought were relatively simple wishes, he now understands what was truly lost. And he understands, in a way that no one currently alive understands, the challenge facing him in trying to stem the tide of the Sect.
It is bigger than anyone has imagined. It is older. It is more endless.
And he now knows.