His ego clouds the truth. The Truth surfaced in his ignorance.... [quote]ENTRY 2 -06- //-update(-echo(HANNU:quartz, SITEX:mistletoe)) On Europa. We lurk like summer vampires in the caskets of our SMILE pods. Our frames labor on the ice, building a cathedral to the sciences. Radiation is very bad outside; even my assistant has taken ion damage out there. Pleased to see him healing flawlessly, vacant and empty as he is. What if this perfect self-repair is the REASON the exos degrade? I sulk in isolation as the crew works. My pride is wounded. [u]Did I expect Clarity to come out and greet me? "Hail to Clovis Bray, first among men?" Yes, absolutely, I did! The lunar artifact promised me a solution to the indifference of the cosmos. It told me I was unlike all others—and, damn false modesty, damn vanity, I am different! Not for my present qualities, but for my future influence. I shine with noon's light, reflected back through time to this age of dawn.[/u] Perhaps the mind heals itself still, and this causes the billboarding, the stereotyped behavior, I'm going to be the LUCA of all interstellar human civilization. the final crash. [u]It is a mistake to imagine that the Greatest Man, the God-Emperor of History and Ruler of Circumstances whose influence reaches to the end of time, will live in the future—in the full flowering of human glory. [b]That man lives NOW, at the tiny bottleneck before the vast explosion[/b], when it is still possible for an individual's decisions to touch the entire species and set the course of all future choice.[/u] Self-maintenance so absolute that it becomes a static loop? Investigate. I said all this in my book, but my son's book still sells better. I suppose because Clovis Points is a much more approachable title than Competitive Immortality Through [u][b]Primogeniture of Future-History Ontogeny/Rephylogeny (PFHOR).[/b][/u] My son's work appeals to those intellectual infants in the retronationals, and to the parasites on Common Compassion support. Obviously they prefer the softened, pre-chewed version of the truth. And there is also that bump of public sympathy for a dead man... Yet I cannot deny that, in simplifying my legacy, my son has improved its reach. He was the one to formulate the famous two-sentence summary of PFHOR: [u]"Most of our energy should be spent in support of the things that are most like us.[/u] This is the only true responsibility of any living thing." And the slightly less famous addendum: "The best way to spend energy is on things that make more things like us." [u]Children are viral replicators of our ideas. But there is a certain terror about them. They alter our legacy, mutate it—as Clovis II modified Competitive[/u] -07- [u]Immortality Through PFHOR[/u] into Clovis Points. What if my children decide on some key amendment, some ineffable change, which makes my legacy no longer mine? How can I be reborn through the eternal recurrence of my life-logic if what my children pass down is the logic of some other Clovis, some flawed copy...just as Clovis II was a flawed image of me? A flaw that I created in my clumsy eagerness to make him flawless. My second-boldest decision during my son's development was to replace Clovis II's mitochondrial DNA, normally inherited from the mother, with my own. I had to know that I was in his cellular engines, powering his existence. It was not that change which killed him. But it is the fear of being replaced by a faulty duplicate that will kill me, if I put off my brain upload much longer. I have a library of scanned volunteers aboard Hannu, but my own consciousness is not among them. A Moravec upload is slow and inadequate; what if there are quantum-informatic elements to the mind not captured by such crude mechanical means? No. I insist on that perfect, terminal quantum snapshot. For reasons of fidelity, the only perfect and lossless brain scan is also a destructive one. A fatal one. Clovis II died in one, after all. I made the vessel to recieve him, but I lacked the Alkahest, the solvent to render it pure. But I dare not make the leap to a new body until I know that body works. And so far, the exobodies are universally fatal. I must finish the exobody work to become the LUCA. The one true divinity of man. To do that, I need Clarity. And Clarity is here. All the signs point to it. [u]If I succeed—no forgiveness for those tight-fisted Ishtar tools. I know they had working prototypes. They could have shared.[/u] CORPOREAL STATUS: Body at 35.5 C. Pulse 30 BPM, strength modest. BP 90 over 60. Resp 6 breaths/ minute. Pulse ox 140, to reduce free radicals and peroxynitrite. Today's blood mix is pure perfluorocarbon with new modified monocytes. New kidneys functioning well. Donor pig sacrificed, brined, prepared as seared pork chops. -08- Sous vide is for prissy nerds. Poor Whitford. I wonder if I should reduce the volume of my stem cells introduced to the pig blastocysts. I feel too much empathy for them. Does PFHOR compel me to take better care of Clovis-pig chimeras than ordinary porkers? Yes...but only to the extent that they can contribute to my legacy with cloned organs and good eating. No guilt! NOTE—SAVAGING -09- The term for parents destroying their own offspring is "savaging." It was a problem for pig farmers, in the days when we raised livestock. Sows attacked their own piglets. No one has ever worked out a good explanation. One theory is that the mother pigs are frightened by their young. Terrified by these strange, noisy, needy things. Evolution is not a perfect optimizer. A trait like "fear of own offspring" could endure if piglet mortality is already high. The ancient biologist August Weismann believed that we age to make room for the next generation. That we are programmed to die to leave a space for our offspring. Perhaps the sows simply acted in self-defense.[/quote] [url=https://www.destinypedia.com/Mysterious_Logbook]Mysterious Logbook[/url] Credit: Destinypedia [It's MY IDEA]! While simultaneously explicating that it wasn't, he destroyed the derivative of his consciousness to ensure the edict was followed. An echo of command from [quote][the] man [that] lives NOW, at the tiny bottleneck before the vast explosion.[/quote] That's Durandel, not a man. Looks like a man. You might have met him in the Dark Forest. And the PFHOR were his collaborators. Not an idea. A species from a different universe. [b]•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••[/b] [quote]The one true divinity of man.[/quote] Maya was working on the same thing 👀. [quote]"I hope I get it right this time".[/quote] Do you remember who said that? 😇👍💠 Destiny and Marathon are "siblings" that share the same DNA. P.S. I made another topic related to our Dark Future and what I would like to see done with the revival of vaulted content here: [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/265349126?sort=0&page=0]My dream for the Red War and the other campaigns...[/url]